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Why my husband is NOT my best friend

So, OK. . . what's on the top of my head today? I'm not halfway through my enormous Starbuck's mug yet, so who knows how coherent it will be, but several ideas have been forming like baby icebergs in my brain, waiting to calve.


I have been married for 38 years, to the same person I mean, and as with a lot of life's more arcane mysteries, I can't really talk about it. I've attempted to write about our relationship before, either in this blog or "that other one", the Open Salon experiment that backfired so badly.


So I won't write about it except to say a few things, maybe dispell a few cliches. If you read this at all, and let's hope somebody does, you'll realize I keep yammering away at certain themes: horses, Anthony Perkins, Harold Lloyd, frustration as an author, etc. But it's the cliches that really get down my neck, chief among them "everything happens for a reason" (with a side of "God never gives us more than we can handle").



These sayings are idiotic in my mind, because there are murders, disasters, jihads, planes flying into towers, world wars, child murders, and all manner of things that happen for no reason at all, except perhaps human stupidity and indifference. And as far as good o'l God seeing to it that we aren't overburdened, as a friend of mine likes to say, "our prisons and mental hospitals are full of people who had more than they could handle".

Amen.

So what do we attack today? So to speak. I hear this phrase all the time: "My husband is my best friend." I have never felt that way about my husband, and I will tell you why.

I have a best friend already. That's part of it. To her, I can tell all the woman-stuff that guys, sorry about that, just don't get and won't get in a million years because of their hormonal structure and brain physiology.

So if I already have one, how can my husband be my best friend? To me, the term implies a buddy-buddy-ness, being there to listen on the phone when you lose that promotion, walking along the beach skipping stones together or sitting in Starbuck's over a double caramelized Machiavelli, just gabbing away.


We don't do that.


It also implies, to me, sexlessness. I'm not saying we're Romeo and Juliet, but our marriage is not sexless and never has been.

Saying "my husband is my best friend" is supposed to be totally positive, but to me it's totally weird if you really look at it (and that's the thing: how many people LOOK at it?). It's like roommates who really get along and even do each other's laundry in a pinch. (He does his own laundry, by the way - always has - it's why we're still married.) So if we aren't best friends, what are we?

The other one is "soul-mate". I don't know about that one either: I dislike like it for reasons that are hard to articulate. It just doesn't hit the mark, and maybe nothing can. My husband is my husband, and occupies a unique place in my life and has occupied that place for the vast majority of my life (since I was ten when I got married - one of those cultural betrothal things). He is my life partner, the father of my children and grandfather to my precious grandkids. And guess what: a best friend doesn't do that.


"Friend" is great, it's wonderful, but it only goes so far. When you're in the trenches together for nearly 40 years, you find out about the deeper levels of commitment that most people seem to ignore.

There are three of them, actually. Everyone goes on and on about commitment, and it's fine. But you can be committed to a dog, a job, a fitness plan. Will that be enough to keep the bond strong as life's hurricanes blast you out of your chair?

No.

The next level, as I see it, is devotion. Great-sounding word, isn't it - and a leap beyond commitment in emotional content. But is it enough to stay married?

Double-no.

The third level is one that doesn't even occur to people, and I call it covenant. In case you think I'm going all religious on you, let me define it now:


cov·e·nant   /ˈkʌvənənt/ Show Spelled[kuhv-uh-nuhnt] Show IPA

noun

1.

an agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons to do or not do something specified.

2.

Law . an incidental clause in such an agreement.

3.

Ecclesiastical . a solemn agreement between the members of a church to act together in harmony with the precepts of the gospel.

4.

( initial capital letter ) History/Historical .

a.

National Covenant.

b.

Solemn League and Covenant.

5.

Bible .

a.

the conditional promises made to humanity by God, as revealed in Scripture.

b.

the agreement between God and the ancient Israelites, in which God promised to protect them if they kept His law and were faithful to Him.

OK, I see where this is going all Biblical, and that puts people off. But what I'm trying to say is: you don't sign a contract with your best friend, unless you happen to be business partners. You don't even sign a contract with your soul-mate, as a general rule.

Marriage is legal. It's something that holds up in a court of law. Most people seal this covenant in a public setting, often very elaborately and expensively, as if to show off the intensity and sincerity of the covenant (though more often, it's the elaborateness of the trappings, including the supposedly-virginal white wedding gown. This ubiquitous bridezilla-mania represents a return to a deeply sexist tradition that makes my hair stand on end).

But the truth is, as people sign that register and smile their faces off, they don't really think that they have signed on for the long haul.

Remember how it goes? Forsaking all others; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. . . so long as you both shall live.

If you think it sounds cold to define marriage as a covenant/contractual agreement, then why do people still insist on it? A few decades ago, the prediction was that legal marriage would become completely obsolete by the year 2000 (always named as the watershed year when absolutely everything would change). People would just live together, or if they married at all the marriages would be loose agreements with lots of escape clauses built in, based on the concept of "serial monogamy" (which still exists: it's called a pre-nup).

