Chapter 7

So,” said Dr. Basescu during our first meeting, “what brought you two in to see me today?”

“Well, the short version,” I said, “is that I made Mike go on a reality show and now he’s deeply resentful but we’re getting married in two months and we’ve wanted to do couples therapy for a while anyway and his individual therapist said you were terrific and gave him your number.”

I have been online for an hour looking at pictures of my wonderful, handsome, dashing, brilliant, charming husband and thinking about how wonderful, handsome, dashing, brilliant, and charming he is.

Not my husband Mike, but my new husband, Cole. I’m sure Mike will understand, though; he’s a reasonable man, and I’m almost positive I’ll give him the ring back, so he won’t be out all that much.

Cole is my new husband because I saw him in a reading of a musical last week (he’s an actor) and friended him on Facebook along with a message telling him how daring and generous I thought his performance had been, and then I saw him in a reading of another piece again yesterday (it’s final project season at the musical theater writing program where I teach) and ran into him beforehand; he thanked me for my message and apologized for not writing back and I told him it was no problem and then he started asking me about myself and all I wanted to do was gaze deep into his eyes and reveal my soul to him but I was in the middle of helping some student with a problem or something—that’s the trouble with students; they always want you to take the time to teach them things—so I told him we’d talk afterward, but then when I came up to him afterward he was looking in another direction and couldn’t see me and I was too scared to try and get his attention because what if actually he didn’t really like me after all and if I just avoided him then he could never break my heart by rejecting me so I ducked into the men’s room and washed my hands for five minutes thinking about what I would cook when he introduced me to his parents and then I came out and he was gone.

(This is an indication, by the way, of how much better medicated I am than I used to be. If this had happened in my early thirties, I would still have ducked into the men’s room, but instead of spending those five minutes washing my hands I would have spent them crying.)

I loved couples therapy. Part of the reason for this was that, rather than being an exploration of what we’d both unwittingly been doing to make the relationship more difficult and a journey to discover what each of us could do to bring the other closer, for the first month and a half it consisted of the therapist telling Mike how he was wrong.

(I am perfectly willing to admit that this was my subjective experience and that in fact our couples therapist may simply have been a brilliant tactician who actually spent a month and a half telling me how I was wrong and making me believe she was doing the opposite.)

“Mike, do you hear what Joel is saying about what he needs from you as far as participation in the wedding planning?” she would say, but she never asked me whether I heard what he was saying, because it was obvious that I did.

“Mike, can you see how Joel might get frustrated when you use language like ‘just take care of the little stuff with the ceremony and check with me about the important things’?”

“Mike, would you be willing to have the sort of conversation Joel is asking for about the ketubah?”

The best part about all of this was that she had been recommended by Mike’s individual therapist, so if he didn’t like it there was absolutely nothing he could say.

According to Mike’s friend Tony, every couple has one problem. Every time they get into a fight, every time they start calling each other names or wishing secretly or openly for a cliff to push each other off, it always boils down in the end to an expression of that problem. This makes a lot of sense to me, as whenever Mike and I get into a fight, it always boils down in the end to an expression of the problem that he is an asshole.

One Saturday a few years ago, for example, we went to the movies. I take full responsibility for the fact that we were late, as I was dawdling when I ought to have been getting ready to go. We got to the theater just in time to catch the beginning of the movie, we thought, but once we had our popcorn and Peanut Butter M&Ms (for me) and nachos and cheese (for Mike), we realized we hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that this theater had eight floors and escalators that moved at the speed of evolution; when we reached our screen on the top floor, therefore, the movie—not the previews but the actual movie—had already started, so I said we couldn’t go in.

Mike exploded. He sat on a bench in the lobby, his rapidly cooling nachos perched precipitously on his knees, and yelled at me for half an hour (by which I mean he spoke sharply to me for like four minutes). I knew it drove him crazy to be late, he said, and if I’d made us late then I had no right to say we couldn’t see the movie once it had begun, and he was sick and tired of my never considering his feelings, and didn’t I realize that he needed taking care of every once in a while, and he didn’t get why this was so difficult for me to understand.

