Thirty Years and Counting...

Today, Robert Rostan and Nancy Kacenga have been married for thirty years.
Hmmm.
At 24 going on 25, having had a total of one kind-of date, one kiss with two halfway-intoxicated bisexual girls at a party, and, it should go without saying, no girlfriend to speak of, the marital longevity of my parents sometimes makes me wonder, how did I miss the gene? (Even MARC has had, key word "had," a relationship at 18.)
But then again, marriage is not something you naturally fit into. No two people on this Earth are alike, and thus there will always be some degree of incompatibility in any friendship, romance, even purely business acquaintance. So coupling yourself to someone for life is a big deal among big deals. Mom and Dad...I've always loved them, taken them as my role models, but I never loved them as much as I do now until seven years ago when they went through personal crises of their own and I learned a secret.
My parents are human. All too human. And far from the perfect minor denizens of Olympus I had always seen them as, they were as flawed as me and my high school government teachers. Mom--whom I take after, fair warning--is the Queen not only of an Englbreitian Everything, but of seizing on tiny things which in my eyes are completely insignificant and building them up into major deals. She laughs the easiest, cries the easiest, and is the one person where soemtimes I just want to stay out of her way and not say anything at all. Dad would be an exemplary friend, husband, and father--he's certainly the best anyone could ask for--except he DOESN'T SHOW IT. It is almost impossible to provoke an emotional response from him, and he often takes any matter presented too lightly. Moreover, unless he's engaged in a discussion important to him, he much prefers to keep his own council and say as few words as possible...which, if you really want to talk about something, a scenario more common than not since relationships are built on communication, is intensely frustrating.
So we have someone who talks a lot in a highly emotional manner, and someone who keeps a certain amused reserve and barely talks at all. It's as if Vivien Leigh got together with John Wayne. BAD IDEA.
And yet, today, thirty years and counting.
Townshend could have stretched "I Can't Explain" out to a ten-minute long, hissing-and-squealing solo-filled epic if he'd been observing this marraige through some 1965 time machine.
With Chicago less than a month a way and literature on my mind, I think about what my heroes had to say about matrimony in light of my parents.
Malcolm X said that one point where whites and blacks were equal was in their delusions about marriage, that pop culture had filled all of our heads with fairy-tale romance and nothing about the work involved. He felt a marital union should come through sheer compatibility which would grow into love. The irony is that when this supreme, fiery thinker writes about courting his wife, his description of that time is laden with undercurrents of longing and jealousy. Have my parents ever been full of jealousy? Longing? Those seem like far too melodramatic emotions for them, even for Mom.
Samuel Johnson spent the last three decades of his life as a widower, composing prayers to his late wife's memory. I THINK Dad would do something like that if he put his mind to it.
James Boswell married a woman who was his match in every way except personality, and thus let him get away with affairs, multiple cases of VD, and an alcoholism Hemingway would have envied. That is NOT DAD. If anything, Mom, who pays the bills, keeps the checkbook balanced, and makes the majority of practical decisions around the house, holds sway.
I'm stearing clear of Fitzgerald. I'm starting to see him in the Jane Smiley light of a young man with young emotions, and in his world romance is intoxicating and marriage is a formality which never works out. My parents are too sober for that.
Of course, we have Leo Tolstoy. "Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Paul Johnson took umbrage with that claim, saying the reverse was true. I can't say for sure myself, not being a family man yet, but I do think that all individual scenarios boil down in unhappiness to a lack of that secret key to literature: empathy and perspective. Can you see things from another point of view? Happy families are those where everyone is allowed to follow their own path but they keep the feelings of others in mind all the time...in that case we have been more or less happy, definitely more, and our discord has emerged mainly from Marc and I learning (and sometimes failing) to see things from others' point of view, and...since we're talking about marriage...an inability to articulate empathy...usually on Dad's part. I feel like I'm laying into Dad too much here, but I'm a writer. I'm striving for honesty. The reverse is Mom's insistence on articulation of everything, stopping short of detailed explanation, a tricky balance.
Tolstoy also makes me think of fate. What if Stepan had not introduced Anna to Vronsky in that fateful railroad arrival? Would she have stayed with Karenin? Would he have married Kitty? Would they have ended up, again, more or less happy? Levin and Kitty may arrive at the ideal marriage, but ideals never have to necessarily occur. They don't in real life, certainly. My parents could have made an infinite number of decisions along the way which would have led to separation/divorce, childlessness, anything. They chose to stay together and have children. In a world where self-identity may be one of the greatest virtues, making such a choice has weight beyond the largest scale.
In the end, for me, like so many other things, it comes back to Anthony Trollope. He understood marriage and intimacy in a way few novelists do, and thanks to his overarching structures was able to explore marriages over the course of multiple novels. In his opinion, marriages always started with romantic love--which has to develop over some period of time unique for each couple--and then it turned into a sort of business partnership with plenty of give-and-take...but a give-and-take not only of the practical but also, and most importantly, the emotional. Couples have to share, have to feel they can tell each other anything and everything, have to be their best friends (though he never used those words). And through it all, the love which sparked this coupling would always be there.
Mom and Dad actually make me think of Trollope's greatest couple, and the one where he clearly broke his rules in their depiction. Plantaganet Palliser marries Glencora M'Cluskie even though she doesn't love him...yet. She's spirited, wears her heart on her sleeve, is a born social figure, while he's governing, quiet, keeps his emotional cards to himself. But when their marriage nearly falters in the beginning, he reveals how much he loves her, she melts, and that love grows and expands to the point where despite her being driven crazy by him to the end, she comes to not picture life without him, and her death in the sixth and last Palliser novel wracks him with paralytic grief. They are opposites in so many ways, but they achieve that rare and beautiful bird, the successful marriage.
Mom and Dad are like that except in one way.
I can remember coming home from college in 2004, the year of the 25th anniversary, getting ready for my European adventure. One day (and this happened several times, by the way, but this is one main example) I was filling out on-line forms when I had a question and walked into our kitchen.
Dad and Mom were holding each other very close, fitting perfectly, not saying words or making any noises. It was natural. Real.
You don't get like that 25 years into a marriage unless there was a deep, strong love i nthe beginning which has at least a vestige surviving despite all the times and tides of existence, jobs and material worries and child-raising and everything.
So I guess the biggest lesson I can learn is to not shy away from any woman I meet in Chicago and elsewhere, even the ones who are my total opposite.
She may be my own great fit 25 years later.
30 years later.
And counting...