Most of us don't have prenups unless we're George Clooney or something, and last time I checked, I wasn't. So OK, why has marriage become more popular than ever, with crazed brides stampeding each other to upstage their girl friends and nab the perfect virginal white gown? On one level at least, it has to do with the kids. Raising kids can be brutal, and it's long and it's very expensive. "Commitment" won't do it. This isn't a Dalmation. Even devotion might wobble and collapse in the storm.

So we're back to that old, creaky, Moses-esque concept of covenant, because it has been the glue in profound human attachments for millennia. Can I step out? OK, it's just my girl friend, she'll never notice. Oops, wait a minute. . . she's my wife. Not only that, she's the mother of my kids, who just happen to have my name on them.

We won't go into the ramifications of last names right now, except to say that the awkward double-barrelled name seems to have trickled away in popularity. (Think of it: the next generation would have four names, the one after that eight. . . It just doesn't work.) Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, that "little piece of paper" people used to scorn is about as unimportant as the Magna Carta and other little pieces of paper that have made a bit of difference over the years.The bits of paper that have changed the course of human history.

Why are we still together? I only have one husband, and he occupies a unique position in my life. To say he's some sort of patriarchal figure would be completely inaccurate, except for his innate need to be protective in his love.

We signed on the dotted line all those years ago, and during those inevitable stormy times when it looked like we might be over, one or the other of us would say: wait a minute. Let's wait it out, work at it for just a little bit longer.

We're not best friends. We're married. Still married. And somehow, as intimate and exclusive as we are with each other, the marriage is part of a much bigger picture, a network or matrix of kids and grandkids, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and other people we probably wouldn't be able to stand otherwise. And may I say this? Marriage is the basic social unit of society, a whole lot of interlocking puzzle pieces of people at least making an attempt at commitment to living in a manner based on love.  Or devotion.

Or that which lies beyond devotion, and always will.

Drunken Anderson Cooper: go home and sleep it off

BAD KITTY: some gifs that move!



I don't know about you, but I love gifs, those crazy, harum-scarum little cubes of animation that are made I-don't-know-how. For some reason, some of these post OK, like these-here, whereas all the rest (most of my really really cute Tony Perkins ones, shoot!) just move for a sec then stop. Some o' them just go on and on, and others last only a precious instant. Even the worst of them are at least an improvement over those goddamned sparkly kittens and angels and pictures of Jesus with rays coming out of him.



Sister Wives: THE MUSICAL!

While you're waiting for the full ramifications of an all-singing, all-dancing LDS musical in pastel polyester and cowboy hats, let me fill you in on a little bit of background.

I don't know much about Mormonism except that it's based on the visions and writings of Brigham Young, the ultimate religious patriarch who advocated that love should be "multiplied, not divided". (Oops, that was someone else.) Quite a few years ago now, my husband and I went to Utah to see Bryce Canyon and other heartstoppingly beautiful natural phenomena. While in Salt Lake City, we decided to take in the sights.

It was interesting. When we visited the Great Salt Lake, it was almost like looking at a sheet of silver, inert and devoid of all life. But wait! What were those million-legged little things squirming around in the water? There seemed to be thousands of them.

A local happened to be passing by. "What?" he answered in the jovial manner of most of the Utah-ians we met. "Them's sea monkeys."

Our next little frisson of pleasure came when we took a guided bus tour of the city. It wasn't so much the sights as the narration, which was both informed and hilarious. There were two guides: the driver, who'd been doing this for a lot of years, and a young Mormon student doing part of the required missionary work to become a, well, you know, a real Mormon-Morman-type guy.

The driver asked about our hotel room. "Oh, it's great," we said. "How about the beds?" "The. . . beds?" Then we remembered that our room had not one, but two king-sized beds in it. "This is an LDS secret, but those are for the extra wives," he said.

That was nothing compared to what the student said. We drove along a massively wide street, supposedly built to accommodate throngs of wagons as they steamed along their way to the Promised Land.

"See, there's where Brigham Young used to go for a walk with all his wives," he said.

Badda-boom! Holy roller, it was (unexpectedly) funny!

The surprises never ended. We went to the Mormon Museum, an interesting place that was a rich slice of Utah history. That is. . . until I noticed something.

There was no mention at all of a certain practice, now banned to be sure, but so much a part of Mormon history that leaving it out would be like the history of Canada without maple syrup (or coureurs de bois, or Charlie Farquharson).

There was no mention at all of polygamy.

Really. I turned the place upside down and inside out. It just wasn't there. Not even one of those creep-out photos of a patriarch with dozens of wives and children posed like a school photo ("short people in front, please"). Nada.

Fast-forward to the age of "reality" (read: "unreality") TV, a time when polygamy is not only practiced but shoved in our faces. I have unfortunately become hooked on the misadventures of the Brown family (Kody, Brody, Dody, The One I Like, and You-know-that-fat-one). 

Something funny happened here: for whatever reason, probably financial, they decided to make their private lives public in a megahouse in Utah. Even the bedroom door was open, though they always seemed to feature a wife (interchangeable) dressed in flannel pajamas and a thick bathrobe giving her husband a palsy-walsy, sexless hug.

