On Thursday night this week, my husband and I were dining in a restaurant for the first time in over a year. It is a family gathering, the focal point of which is my great nephew, a 17-month-old whirling dervish. Landon is shoving rice and beans into his mouth and flinging them onto the floor in approximately equal proportions. Don is regaling us with a college story about taking a young woman out to a waterfront restaurant. He calls ahead to request the best table in the house, hoping to impress his date. She apparently was not smitten with Don when he does not leave a tip for the waiter.
My husband shares the story with our server, who with practiced graciousness, laughs and secretly hopes we will dine quickly so she can replace the table with more generous – and less messy - patrons.
Don is slow to initiate telling of tales in a social setting and even slower to complete them. I know how to prompt him to start, and how to curtail its length. It is part of our marital covenant, one provision in a vast encyclopedia of behaviors, activities, responses, and temperaments.
We are matrimonial long-haulers, chugging along towards our fourth decade in a mostly traffic-free highway. It is not that our marriage has not had its breakdowns or occasional detours; it is simply that our union has never faced the possibility that the expedition will end.
After just twenty years of matrimony, I used to joke that we would never get divorced because we were too old and tired to look for someone else. But the truth is that if our union dissolved, I would look for someone else exactly like my husband. Well, someone remarkably similar to Don, but with a tidier office. Or maybe someone who resembles Don but with a tidier office and the ability to pull the trigger on a simple home repair without evaluating outcomes with multiple spreadsheets. But you get my point.
The marriages of rich and famous couples are crumbling these days like poorly maintained concrete footings. The wife in one such pair related that she and her spouse had stopped evolving as a couple, a comment that mystified me. The concept of a marriage as being something distinct from its participants has occurred to me, but the idea that it will transform over the years independent from its members is odd. I do not believe that people really change with time, a fact that has proven true in our marriage.
Do not get me wrong; Don and I have refined the efficiencies of our spousal partnership over time. I know that my husband will take out the garbage and recycling on Tuesday mornings. I anticipate that at any given point on the weekend, I will be able to find him in his home office, analyzing tables and databases and anything else that stimulates the pleasure centers of his engineering brain. He knows that I will come home from work grumpy and exhausted, but will jump out of bed in the morning, chomping at the bit to get back to it. I appreciate that he will file our tax returns before the deadline, and that I will spoon feed him the financial data to do so. Any suggestion that I have for dinner will be met with cheery agreeableness. He will cook; I will make the salad and do the dishes.
We have never really had an argument in our marriage because arguments, by definition, require two participants. Although I have a temperamental quick twitch, my life partner approaches disagreements with analytical thoughtfulness and study. So, I am left with lopsided fuming and fussing while he is left with wondering what on earth is going on.
Reliability is the touchstone of our relationship, and Don is fundamentally the same person that I met and fell in love with almost forty years ago. My husband is unfailingly sympathetic, ceaselessly steadfast, and perpetually funny. He is the least thin-skinned person I have ever met, a trait I will never have. He is thoughtful to the core, and he never whines. If I ask him to do a disagreeable task, say pick up dog poop in the yard, his automatic response is, “you bet!” as though I had suggested we dispense with household chores, order delivery tacos, hunker down on the couch, and watch a movie. His willingness to hitch his wagon to mine for the rest of his life remains one of life’s great mysteries.
As we leave the Mexican restaurant, I glance down at the tab. Don has left a $40 gratuity for a group meal that cost $130. Maybe I am wrong that people do not change with time - Don has become a much better tipper.