We met for the first time at a reading in Providence, Rhode Island, where we both wore black and carried big bags. After we signed books, we went across the street to Starbucks and soon found ourselves in a looping, caffeine-inspired conversation. Somehow we got onto the topic of husbands. Jean had been married for sixteen years and this was her second marriage. Karen, who’d married in her mid-thirties, had recently celebrated her eighth anniversary.
And then, as the espresso machine steamed and whirred in the background, the universe served up one of its serendipitous moments. We discovered we’d both recently written essays with the same exact title: “Why I’m Still Married.” We laughed at having struck, if not the uncanny, the coincidental. Or, maybe not all that coincidental. We began to deliberate. If we’d written essays on this theme, there must be many other women out there with the same concerns.
Why are we still married? As independent, career-minded feminists, we felt oddly defensive to admit we’d settled into such an age old patriarchal institution. In Jean’s first marriage in 1970, she went to a lawyer to have a contract drawn up so she was able to have a credit card in her own name. Karen was practicing her version of the contemporary balancing act known as career and family. Could being long married also imply we were past our luscious prime and doomed for a future of unwelcome compromise? And when one of our husbands turned bedtime rituals into a healthcare triathalon and one let loose his rage, we asked ourselves why we wonderful gals needed to put up with such behavior.
Implied in the question was, of course, something much deeper. We wondered what made us the ones who stayed. Why are we still married, we asked, when more single women than ever before in history are financially successful, eminently dateable, and leading full, independent lives? As ZZ Packer says in her essay for this collection, about her not so long ago single days: “I’d always thought of marriage more like the weather: if certain atmospheric conditions occur, then rain will fall; if not, not.”
Kamy Wicoff writes about her unexpected difficulty in giving up the freedom of her single life, worrying what happens to sex after marriage in her “Monogamy Meltdown.” Contemporary marriages are inspired by expectations for individual happiness and romantic love. However, Susan Cheever reminds us in her essay, “Mrs. Married Person,” that laws written on stones once deemed women property of men. Marriages were arranged to keep liaisons within select families and to provide heirs. The first love poetry came later, during the Christian crusades, creating the connection between love and longing that we now take for granted. But individual happiness and romantic love, as the poets know, are forever fickle. Perhaps that is one reason women coming of age today no longer assume they will marry and stay married.
Why are we still married? We knew the dismal statistics: more than fifty percent of contemporary marriages end in divorce; married women are more depressed than married men and significantly more depressed than single women; married women with young children are the most depressed population. Aimee Liu, in her essay, “A Great Wall,” speaks of a separation which completely “disassembled” her....”In the therapist’s office. Out of the therapist’s office. Tears. Screams. Confession.”
If there is so much pain in permanent coupling, what Maria Hinojosa calls “the long haul of love,” why are the majority of us are still walking down the aisle one, two, three, even four times? Julia Alavarez, in “Third Time Around: Snapshots of a Long-Last a Long Term Marriage” writes of her satisfying third marriage, which includes the challenge of step-parenting. Diana Abu-Jaber met her second husband “under the flickering, unfiltered ray of a computer screen,” at a time when she wondered, “Do we really know who we’re meant to love?”
Why do we keep getting married, but more importantly, what keeps us married? Is the answer as simple as Hannah Pine’s confession about her passionate, open marriage: “At core, of course, I’m still married because I still love being married to my husband.”
We wanted to provide a forum for women to speak their truths and we had a pretty strong hunch these truths could be found in stories--real stories about real marriages. Like everyone else, we knew about bad marriages that ended badly, or seemingly perfect marriages that succeed. But we wanted to know about the real marriages that survive, despite obstacles and struggles.
We wrote to writers whose work we admired and whom we thought would have something valuable and important to contribute to the topic. We wanted people who were smart, articulate, funny, brave and above all, honest. We wanted diversity in age, background, cultural perspective and geographical location. We wanted contributors whose insights grew from their number of years married. We asked to hear about the longings, losses and betrayals in conjugal life that had tested their commitment. Sex is good, we said. Humor is even better.
Some writers we knew personally; most we did not. Many of the writers to whom we wrote responded with immediate, even urgent enthusiasm. Those who declined said they did so either because they were too busy or because they could not be as truthful as they’d like. “At the moment, I’m not brave enough to write this essay,” answered one well-known author.
When the essays began to come in, we were struck by the range and variety of experiences that comprise marriages today. Anne Bernays, the longest-married in this collection, recently celebrated her fiftieth anniversary. Her essay spans the historical changes that 1960s feminism wrought on the institution of marriage. Nell Casey, who describes herself in “Marrying Out of History,” as a “34-year-old, happily married woman,” is newly wed at one year.