This show is so weird! The family seemed astonished when the shit hit the fan after (or probably long before) the show premiered. They kept talking about how important it was to "come out" and show the public how they lived, in order to promote, I guess, religious tolerance or something. The deeply-entrenched patriarchal values system that kept the wives nailed in place while claiming independence was presented with a slick veneer of modernity and even hipness. Hey, folks, we're just like everybody else, except that the Daddy boffs a whole lot of Mommies!

So the Utah police, or authorities, or whoever, got on the case and began to persecute them, which was a ratings grab for sure, so they had to "flee" (claiming to be "run out of Dodge" by Kody the faux-cowboy) to the Promised Land: Las Vegas.

Yeah, THAT Las Vegas.

I kept saying, "noooooooooooooooooooooo" as they crammed things haphazardly into their truck, which kept breaking down. Don't do this to the family! Why not stay and face the music? You can flee and claim persecution and try to get public sympathy, or you can stay and take responsibility, in full realization that the reality-viewing public would NEVER allow the law to "split up the family" and make Kody go to jail for his sexual peccadillos (which is, by the way, a sort of Mormon armadillo).

But they ran, and now everything's in a mess. "Split up the family"? Instead of one massive house (with Robyn on the side, her separate kennel a few doors down: I guess Kody needed an airing every four nights), they have FOUR big houses, two with swimming pools, and no discernible source of income. Except maybe reality TV.

I think it's Janelle who had to give up her career doing "???" and has groused about it non-stop ever since, saying she's "used to being busy" and now doesn't know who she is. For some reason she has never done anything in the areas of child care or cooking or household chores. She's just sitting there. She could be peeling potatoes, but no. She "can't find work", and her identity is shattered. But think of the massive amount of work required every day to keep everyone clean, clothed and fed. Why doesn't she just pick one of the four houses at random and roll up her sleeves? But for some reason she's in a sort of special position, maybe because she just doesn't like to clean toilets. This I will never understand. Or is she, after all, Kody's favorite? Did we all think it was Robyn with her flat stomach and hormones and tears? Pshaw. Maybe Kody likes to jump up and down on Janelle's. . . bed.

(Note in the photo below, how Janelle, far left, is almost completely hidden. Fat is stigmatized; polygamy isn't? As a matter of fact, even her head looks smaller than the rest: I think her entire body has been shrunk down, then relegated to the corner.)

Robyn, well. . . most of the ink spilled lately has been about Robyn, Kody's demure new wife, she who cries at the drop of a hat, has a cuter and slimmer figure than any of them, and is now (surprise!) pregnant. The blown fuse of the other three's expired fertility seemed to give Kody license to look for a fourth table leg so he could continue to dine on a richly-varied sexual diet.

This show is so weird about sex. Though in a way, the show is about sex, or at least patriarchal sexual arrangements that most people would find distasteful, everyone kind of pretends it isn't happening. Kody admonishes the fifteen or so teenagers in the family that they can't be "sexual" until they graduate from high school, or turn thirty, whichever comes first. Telling a teenager not to be "sexual" is like telling them not to blink their eyes. It's practically a recipe for shame as they try to cope (alone) with bodies that don't always co-operate. This is not to mention yet another of the dozens of contradictions in the household: they can't be "sexual", when Kody can roll around with four different chicks, of his own choosing of course, and get them pregnant into the bargain.

This past episode featured the Brown family, now trying to maintain four large houses in Las Vegas on no income, going on a furniture-buying binge. For a fundamentalist family who supposedly lives for their faith, this clan is awfully materialistic (and hardly ever mentions God or prayer or anything spiritual, except for having their kids join a Presbyterian youth group "as a social outlet").

TV has become something of a freak show, with two-foot-tall doctors delivering babies not much bigger than they are, people cramming their houses up to the ceiling with foul garbage, and (even) so-called mediums with grating voices telling gullible clients, "Oh yes, I see him standing right there in front of you!" while their eyes brim over with gratitude and hopeless hope.

Network TV isn't much better, with shows like Pan Am and The Playboy Club trying unsuccessfully to coat-tail on Mad Men's phenomenally original influence. (And by the way, why in HELL'S name do we have to wait until February to see Season 5 of Mad Men? Whose brilliantly shitty idea was that? Don't they realize how much momentum they will lose by then? The show is committing suicide, but only because its creator Matthew Weiner is having a prima donna hissy-fit over commercial time.)

So. . . the one truly watchable show is being withheld, with perhaps fatal results. I will admit that my habit of watching Hoarders and Sister Wives and junk like that is about as healthy and justifiable as eating massive amounts of movie popcorn saturated with salt and "golden topping".

But when SW runs out of steam, which it might when the last wife finally passes through menopause and the seventh house explodes, there's always Sister Wives: The Musical!, featuring those merry wives of Kody doing high-kicks and pole-dancing in a joyous celebration of how love should be "multiplied, not divided".

Until the law arrives, and subtracts them all.

Mini Me

Does God give us second chances? Can we sometimes set a howling wrong at last and finally right?
When I looked at you and thought, you're me. . . it changed everything. Can I love you the way I was never loved? Will the stars permit it?

Can I, must I steal away the chance, before anyone can see?

Love rushes in, before the question's even asked.