Mike, making this passionate speech while some kid played an arcade game behind us, seemed angrier at me than he’d ever been. Enough time had passed since the beginning of our relationship that I was no longer limited to my instinctive reaction, which would have been to freeze any hint of emotion out of my face and look coldly at him without moving a muscle the whole time he was speaking and then, when he was finished, say, “Okay,” and turn on my heel and leave, imagining a meteor falling down from a clear sky to crush him (no; not protracted enough) violent explosion of something made of glass that sent tiny glass shards flying into every part of him, beginning with his eyes and making sure not to miss his genitalia (no; even if he went blind the rest of him would heal eventually) creeping, leprous infection of a type contracted only by speaking sharply in movie theaters to people who didn’t deserve it, an infection that both kept him in agonizing pain for years and deformed his countenance monstrously so that his outsides would reflect the rot that was in his soul, and he would be aware the entire time that this wouldn’t be happening to him if he hadn’t been so mean to me.

But, as I say, by this point my conflict-resolution skills had matured somewhat, so I was able to offer sincere apologies mixed with expressions of frustration at what I perceived as Mike’s inflexibility and need to control things.

We made a sort of peace eventually and left the theater to go to the Barnes & Noble next door, where we browsed for an hour or so. I bought a couple books and a little box of four Godiva chocolates, which I started eating while we waited for the subway home. “Hey, can I have a bite?” asked Mike as he eyed the caramel-filled half piece of chocolate in my hand.

“What?” he said, apparently taken aback. Then he decided I was kidding. “Funny. Give me a bite.”

“Are you serious? You just disemboweled me in public and you don’t understand why I won’t give you a bite of chocolate?”

“Fine.” He stalked a few yards over to lean against a pillar, and I stayed where I was, which meant that when the subway came we got into separate cars. I was fuming and I’m sure he was too. We walked home from our subway stop separately, which was the first time that had ever happened, and when we got home the first thing we did was have another, even bigger fight, this time about the kitchen.

Let us pause briefly while I explain the extent to which I am not a neat person.

It’s not that I don’t care. I really do like things beautiful and orderly and lined up and clean and sunshine and bluebirds and fabric softener, and I really wish I could keep them that way, but I can’t.

“I told you to watch him!” my mother shrieked when she got back from lunch to see blood pouring out of my two-year-old scalp.

“I did!” said my father. “I did watch him! I watched him climb up on the sink, I watched him lose his balance, I watched him fall, I watched him hit his head. . . .”

For most of my life I thought that the one-inch-diameter bald spot on top of my head was my sole memento of the fall, but a few years ago, for reasons too tedious to go into here, I had a brain scan, and it turns out that I’m brain damaged. The part of my brain underneath the bald spot is sluggish, as is, to a lesser extent, the corresponding part on the other side. The first sluggish area, my doctor told me, is the section of the brain that processes visual information, which explains a great deal (why I had to stop playing video games in 1984 when they started coming out in 3D, because I found them overwhelming; why I hate art), and the second area is the section of the brain that governs organization, which also explains a great deal. So my tendency toward messiness isn’t a fault; it’s a disability—not only can’t I organize things, I also can’t see that I’ve neglected to organize them—for which I should receive special consideration and perhaps a parking space.

Mike, on the other hand, is a very organized person; he’s also a very visual person, and decided to become a psychiatrist only after considering and rejecting the idea of becoming a painter. (“The ratio of success to starvation was way too low for me,” he said.) So when I got home, having walked a block and a half behind him from the subway, it was only to be confronted with his fury in the kitchen. “You told me you were going to clean this up,” he said hotly, indicating the counter, which had a great number of towering stacks of paper on it, along with several books and a half-empty tin of brownies. “You said that two weeks ago, and it’s still a disaster. It’s like you’re not even aware that I exist. You know how anxious I get when things are messy, and all I can think is that you just don’t fucking care.”

