Now they tell me…
What if the problem with finding a house is ME?? It probably is. Can’t get away with nothin’ around here any more.
Driving into town to look at a house for rent. Why does she even want to look at that one? I rejected it yesterday without ever having seen it. That went over well: she ranted and raved, stomped her foot, and let me have it. When you get girls from Iowa stamping their feet, you’re in big trouble. I couldn’t say a thing (and didn’t try) for 20 minutes, which is fortunate. Besides, she was right.
What a paranoid sumbitch I am, scared someone’s going to say I can’t go outside and play. Everything’s a threat to my precious independence, like my wife, denying us a chance to live in a dump forever. Oh, a loveable dump, to be sure, the perfect bachelor pad, best place I’ve ever lived. Driving into town to look at a house for rent. God, the sky is beautiful! Dark blue over Taos Mountain with lightning bolts, brilliant sun and white clouds overhead. Eighty degrees and I’m cool in my long sleeves. Makes it hard to be an idiot.
We didn’t rent the place — too awkward, no wood heat, etc. — but we prowled around the neighborhood. My wife is pulled there. (This is big medicine, bastards beware.) The woman is a creature of wild unleashed passion and joy hemmed in by negativity and big smelly men. I for one spent years of my life holding her down out of madness. It didn’t work, and she’s still with me. I’m not just lucky, I’m obscene.
Driving back to Llano Quemado after latte and chai in Taos Plaza. My partner is blazing sane, friendly, and tuned in. (How do they DO that?!?) Despite this, I’m still eating broken glass from last night’s dressing down. I’ve been forgiven (in effect), she’s miles ahead, but I’m a bastard without an excuse, averaging two syllables per mile. When we get home, she goes off to practice the piano, and I take a nap, otherwise known as all I can manage without being tasered.
Cocktail hour under the elms. I look at the mountain and drink my tequila. She walks back from her studio all smiles from playing Bach, goes into the house to change her clothes, and comes back out with a glass of wine. I pour myself some more tequila, and we clink glasses. Usually one or the other of us makes a toast, but I’m not talking. Still touching her glass to mine, she leans in close, pulls her sunglasses down just far enough to drill me in the eye, and says, “You take a long time, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” I reply, turning away and downing my shot.
Later I will put on loud Cajun music from the 1930s and microwave burritos from Antonito while she makes a salad. I am lots less crazy but the weight of me has slowed us down. After dinner we have three chances to catch Callie the studio cat and blow each one.
It’s 2:00 a.m. now. Time to zap the last half-cup of coffee and answer email, order hard drives. Moths are beating against the window glass, welcome to America.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Nicely written. I can just picture the both of you.
But I’m still not sure if I should be insulted over the Lumpy post.
Your comment surprised me, so I went back at looked at that BAD piece of writing! Try it again.
Here’s the sovereign remedy for what ails us males in the married state: We gotta learn to C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E or else it’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E. That first song wasn’t a Tammy Wynette hit, but it might get some of us through the night with a mate still in our bed at the end of it. –Hell, who knows anything about how to live with a woman? Psychologists and marriage counselors are mostly working on their 3rd and 4th goes at it. “All Happy Families are the same,” said Leo Tolstoy, who made his own utterly miserable. In his last days he deserted his spouse of 50 years so that he could live free at last of her corrupted femaleness. Leo, my boy, you needed to learn to C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E. Tequila cocktails in the cool of the evening might have made all the difference.
Tolstoy never said, “All happy families are the same, and mine is one of them.” He knew the score.
Well, as she’s still with you, John, you must be doing something right. Personally, I don’t like ‘compromise’. The one who compromises always feels they’ve lost. I like to find a third way that’s better than the other two.
I like to find a third way that’s better than the other two.
Yes, that THIRD way. Brilliant! That’s exactly how it works.That’s the thing that gets me all excited.
And K.J., it’s like you’re reading me through a straw. Loosen up, dude. Get transcendental. It’s the new sex.