We were moved by the range and variety of emotions at the heart of married love. Liza Wieland calls the pain from her commuter marriage, being separated months at a time, a “hunger to be held in my husband’s large arms, to be kissed, to be carried up that flight of stairs.” Susan Dworkin, in “The Marriage of Lost Fathers,” courageously describes her husband after his stroke: “He did not recognize my face but he remembered that he had a wife named Susie, so when I walked in and said I am Susie, your wife, he held out his arms for me and I hugged him and kissed him.” Eve LaPlante in “18, 260 Breakfasts,” shows how important the regularity that marriage imparts can be to a child of divorce. Audrey Schulman, in “Murmurs,” deftly describes the opposing parenting philosophies that struggle to co-exist in marriage. And Jennifer Heath, whose fine essay “The Two of Us,” shows that marriage contains a myriad of moments where we “laugh, giggle, guffaw, chuckle, snicker, hoot, snort, cackle and chortle until our sides hurt.”
What surprised us was how many contributors staked the success or failure of their marriages around their growth as writers. Kathleen Aguero explains in “Koan” how she had to learn that a relationship can accommodate the writer’s need for solitude. In “The Occasional Persistence of Love,” Marge Piercy tells how she left a man who wanted her writing to take second place to domestic duties. Erica Jong, “A Twenty-First Century Ritual,” agreed to marry her present husband only after he’d scribbled a written contract on a dinner napkin saying she was free to write whatever she wanted. And Bharati Mukherjee, “An Experiment in Improvisation,” says of her long, productive marriage to writer Clark Blaise: “Fiction writing brought us together and kept us together.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that four contributors mentioned Jane Austen, who of course never married, though she is our genius in portraying the psychological and societal journeys young women experience in order to get married.
It’s fitting that two people working on a marriage book as closely as we did for the better part of 18 months should perceive their working union as a kind of marriage. We met every week at a café and continued our caffeinated conversations, first about the individual essays and later about the book’s development. We talked at least once a day on the phone and sent countless emails. When we opened a joint bank account and ordered checks with which to pay our contributors, we joked that now we were “really married.” We negotiated, complained, and stretched our imaginations. We had our first fight and made up. We discovered little quirks and different strengths. Karen had a talent for dealing with delicate interpersonal situations; Jean was brilliant at creating useful lists and organization out of chaos.
It was Jean’s idea to shape the book around the number of years each woman had been married. Wouldn’t it be interesting, she thought, if the essays engaged in conversation with one another, a kind of coffee klatch through the pages and the ages? Karen thought to title each section based on the quaint lists meant to guide anniversary gift-giving—wood to celebrate a couple’s fifth year, china to celebrate their twentieth—reminding us savvy wives of the world that not only is marriage an inherited institution but one that’s rooted in things domestic.
Once we began to sort through the glorious stack of essays we’d received, we found they fell naturally into four groups. Silver to Gold contains essays written by contributors who’ve been married twenty years or more, several long enough to have experienced historical changes in marriage. Steel to China has essays by women married from ten to twenty years, many having made it past the most difficult places. Sugar to Tin is written by women five to ten years married, still struggling with the knowledge that comes with commitment. Paper to Wood contains essays by women just starting out, some in the throes of adjustment, others still in the honeymoon glow, all married one to five years. Readers may simply want to read essays by writers who speak to their specific experience. But those who choose to read the book in sequence will, we hope, gain a delicious sense of the rich complexities and rewarding challenges that long term marriage confers.
While we were working on this anthology, marriage wars were raging across the country. Staunch leftists found themselves defending marriage just as heatedly as they had once criticized it. “All I wanted,” says Meredith Maran about her ecstatic marriage to Katrine Andrée Simone Thomas, “was the same things every lover wants: for it to be good, and for it to last forever. Like love, marriage, and the baby carriage, I thought, one led to the other, and only in that order.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we began to work in earnest on this book shortly after May 17, 2004, the day the Massachusetts courts began to issue applications for marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and the day that Elizabeth Graver writes about in her moving essay, “Gathered.” “I had taken advantage of that right before I’d known that they would have it, and so my lessening of guilt was spurious, and so the easy answers continued to refuse to come,” she says. On the other hand, Helen Fremont, with characteristic wit, remarks that Massachusetts’ legal support “was both annoying and exhilarating. After all, Donna and I had been married for eight years already, without an ounce of help from the state.”
This collection went to press at the same time as thousands of gay and lesbian couples celebrated their first year (paper) wedding anniversary. We like to think one of the reasons the essays in this anthology are as vital and engaging as they are is because they were written during this historical first year.
As we proudly turn you over to these wise and loving writers it is our wish that they spark your own well-earned stories.