“Oh, you mean like how I didn’t care yesterday when you texted me that you were having a bad day at work and I went to get raspberries so I could make you peach Melba for dessert and I had to take the subway an hour each way to get them because you made us move into a ghetto in the middle of nowhere where they don’t even sell raspberries? And like how I didn’t care when I spent three hours writing those recommendations for your students on Thursday because you’re just shy of dyslexic? You mean like that not caring?”

We went on like this for half an hour or so, and this time we didn’t come to any sort of peace. Mike stormed upstairs and I decided that if he wanted a clean kitchen he was damn well going to get one. So I moved all the papers and books into my office, ate the remaining brownies, including the corners, which are Mike’s favorites, and took everything else in the room, put it in garbage bags, and dragged it down to the basement. And by “everything” I mean everything. Not just the knife stand and the blender, so that the counter would be clear, but everything in the drawers and cabinets, too. Dishes, silverware, glasses. The ice cream maker. The colander. The Cuisinart. They all went into huge thirty-gallon trash bags. Pots, pans, pie dishes, cake tins, the citrus zester. And the pantry. Cereal, flour, honey, pasta, spices, extract of orange, baking powder, all of it. The delivery menus. The refrigerator magnets. I almost took the food in the fridge and freezer down but left it simply because sometimes when I can’t sleep I eat instead and I didn’t want to risk going down to the basement in the middle of the night and consuming a snack that had turned and getting salmonella.

Altogether this took me an hour or two, at the end of which time, feeling very satisfied with myself, I went into my office, shut the door, and started making notes for a short story in which a cruel, sadistic psychiatrist is tortured and killed by the patients he has victimized.

It wasn’t too long before I heard the sound of Mike coming down the stairs, followed by the sound of Mike going into the kitchen, followed by a short period of silence, followed by what might reasonably be termed the Door Slam Heard ’Round the World, followed by the sound of Mike storming back up the stairs. Then I went back to my notes for the story, realizing that I had neglected to include a scene in which the fiendish psychiatrist begs his victims to have mercy on him and they just laugh and laugh and bring out longer knives.

“I was livid,” he said in his answering voice mail message, “but to tell you the truth I was also kind of impressed. And I’m really sorry too.”

Over the next few days I brought most of the kitchen stuff up from the basement and put it back. Some of it I left down there because we didn’t really need it (I’m sure I had a very good reason for taking that handblown monstrosity of a candleholder off my friend Dave’s hands when he was moving but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what it was).

I swear to you, I scoured that basement for hours—days, months—looking for them, and they had vanished. Every once in a while during the next few years I looked for them again, but nothing doing. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to replace them; when I needed to cover a pot I just put a pan on top of it and vice versa, which was actually really inconvenient.

“Mike,” asked Dr. Basescu, “do you understand what Joel is asking for when he says he wants you to be specific about how you’d like to be involved in planning the wedding?”

“But I am being specific,” he answered. “I don’t know how I can be more specific.”

“All you’ll say,” I said, “is that you want me to take care of the details and check in with you about important things. But it’s a mystery to me what you think is a detail and what you think is important, and you never tell me, and you get annoyed when I ask, so I’ve stopped asking, and I just have to guess, and I hate that.”

“Honey, when I say I’ve talked to Sugar Sweet Sunshine about getting cupcakes you get annoyed that I didn’t ask you to taste them first, but then when I ask you to sit with me and make a list of who we want to invite you get annoyed and say we’ve already talked about it and I should just go ahead and invite them.”

“That’s because we have already talked about it, for days, and we made a list, which took us hours, and you lost it.”

It was around this time that the couples therapist started asking me whether I understood what Mike was expressing.

