First, you must find yourself two people of the same race, age, religion, cultural background, and intellectual level whose parents had never divorced. Make these two people wait until they are about forty-five years old before you allow them to marry-without letting them live together first, of course. Ensure that they both fervently believe in God and that they utterly embrace family values, but forbid them to have any children of their own. (Also, the husband must warmly embrace the precepts of feminism.) Make them live in the same town as their families, and see to it that they spend many happy hours bowling and playing cards with their neighbors-that is, while they’re not out there in the world succeeding at the wonderful careers that they each launched on account of their fabulous higher educations.
Who are these people?
And what was I doing, anyhow, steaming away in a hot Laotian hotel room, poring over statistical studies and trying to concoct a perfect American marriage? My obsession was beginning to remind me of a scene I witnessed one fine summer day on Cape Cod when I was out for a walk with my friend Becky. We watched as a young mother took her son out on a bicycle ride. The poor kid was decked out in protective gear from head to toe-helmet, kneepads, wrist braces, training wheels, orange warning flags, and a reflective vest. Moreover, the mother literally had the child’s bicycle on a tether as she ran frantically after him, making sure he would never be out of her reach, not even for a moment.
My friend Becky took in this scene and sighed. “I’ve got news for that lady,” she said. “Someday that child’s gonna get bit by a tick.”
The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn’t prepare for.
Nobody sings, in other words, until the fat lady sings.
But still, can’t we at least try to minimize our dangers? Is there a way to do this sanely, without becoming neurotic about it? Unsure how to walk that line, I just kept stumbling through my premarital preparations, trying to cover every base, trying to foresee every imaginable possibility. And the last and most important thing that I wanted to do, out of a fierce impulse toward honesty, was to make sure that Felipe knew what he was getting-and getting into-with me. I desperately did not want to sell this man a bill of goods, or offer up some idealized seductive performance of myself. Seduction works full-time as Desire’s handmaiden: All she does is delude-that is her very job description- and I did not want her stage-dressing this relationship during the out-of-town tryouts. In fact, I was so adamant about this that I sat Felipe down one day in Laos, right there on the banks of the Mekong River, and presented to him a list of my very worst character flaws, just so I would be certain he had been fairly warned. (Call it a prenuptial informed consent release.) And here is what I came up with as my most deplorable faults-or at least once I had painstakingly narrowed them down to the top five:
1. I think very highly of my own opinion. I generally believe that I know best how everyone in the world should be living their lives-and you, most of all, will be the victim of this.2. I require an amount of devotional attention that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.3. I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more than I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I’ve overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance.4. I am openly prideful, secretly judgmental, and cowardly in conflict. All these things collude at times and turn me into a big fat liar.5. And my most dishonorable fault of alclass="underline" Though it takes me a long while to get to this point, the moment I have decided that somebody is unforgivable, that person will very likely remain unforgiven for life-all too often cut off forever, without fair warning, explanation, or another chance.
It was not an attractive list. It stung me to read it, and I’d certainly never codified my failings for anyone so honestly before. But when I presented Felipe with this inventory of lamentable character defects, he took in the news without apparent disquiet. In fact, he just smiled and said, “Is there anything you would now like to tell me about yourself that I didn’t already know?”
“Do you still love me?” I asked.
“Still,” he confirmed.
“How?”
Because this is the essential question, isn’t it? I mean, once the initial madness of desire has passed and we are faced with each other as dimwitted mortal fools, how is it that any of us find the ability to love and forgive each other at all, much less enduringly?
Felipe didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said, “When I used to go down to Brazil to buy gemstones, I would often buy something they call ‘a parcel.’ A parcel is this random collection of gems that the miner or the wholesaler or whoever is bullshitting you puts together. A typical parcel would contain, I don’t know, maybe twenty or thirty aquamarines at once. Supposedly, you get a better deal that way-buying them all in a bunch-but you have to be careful, because of course the guy is trying to rip you off. He’s trying to unload his bad gemstones on you by packaging them together with a few really good ones.
“So when I first started in the jewelry business,” Felipe went on, “I used to get in trouble because I’d get too excited about the one or two perfect aquamarines in the parcel, and I wouldn’t pay as much attention to the junk they threw in there. After I got burned enough times, I finally got wise and learned this: You have to ignore the perfect gemstones. Don’t even look at them twice because they’re blinding. Just put them away and have a careful look at the really bad stones. Look at them for a long time, and then ask yourself honestly, ‘Can I work with these? Can I make something out of this?’ Otherwise, you’ve just spent a whole lot of money on one or two gorgeous aquamarines buried inside a big heap of worthless crap.
“It’s the same with relationships, I think. People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”
“Are you saying you’re clever enough to work around my worthless, junky, crappy bits?” I asked.
“What I’m trying to say, darling, is that I’ve been watching you carefully for a long time already, and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.”