This is not even to mention the special horror of watching as somebody whom you once loved and defended becomes an aggressive antagonist. I once asked my divorce lawyer, when we were really going through the thick of it, how she could bear to do this work-how she could endure watching every day as couples who had once loved each other tore each other apart in the courtroom. She said, “I find this work rewarding for one reason: because I know something that you don’t know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you’ll move past it and you’ll be fine. And helping somebody like you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.”
She was correct in one respect (we will all be fine eventually), but she was dead wrong in another respect (we will never entirely move past it, either). In this sense, we divorced folks are something like twentieth-century Japan: We had a culture which was prewar and we have a culture which is postwar, and right between those two histories lies a giant smoking hole.
I will do virtually anything to avoid going through that apocalypse again. But I recognize that there’s always the possibility of another divorce, exactly because I love Felipe, and because love-based unions make for strangely fragile tethers. I’m not giving up on love, mind you. I still believe in it. But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love-or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony. Maybe it is not love and marriage that go together like a horse and carriage after all. Maybe it is love and divorce that go together… like a carriage and a horse.
So perhaps this is the social issue that needs to be addressed here, far more than who is allowed to get married and who isn’t allowed to get married. From an anthropological perspective, the real dilemma of modern relationships is this: If you honestly want to have a society in which people choose their own partners on the basis of personal affection, then you must prepare yourself for the inevitable. There will be broken hearts; there will be broken lives. Exactly because the human heart is such a mystery (”such a tissue of paradox,” as the Victorian scientist Sir Henry Finck beautifully described it), love renders all our plans and all our intentions a great big gamble. Maybe the only difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
I remember a conversation I had several years ago with a young woman I met at a publishing party in New York City during a bad moment in my life. The young woman, whom I’d met on one or two previous social occasions, asked me out of politeness where my husband was. I revealed that my husband would not be joining me that evening because we were going through a divorce. My companion uttered a few not-very-heartfelt words of sympathy, and then said, before digging into the cheese plate, “I myself have been happily married for eight years already. And I’ll never get divorced.”
What do you say to a comment like that? Congratulations on an accomplishment that you have not yet accomplished? I can see now that this young woman still had a certain innocence about marriage. Unlike your average sixteenth-century Venetian teenager, she was lucky enough not to have had a husband inflicted upon her. But for that very reason-exactly because she had chosen her spouse out of love-her marriage was more fragile than she realized.
The vows that we make on our wedding day are a noble effort to belie this fragility, to convince ourselves that-truly-what God Almighty has brought together, no man can tear asunder. But unfortunately God Almighty is not the one who swears those wedding vows; man (unmighty) is, and man can always tear a sworn vow asunder. Even if my acquaintance at the publishing party was certain that she herself would never abandon her husband, the question was not entirely up to her. She was not the only person in that bed. All lovers, even the most faithful lovers, are vulnerable to abandonment against their will. I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay. Knowing all this, I will enter into my second marriage with far more humility than I entered into my first. As will Felipe. Not that humility alone will protect us, but at least this time we’ll have some.
It’s been famously said that second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. It seems to me that first marriages are the more hope-drenched affairs, awash in vast expectations and easy optimism. Second marriages are cloaked, I think, in something else: a respect for forces that are bigger than us, maybe. A respect that perhaps even approaches awe.
An old Polish adage warns: “Before going to war, say one prayer. Before going to sea, say two prayers. Before getting married, say three.”
I myself intend to pray all year.
CHAPTER FOUR
BE OF LOVE (A LITTLE)/ MORE CAREFUL/ THAN OF EVERYTHING-e.e. cummings
It was now September 2006.
Felipe and I were still wandering across Southeast Asia. We had nothing but time to kill. Our immigration case had stalled completely. To be fair, it was not only our immigration case that had stalled, but the cases of every single couple applying for fiance visas to America. The whole system was in lockdown, frozen shut. To our collective misfortune, a new immigration law had just been passed by Congress and now everybody was going to be held up-thousands of couples-for at least another four months or so of bureaucratic limbo. The new law stated that any American citizen who wanted to marry a foreigner now had to be investigated by the FBI, who would search the applicant for evidence of past felonies.
That’s right: any American who now wished to marry a foreigner was subject to FBI investigation.
Curiously enough, this law had been passed to protect women-poor foreign women from developing nations, to be precise-from being imported into the United States as brides for convicted rapists, murderers, or known spousal abusers. This had become a grisly problem in recent years. American men were essentially buying brides from the former Soviet Union, Asia, and South America, who-once shipped off to the United States-often faced horrible new lives as prostitutes or sex slaves, or even ended up murdered by American husbands who may have already had a police record of rape and homicide. Thus, this new law came into being to prescreen all prospective American spouses, in order to protect their foreign-born brides from marrying a potential monster.
It was a good law. It was a fair law. It was impossible not to approve of such a law. The only problem for Felipe and me was that it was an awfully inconveniently timed law, given that our case would now take at least four extra months to process, as the FBI back home did their due diligence investigations to confirm that I was neither a convicted rapist nor a serial murderer of unfortunate women, despite the fact that I totally matched the profile.