I think that the historical event most damaging to the institution of marriage, far more than divorce or same-sexers getting married, may have been the birth of romance novelist Kathleen Thompson Norris in San Francisco on July 16, 1880. Upon her death in 1966, the New York Times described her as a militant feminist, but Time called her novels, which had sold over ten million copies, “relentlessly wholesome.” In 1926, she published a book called The Black Flemings, about the tempestuous love between Gabrielle and David; on page 345 one reads the following words:

“‘When I was away from him, I had time to think it out logically and dispassionately, and I knew he was—the one,’ the girl resumed, ‘and when I saw him—whenever we were together, although I couldn’t think logically, or indeed think at all,’ she said, laughing, and flushed, and meeting his eyes with a sort of defiant courage, ‘I knew, from the way I felt, that there never could be, and never would be, any one else!’” (Page 345 of The Black Flemings also contains the line, “‘But after I got home from Paris I saw him again,’ the girl offered, lucidly.” I feel that if somebody who writes like that can sell ten million books I am clearly going about this whole author thing in the wrong way.)

This is, in any case, the earliest instance I’ve been able to find of the use of the unmodified term “the one” as shorthand for something like “the person I’m meant to be with in a match made by destiny.” The idea of love written in the stars has been around—well, really from the beginning, when God saw that Adam was lonely and knew just the companion to give him.

I love Mike, and I believe myself immeasurably lucky that he has allowed me (thus far, at least) to yoke my life to his. But every day I pass twenty men to whose lives I fantasize about yoking mine, and each one of them, in the moment I see him, is better than Mike; each of those twenty men, in the moment I see him, is The One, because Mike certainly isn’t. He snores, he’s rigid, he likes black-and-white movies. He’s balding and he’s a bad speller. He’s full of energy during the day, only to come home from work listless and tired, whereas I’m listless and tired during the day, only to be full of energy in the evening, when all he wants to do is watch goddamn home and garden shows on HGTV. He nags me to eat vegetables. He makes me come along with him on trips to Home Depot. In the drugstore he stands paralyzed for minutes at a time, two minutes, five minutes, unable to decide whether to buy the Dove soap for $1.29 or the less appealing Ivory Spring soap for $1.19. He rises early on the weekend and gets grumpy when I want him to spend time lazing in bed with me. If we’re having a conversation walking down the street he is constantly distracted by architecture.

None of the possible Ones upon whom my glance falls on any given day has any of these faults. The brunet standing in the 2 train reading Go Ask Alice has the same circadian rhythms as I do and would rush to any movie about a) sorcerers and/or dragons, b) aliens who try to destroy the earth, c) a college student whose roommate begins exhibiting strange behavior the day after fooling around with a Ouija board, and/or d) a guy who gets kidnapped by a top-secret counterintelligence agency and transformed into a powerful force for destruction but escapes to become a sword-wielding angel of vengeance and woe betide them who first disturbed his peaceful, ordinary life. The blond sitting across from me on the 5 train (I transferred at Franklin Avenue) playing a game on his iPad won’t sulk when I tell him I’m not interested in puttering around in the garden with him and doesn’t see the need to pressure decent, self-respecting people to eat broccoli. The stocky man in a shirt and tie walking three strides ahead of me down 14th Street toward Trader Joe’s doesn’t even subscribe to HGTV, much less spend all his time watching it, he prefers going to the hardware store alone, and he can choose a soap without even stopping the cart.

Then of course there’s my Facebook friend Eric, who spells well, who isn’t losing his hair, and whose engorged penis, I can see from the picture he emailed me the day we were sending flirty messages back and forth, is not only larger than Mike’s and larger than mine but larger than Mike’s and mine put together and in fact larger than any engorged penis it has ever been my privilege to behold. And Matt, whose blog’s air of weary, threadbare irony is far more eloquent than anything Mike could write and who proved, when I met him in London, to be gorgeous, and if only I’d known that he and his partner weren’t monogamous I could have had one last glorious affair before starting to date Mike, and somehow Matt and I would both have realized that we were meant to be together and he would have dumped his partner and I would have moved to London or he would have moved here and my life would be perfect, and then of course that blond guy in Italy who caught my eye in the town square and beckoned me over but when I got to his table and his friend looked up at me expectantly I couldn’t come up with anything to say so I pretended I’d thought he was somebody else and went and sat in a corner of the cafe hoping against hope that he’d pass by on his way out but he didn’t and I lost my one chance at true happiness.

