And it’s true. You didn’t see it coming. But you did build it, and you could have stopped it if you’d acted faster. The moment you found yourself sharing secrets with a new friend that really ought to have belonged to your spouse, there was, according to Dr. Glass, a much smarter and more honest path to be taken. Her suggestion would be that you come home and tell your husband or wife about it. The script goes along these lines: “I have something worrying to share with you. I went out to lunch twice this week with Mark, and I was struck by the fact that our conversation quickly became intimate. I found myself sharing things with him that I used to share only with you. This is the way you and I used to talk at the beginning of our relationship-and I loved that so much-but I fear we’ve lost that. I miss that level of intimacy with you. Do you think there’s anything you and I might do to rekindle our connection?”
The answer, truthfully, might be: “No.”
There might be nothing you can do to rekindle that connection. I have a friend who brought her husband pretty much this exact conversation, to which he replied, “I don’t really give a shit who you spend your time with.” And there’s a marriage that, not surprisingly, ended soon after. (And needed to, I would argue.) But if your spouse is at all responsive, he or she might hear the longing behind your admission, and will hopefully react to it, maybe even countering with an expression of his or her own longing.
It’s always possible that the two of you will be unable to figure things out, but at least you’ll know later on that you made a heartfelt effort to keep the walls and the windows of your marriage secured, and that knowledge can be comforting. Also, you may avoid cheating on your spouse, even if you may not ultimately avoid divorcing your spouse-and that alone can be a good thing, for many reasons. As an old lawyer friend of mine once observed, “No divorce in human history has ever been rendered more simple, more compassionate, more quick or less expensive by somebody’s episode of adultery.”
In any case, reading Dr. Glass’s research on infidelity filled me with a sense of hope that felt almost euphoric. Her ideas about marital fidelity are not especially complex, but it’s just that I’d never learned this stuff before. I’m not sure I ever understood the almost embarrassingly remedial notion that you are somewhat in control of what happens within and around your relationships. I shame myself by admitting this, but it’s true. I once believed that desire was as unmanageable as a tornado; all you could do was hope it didn’t suck up your house and explode the thing in midair. As for those couples whose relationships lasted decades? They must have been very lucky, I figured, that the tornado never hit them. (It never occurred to me that they might have actually constructed storm cellars together underneath their homes, where they could retreat whenever the winds picked up.)
Though the human heart may indeed be shot through with bottomless desire, and while the world may well be full of alluring creatures and other delicious options, it seems one truly can make clear-eyed choices that limit and manage the risk of infatuation. And if you’re worried about future “trouble” in your marriage, it’s good to understand that trouble is not necessarily something that always “just happens”; trouble is often cultured unthinkingly in careless little petri dishes we have left scattered all over town.
Does all this sound excruciatingly obvious to everybody else? Because it was not excruciatingly obvious to me. This is information I really could’ve used over a decade ago when I was getting married for the first time. I didn’t know any of this stuff. And I am appalled sometimes to realize that I stepped into matrimony without this piece of useful data, or without very many pieces of useful data at all. Looking back on my first wedding now, I’m reminded of what so many of my friends say about the day they brought their first babies home from the hospital. There is this moment, my friends report, when the nurse hands over the infant, and the new mother realizes with horror, “Oh my God-they’re going to send this thing home with me? I have no idea what I’m doing!” But of course hospitals give mothers their babies and send them on home, because there is an assumption that motherhood is somehow instinctive, that you will naturally know how to care for your own child-that love will teach you how-even if you have zero experience or training for this towering undertaking.
I’ve come to believe that we all too often make the same assumption about marriage. We believe that if two people really love each other, then intimacy will somehow be intuitive to them, and their marriage will run forever on the mere power of affection. Because all you need is love! Or so I believed in my youth. You certainly don’t need strategies or assistance or tools or perspective. And so it came to pass that my first husband and I just went ahead and got married from a place of great ignorance and great immaturity and great unpreparedness simply because we felt like getting married. We sealed our vows without a single clue whatsoever about how to keep our union alive and safe.
Is it any wonder that we went straight home and dropped that baby on its fuzzy little head?
So now, a dozen years later, preparing to enter marriage again, it seemed like some more mindful preparations might be in order. The silver lining to the unforeseen long engagement period offered to us by the Department of Homeland Security was that Felipe and I had a luxurious amount of time (every waking hour of the day, actually, for many months on end) to discuss our questions and issues about marriage. And so we did discuss them. All of them. Isolated from our families, alone together in remote places, stuck on one ten-hour-long bus ride after another-all we had was time. So Felipe and I talked and talked and talked, clarifying daily what the shape of our marriage contract would be.
Fidelity, of course, was of primary importance. This was the one nonnegotiable condition of our marriage. We both recognized that once trust has been shattered, piecing it back together again is arduous and agonizing, if not impossible. (As my father once said about water pollution, from his standpoint as an environmental engineer, “It’s so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it’s been polluted.”)
The potentially radioactive topics of housework and domestic chores were also fairly simple to address; we’d lived together already and had discovered that we shared these tasks easily and fairly. Similarly, Felipe and I shared a united position on the subject of ever having children (to wit: thanks, but no thanks), and our concordance on this massive subject seemed to erase a textbook-sized volume of potential future marital conflict. Happily, we were also compatible in bed, so we didn’t foresee future problems in the human sexuality department, and I didn’t think it was smart to start digging for trouble where none existed.
That left just one major issue that can really undo a marriage: money. And as it turned out, there was much to discuss here. Because while Felipe and I easily agree on what is important in life (good food) and what is not important in life (expensive china on which to serve that good food), we hold seriously different values and beliefs about money. I’ve always been conservative with my earnings, careful, a compulsive saver, fundamentally incapable of debt. I chalk this up to the lessons taught to me by my frugal parents, who treated every single day as though it were October 30, 1929, and who opened up my first savings account for me when I was in the second grade.