Tossing back Tequila kinda leads to the old transcendance, but I’ll take my transcendance anywhere I can find it, little as I ever do find it.
The trouble with formulas like the third way and stayin’ loose is that they deceive us into thinking these big structural issues between men and women can be easily dealt with. Greg is right about Tolstoy. That old boy had the real lowdown on what happens inside families – everything from the enchantments of courtship to the first strained accommodations of married life, the heartaches children bring, the ecstasy and unsatisfactoriness of adultery, the sheer misery of a married lovelessness that led his most famous heroine to throw herself under the wheels of a train. In his own life Tolstoy, after making his wife pregant a dozen or so times, tortured her with visionary dreams of a perfect world without sex or family relations. She was ready to throw HIM under a train…. Most women who live with men get that way eventually, though the Tequila helps ease the situation.
The ‘third way’ is not a formula, and it’s not easy. It requires looking outside the box, leaving your comfort zone, giving up the idea that there are only 2 ways or variations thereof. There are a million ways. ‘Compromise’ is lazy thinking and usually results in a lose-lose situation.
Oh, and by the way, in 36 years of marriage I’ve never once wanted to throw myself of my husband under a train. Don’t drink tequila either, though I do drink single-malt whisky … but NEVER when I’m unhappy.
Oops … should read ‘throw myself OR my husband’.
I should add that I do sometimes ‘compromise’, as does my husband, but I always wish we hadn’t. In little things it doesn’t really matter, but in big things … very very unwise.
“Compromise” and “third way” are just words. As you describe the latter, Carmel, it seems pretty much what I mean by the former. My favoured word doesn’t get much respect because of its connotations of corruption and giving up on achieving the ideal. But living with a mate necessarily means giving up things – and not necessarily idealistic things. More likely, selfish things and even rather trivial things.
My two best friends are lifelong bachelors. Charming and good-hearted guys, both of them love being with women, have women friends, have briefly lived with women, etc. The reason they can’t close the deal is pretty simple – they’re fussbudgets about every darn thing in life. Neither has found a woman willing to put up with being dictated to about the pattern of the wallpaper or lights-out time, never mind the big stuff. Both have given up on finding a mate – another kind of giving up on the ideal, you might say.
I like your description of third way solutions. My friends could use some of that. In the end the reality that lies behind that phrase (and my blunter word) is that in marrieage you don’t get to have things just the way you want them. You’ve stopped being a sole proprietor and become a partnership (or, with the arrival of children, a joint stock company!). You’re hostage to others, you’re no longer the only one at the wheel, you’re fully exposed to the heartbreak and frustration of having your happiness depend on another’s will. You either like the mate who comes with that condition well enough to put up with the condition’s constraints – or you don’t and you won’t. The Man in Black had it right: “I walk the line.” (Years ago, I remember reading a critique of that song in the “Village Voice” – the critic called it something like “an anthem to Fascism”. If so, all us married men are living under the heel of a dictator.)
But my friends will tell you that their choice – to be solitary, free and, with apologies to Carmel, uncompromised – isn’t without its own constraints. As has often been said (by males, I admit, in exasperation): “Women! You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them!” –Of course it depends on the woman. Compromising with the wrong woman about the wrong things, walking the line for her, struggling to find the third way out of each daily hole: all that with the wrong woman ain’t the ticket to nothing but a long friendship with the bottle.
–Do women say such things about men, Carmel?
I can’t speak for ‘women’ K.J., only for myself. I don’t think of ‘men in general’, but of particular men. My experience is that personality is a more critical factor in relationships than gender. Sometimes female acquaintances have said, “You know what men are like” in describing something their husband has done. But the men I’ve had close contact with don’t have that particular behaviour.
Maybe I’m a-typical of my gender. I have, on the whole, closer relationships with men than with women. I don’t belong to ‘women’s groups’ – I prefer mixed company. And I HATE those gatherings where the sexes separate into groups.