(And don’t forget Cole, beautiful, perfect Cole, my new husband, but we’ve already discussed him.)

Every one of these men would be a better husband than Mike; each would support me in ways that Mike could never even understand, would satisfy needs Mike isn’t even aware I have.

The second problem is that, even if they did, they would be terribly, terribly wrong for me.

Take the brunet reading Go Ask Alice. I’ve already revealed that we share biorhythms and a taste in movies. Let’s be generous and say he prefers to be alone when gardening or going to the hardware store, takes a dim view of vegetables, has never watched HGTV, can make hygiene-product decisions faster than Mitt Romney changes political positions, spells well, and has a cock that would give Catherine the Great pause.

The thing is, you can’t play connect the dots with only eleven data points. Or, rather, you can, but your chances of getting the right image are pretty slim. Take these dots, for example:

And I can fantasize and dream about it and know with absolute certainty that I’ve found the apple of my dreams, when in fact the dots actually connect to form this:

You take my point: All I actually know about the brunet is that he’s handsome and has attractively ironic taste in literature. The rest of it I’m making up out of whole cloth—an unfortunate example of something that psychologists, if I understand correctly, call the halo effect, whereby humans assume, because we’ve evolved to draw broad inferences from whatever data we’re presented with, that attractive people are also smart, kind, fun, interesting, and good in bed. I want an apple, so when I see the dots Mr. Go Ask Alice presents, it’s easy for me to connect them to make an apple, when in fact I have no idea whether he’s an apple or a bottle of poison. Or, for that matter, a choo-choo train, a Finno-Ugric linguist, despair, the Principality of Andorra, Yggdrasil (the World Tree of Norse myth), Fyodor Dostoevsky, a bacon double cheeseburger, the molecular structure of hydrochloric acid, or dirt. In fact the chances that he’s an apple are so low as to be, for all practical intents and purposes, zero.

If there are seven billion people on earth, roughly half of whom are men, roughly 65 percent of whom are between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four (I am neither a pedophile nor a grandpa chaser, but those are the ages that bound the most appropriate category in the CIA World Factbook), roughly 5 percent of whom, according to the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law, might identify as gay—the old one-in-ten statistic, it turns out, was a little optimistic—then the chances that my soul mate is the brunet (who proves upon further examination to have a cute scar above his eyebrow; is he Harry Potter?) are something like 1 in 111,743,043.

But I doubt that even dropping the arch act and admitting that people who say “The One” don’t really mean “the one person on earth who is my soul mate” but “a person who’s perfect for me” or “a person who satisfies all my needs” or “a person who meets every requirement on my checklist” makes the odds a whole lot better. Because it’s really difficult for me to imagine that such a person can exist. I’ve dated guys who seemed to be The One whom I later had to dump because they turned out to be racists, or bad spellers, or bottoms like me (“What are you going to do,” my friend Stephen asked, “get together and bump pussies?”), or Republicans, or one or several of any number of other undesirable attributes that put them out of the running. Of course after dumping them I added their missing qualities to my list, but somehow the men I went out with seemed never to run out of new ways to disappoint me.

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong and that the stocky man in a shirt and tie walking three strides ahead of me down 14th Street toward Trader Joe’s would in fact have been the perfect man as I see him. I’m at something of a loss here, because when I talked about this in my last book I think I got it exactly right, and I don’t want to gild the lily, but at the same time it’s relevant to the discussion, so the best I can do is quote myself, à la Jonah Lehrer, and say that, if I had gone up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and managed to charm him with my self-conscious flirting, Mr. Stocky might well have turned out to be “gorgeous, hysterically funny, a towering genius, a master of sparkling repartee, fabulously wealthy, blond, multilingual (my dream was that he would speak eight languages but I [would be] willing to settle for five, as long as he could punctuate correctly in all of them), and possessed of beautifully shaped teeth. I wouldn’t even have to trick him into thinking that I was just as perfect as he was, because simply being with him would wipe out my faults as utterly as if they were the city of Carthage or Jennifer Grey’s old nose.”

