LITTLE ROCK — BEVERLY HILLS, CA. It was a Hollywood actress-Julianne Moore-who pointed out the obvious to me; that most couples who stay together have likely been through times as bad as most couples who get divorced. Whether or not we break up often depends less on the damage we sustain (or inflict) than our prospects for re-inventing our lives.
Moore was talking about her latest role, as one half-the more problematic half-of a committed lesbian couple in Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy The Kids Are All Right, which is tentatively scheduled to open in Arkansas at the end of July. (That we will get to later, in another part of this newspaper.) But I was thinking of Al and Tipper Gore, and of several couples I know who have recently split.
I am not quite sad for them-divorce is at times a necessary mercy, and good people sometimes find themselves in situations they never expected to experience. Marriages, legal and spiritual, are strange and private compacts, and it’s almost always inappropriate to comment on how two adults decide they want to intertwine their lives. Their grief and happiness is our business only to the extent that they want to share them with us, and even then we should becareful not to presume.
Selfishly, I want my friends to stay together, to retain the same balances. We want to know what to expect for dinner, to not have to explain the inside jokes or to be presented with new riddles in place of the ones we thought we’d solved. New people can be confusing; they can throw off the old rhythms. It takes awhile to acclimate to them. And then there’s always a touch of mourning for the friend not present, for even if they remain in our lives their context has been altered. When we say that a couple’s breaking up is sad, what we usually means is that it is inconvenient-for them as well as us.
Still you wonder when a marriage of long standing seems imperiled-most of the time people figure out they can’t live together before they’ve raised their kids and seen them off. The longer you staytogether the more likely you are to stay together-you’ve accumulated joint assets (and debts), you’ve commingled your families and friendships, you’ve developed common interests and a particular private history that, whether you judge happy or not, is your own. Forty years is a long time.
But 40 years is not as long as it used to be; you wake up one day and you’re 60 years old but you feel vital and useful and expectant of the world. You’re healthy and strong. Who’s to say you can’t go out and make something better of the not inconsiderable rest of your life? Why should you feel compelled to stay in an inert relationship, with someone who has grown bored with you, especially if you have the financial means to operate independently?
So to the extent I think about the Gores splitting up, I don’t necessarily think it’s all that terrible a thing. Maybe it is, but I don’t know anything about it.
My experience is, however, that no matter how these things are presented, the decision to break up is never an entirely mutual decision, invariably there’s one partner who wants it more than the other. And while often there’s a discrete incident, a betrayal of trust, that precipitates a crisis and divides a coupleinto victim and victimizer and compels a reckoning, just as often people seem to simply, as they say, “drift apart.”
So maybe you think everything’s fine, just fine. And one evening you walk in and your sweetheart wants to talk. It happens. It happens all the time. There’s only so much that’s yours to control-when someone tells you they don’t want you any more there’s only so much you can say. You can make the practical arguments, point out what a drag it’ll be to settle up and cash out, but you can’t argue with the heart.
I think all you can do is try to protect what you have, and be honest about what it means to you. Some people get along just fine alone. Some people. (Maybe you do. I don’t.)
We are different people than we were years ago, and human institutions are bound to evolve as we do.Adolescence used to be a relatively brief transitional stage; now we have people living like teenagers (itself an invented, demographic conceit) well into their 30s, 40s and 50s. I’ve heard it suggested that human beings aren’t naturally monogamous creatures, that lifelong committed relationships are relatively rare, appearing in only about 20 percent of human civilizations.
(If that figure sounds dubious toyou, see the level-headed and surprisingly entertaining The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, a zoologist and psychiatrist, respectively, who also happen to have been married for 33 years. )
Yet, part of what makes us human is our ability to suppress our biological imperatives; civilization and its laws are based on the repression of instinct. We are domesticated animals, and whatever flutters in the blind back of our heads is subordinate to our will. Unless something is broken, we can behave and usually do.
You have to be careful writing about these sorts of things; you don’t want to jinx your own luck, to come off as smug. Julianne Moore’s been in her current relationship for 14 years, but before that she had a marriage fail. Most of us who have kept our partnerships together for more than a few years understand we were younger in our 20s and 30s than we thought we were at the time. Most of us have been throughrough patches. All of us make mistakes, most of us have done hurtful things to the people we love most and some of us have been forgiven.
Perspective, Pages 82 on 06/27/2010