But back to ‘compromise’. I’m using my dictionary definition (admittedly it’s an AUSTRALIAN dictionary, and may differ from an American one
“a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an adjustment of conflicting claims, principles, etc, by yielding a part of each; something intermediate between different things”
The danger here is that if important parts are yielded, one or both parties are dissatisfied, and resentment may fester. One wants to live in the mountains, one near the sea. Somewhere in between just doesn’t cut it.
The dictionary goes on, and here it gets interesting:
“an endangering, esp. of reputation; exposure to danger, suspicion; to make liable to danger, suspicion, scandal etc; endanger the reputation; to involve unfavourably.” (aha, the dictionary knows what I’m talking about!)
Let’s take a simple example regarding the purchase of a car. Recently my husband and I were thinking about new cars. (We didn’t have money for a new car so the example is benign.) My preference is for red or black, both of which my husband consider impractical, the first because it’s ‘flashy’, the second because it shows dust. His choice would be ‘something that doesn’t show the dust’, which is pretty boring from my point of view. Being (ahem) ‘mature’ we tend to focus on the thing we BOTH want, in this case, the MAKE of car. We went to look at new Hondas and Peugeots in a car sales yard. I was. needless to say, on the lookout for an ‘interesting red’ which my husband might not consider so flashy. But then we both saw it … a marvellous dusky grey-purple such as we didn’t know existed. We both LOVED it … better than what we THOUGHT we wanted.
Sometimes the 3rd or 4th or nth way is harder to find, but it’s there. All it needs is the will.
In a perfect world anyway
Words are slippery, but, as Ekiot said, “to talk to you I gotta use ‘em”. Yes, the C word has these different senses, and those senses colour each other, but the second sense isn’t the one we mean in this context. No more than when we say someone is “boring” us are we saying he’s drilling a hole into us. We humans make those distinctions between the different senses of words all the time.
The first meaning seems to me to describe very well what you and your husband did about the car in that neither of you got just what you wanted in the first instance and were willing to give up your first preference and go looking for something else. That “something else” doesn’t have to be in-between in all cases. If I liked “Harry” as the name for my first-born and my wife liked “George”, a compromise on that point wouldn’t be “Gary” or “Jorge”. No, it’d be to move on to something else. That decision itself would be the compromise. When you went looking for a colour you could both live with, you did that. Is it possible that somewhere in that exchange somebody “gave up” something? Is it possible that gray purple represents some midway choice between your preferred flashy red and your husband’s dusky beige. Some things are measurable mathematically (the compromise of a law suit, say, where one side says the claim should be $20,000 and the other says $10,000 – just split the difference and make it $15,000), some things – typically things in the esthetic realm, like the names of children or the colours of a new car – are not.
And here’s another thought about that decision: You both felt happy about it, I surmise, because you liked being able to make the other happy. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a good marriage. That little concession to your mate made you disposed to like the second choice when it came along so fortuitously.
To me this all sounds like a classic compromise – a word that at least has a dictionary meaning. A phrase like “third way” doesn’t “mean” much but has a lot of hope and good feeling clinging to it largely because it’s so vague. Isn’t that kind of why an optimistic person like you who wants to feel good about things likes it so much? Whereas, me – well, long ago there was a television series called “Dragnet” in which Sergeant Joe Friday (my namesake, Jack Webb) was fond of saying, when people gave him fancy explanations that didn’t quite add up, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Yep, that’s the ticket.
Nope. None of that. Remember, we weren’t even buying a car. There was no need to make anyone happy. We both instantly LOVED that purple car (and if anyone had told me in advance that I’d love a purple car I’d have thought they were nuts), and in the moment of loving we weren’t to know if the other liked it or not. It could just as easily have happened that one developed a lust for purple and the other for lime green (ahem).
I think you’ve missed the point and the opportunity. ‘Third way’ means plenty to the adventurous.
This could go on forever, but alas, I have to go and try to figure out a way to buy a purple car.