But statistically, it seems much more likely that he would have turned out to be a racist Republican bottom who couldn’t spell.

“I’m willing to wait until I meet a man who’s exactly right,” said a friend of mine when we were talking about this a few years ago.

I don’t know. There’s no way for me to find out whether I’m right or not (not that I usually let that get in my way). So I could be spending this entire book justifying having made the wrong choice. I could be spending my entire life, for that matter, justifying having made the wrong choice. But I have to imagine that, once Cinderella and the Prince had been together for five or six years, he got pretty sick of her snoring, and she had come to hate the way he talked incessantly about the flora and fauna of whatever enchanted forest they were passing through, and every once in a while she burped or he farted, and they continually disappointed each other and neither one of them was ever truly everything that the other wanted.

And I guess the reason I believe this is that, when I think about The One and when I run down my checklist, sometimes making adjustments to it (no, I’ve actually realized that the requirement that he cry at the same time as me at the movies is more important than the requirement that he share my fantasy that one day they’re able to reconstruct the ancient Library of Alexandria and all its manuscripts), I feel like what I’m developing a picture of is not the perfect spouse but the perfect self, somebody who has all of my virtues and none of my flaws. Yesterday I tried to put on a pair of shorts I bought two years ago and I couldn’t fit into them, but if my husband, Mr. The One, has a perfect body, then who’ll notice? I end up in situations every day in which I have no idea what to do or say and end up stammering out something completely inappropriate that does nothing but embarrass me hideously, but if my husband is actually foreign royalty and has been trained to know what to do or say no matter what the circumstances, then I won’t have to face my own insufficiency. I only pretend to have read most of what I say I’ve read, but if I’m married to a man who’s read it all then it won’t matter, because I can just ask him and he’ll tell me and the end result will be the same.

And I’m not a psychologist, but I can’t believe such a relationship would be healthy. Because if what you’re looking for isn’t a partner but a completion, well, you’re destined to fail, because nobody gets to be complete. Sorry. Game over. All your base are belong to us. I may see the world through thorn-colored glasses, but, in a society that allows Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose flagitious response after Hurricane Katrina to a desperate plea for food, water, and medical services for the 30,000 people in the Louisiana Superdome was an email that read, “Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?,” to make six figures a year as a speaker about disaster preparedness, an equation that aims for wholeness requires a more complicated calculus than Disney can design.

“I just feel so much pressure from you all the time,” said Mike, as Dr. Basescu looked compassionately on. “It’s like, we talk about maybe doing something, and then you’re in my face saying, ‘Let’s do it NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW.’ With everything, not just the wedding planning. But the wedding planning is a good example. Like the ketubah. You’re so insistent about it, I wish you’d just leave me alone.”

“The reason I feel like I have to be in your face saying NOW is that otherwise you’ll never make a decision. We say, we need to get a ketubah, and then I keep asking about it, and you say, oh, let’s figure it out later, and then when I ask about it later you say, oh, let’s figure it out later, and then it’s too late. So if we want a ketubah I feel like I have to keep annoying you about it or we’ll end up without one.”

“It sounds to me,” said Dr. Basescu, “as if one of the issues you guys are facing is that you have different starting speeds. Joel, you go from zero to sixty in one second, and Mike, you take a while to get there. So when Joel tries to make you as a couple go faster, you feel like he’s dragging you more quickly than you feel comfortable with, and Joel, when Mike tries to make you as a couple go slower, you feel like he’s putting the brakes on and keeping you from going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, “it helps a lot to see it that way.” He turned to me, his face filled with relief. “So you just have to slow down and our wedding will be fine!”

“Um, no, you have to speed up and our wedding will be fine. So what are we doing about a ketubah NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW?”

“Can you guys understand how it might be difficult to hear what you’re asking each other?”

You paid somebody $125 a week to tell you that?, I can hear you thinking. Why not just stop by the self-help section of the nearest bookstore, close your eyes and spin around, and buy whatever collection of pabulum you end up pointing at?

I understand. I’ve been hearing that marriage is hard work since before I imagined that marriage was a possibility for me. I get it. Marriage is hard work.

But the people who say this are leaving out the most important part; they’re lying by omission. The idea that marriage is hard work never bothered me in the slightest, because I work hard. I work really hard. Really, really hard. I wrote and cut more songs from my last musical than actually ended up in the musical. I edit drafts of my writing as if they were crystal meth. Back when I was blogging regularly I could easily spend three hours on a two-paragraph post.

No, the part that people leave out is that marriage is hard work of a kind that makes you incredibly uncomfortable to do.

Marriage is hard work like understanding that, when you ask your husband on Saturday afternoon whether he wants to go to the theater with your friends on Thursday and he tells you he’ll think about it, and then he never says anything about it, and then when you ask him again on Tuesday morning he says can we talk about it tonight, and by the time you actually pin him down your friends have already bought their tickets and you have to spend Thursday night in front of the television watching season two of Dollhouse on Netflix, it’s not because he doesn’t want to go but can’t bring himself to say no, it’s not because he doesn’t like your friends, it’s not because he wants to make your life miserable though somehow he’s succeeding, it’s because having to make decisions overwhelms him and you need to find a different way to ask him.

Hard work like realizing that it’s not enough to go on the neighborhood tour with him; you have to take an actual interest in the fact that the house at 127 was designed by the same architect as the house at 142 but ten years later and look how he evolved, even though you don’t care and can’t tell the difference, or he’ll feel like he’s doing it alone. And faking it doesn’t work.

And, conversely, marriage is also hard work like remembering, as you walk down the street, even though really all you can think about is which politicians you’d kill first if you got turned into a werewolf and could do so with impunity, or how the hell Julianna Margulies is going to get out of the imbroglio she’s gotten herself into on The Good Wife, that you promised a couple days ago you’d get your husband a new pair of nail clippers because he got upset when you used his, and keeping an eye out for a Duane Reade because, even though the pair he has is working just fine, and given the parts of him that have been in the parts of you the idea of not wanting to share nail clippers is ridiculous, and there’s no reason at all this can’t wait until you remember it later, if you come home without the damn nail clippers he’s going to feel like he doesn’t matter to you.

Hard work like spending all day in your house without talking to a single person but having made excellent progress on a piece you’re working on and then realizing, when he comes home from a terrible day at work, that there’s only a certain amount of emotional energy he has left and it’s not enough for this, and stifling your excitement to tell him all about it.

Like saying to him after dinner that you’ll be upstairs in five minutes and then catching sight of an amazing piece online about Johannes Kepler, father of optometry and author of the laws of planetary motion, and still making it upstairs within fifteen minutes instead of an hour, even though it means leaving unfinished the account of how Kepler was actually a sociopath who murdered his mentor, Tycho Brahe, and even though the piece about Kepler’s sociopathy opens up previously unimaginable vistas of thought and creation and hilarity, while going upstairs just means you have yet another conversation with your husband about what to do with the dogs when you leave for vacation.

And that’s the thing. I can bake pie upon pie upon pie for my husband, and I can write letter of recommendation after letter of recommendation for his students, and I can search for hours on end for the perfect dinnerware to replace the dinnerware I brought into the marriage, which he hates, because, despite the fact that those things all take hard work of one kind or another, I enjoy doing that work.

When I’m trying to make lists of lycanthropic assassination targets or figure out how Julianna Margulies is going to rescue herself on The Good Wife, keeping an eye out for a Duane Reade only gets in my way.

So I guess that’s what the “marriage is hard work” people are leaving out: marriage isn’t just hard work. Marriage is hard work that gets in your way.

There are a lot of different positions gay couples can take on monogamy: We’re monogamous. We can sleep with other people but only if we tell each other about it. We can sleep with other people but only if we don’t tell each other about it. We can sleep with other people but only if we take pictures. We can sleep with other people when we’re not in the same city. We can sleep with other people but not in our home. We can sleep with other people but only when we do it together. We can sleep with other people as long as we avoid certain sexual activities. We can sleep with other people but nobody more than once. We can sleep with other people but only infrequently. We can sleep with other people with no restrictions. (Of course there’s also the fact that either member of a couple can choose to abide or not to abide by the terms agreed upon.)

So monogamy is a really tricky thing to talk about, at least among gay men. Or, rather, it’s not so tricky to talk about among gay men, but it’s tricky to talk about among gay men if straight people are listening, because the cultural standards are simply different—our inability to marry each other has to play into this—and there simply isn’t as strong a belief, as there seems to be in straight society, that monogamy is the only way to get a relationship right. I think much of this has to do with the fact that gay male couples are made up of two men, each of whom understands that it’s a struggle for the other to get anything done in life at all given the strength of his desire to bed every halfway attractive man who walks by. In straight couples, it’s a struggle for the man to get anything done in life given the strength of his desire to bed every halfway attractive woman who walks by, but his partner has little personal insight into this feeling, and whether she understands or not he usually doesn’t think she does, so things get complicated.

Of course, it’s much simpler in the rest of the animal kingdom. It turns out that even the much-vaunted monogamy of the prairie vole is a myth, at least in the way monogamy advocates talk about it. The only examples of absolute sexual monogamy I could find in the animal kingdom were a) the urban coyote and b) several species in which, after they mate, the female kills the male. Monogamy is unnatural and probably stupid.

Nevertheless, Mike and I have decided to be monogamous, and since the day I made a commitment to him I haven’t slept with anybody else. For all I know he may have turned his office at the hospital’s department of psychiatry into a lurid cavern of venial delights, but given his schedule I suspect it’s unlikely. I think we talked for like a minute and a half once, early in our relationship, about the idea of having threesomes as a couple, but even then our hearts weren’t really in it.

For me it was easy to choose monogamy, for a very simple reason: I’m way too insecure for anything else. If Mike and I decided that playing around was okay, I would spend every single moment I wasn’t with him obsessing over who he might be with, into what orifices he might be inserting what turgid body parts, and in what ways he might prefer which partner(s) to me. I would become so shrill a harpy that Petruchio, come to wive it wealthily in Padua, would take one look at me and go home. “So, honey,” I would say very casually when Mike came through the door at 6:17, “I see that it took you twelve minutes longer than usual to get home from the hospital. Is there anything you want to tell me?” And when he said no I would say, “Really? Are you absolutely certain? Because I called you and got your voice mail and it’s difficult for me to believe that . . .” and so on and so on through hissed accusations all the way to shouting and ostentatious silences and we would break up before the week was out.

I suppose the other alternative would be for me to sleep around without Mike’s permission and not tell him, but that, too, would render me practically nonfunctional, because doing something I’m not supposed to do and then trying to keep it a secret sends me into a dazed state that would give Oliver Sacks enough material for a new book. My entire life begins to revolve around my transgression and my world becomes narrower and narrower and narrower until finally the secret becomes the only thing that exists, preventing me ultimately from even chewing food.

As the years have passed, however, I find that I have another reason not to sleep with anybody else.

We in twenty-first-century America have burdened marriage with much more weight than it has ever had to bear.

Until a couple centuries ago, marriage as we know it tended to be a business arrangement. In the upper classes, wives were for bearing children and cementing political alliances; for love, a man had a mistress, or several. (Women took lovers too, of course, but these arrangements were less sanctioned by society, given that, by creating uncertainty in questions of paternity, they threatened the passing of property from a father to his son.) In the lower classes, men and women were essentially corporate partners, because to plow the field, milk the cow, feed the children, and mend the clothing was simply beyond the ability of one person. One presumes that the lower classes had extramarital flings as well, but since they rarely featured in broadsheets we have much less information about them. The point is: for most of our history, monogamy has been an incidental part of marriage at best.

I suspect that it was in 1848 that this began to change in America, with the passage in New York State of the Married Women’s Property Act, which decreed that women who came into marriage with property could keep it instead of automatically giving up ownership to their husbands. This meant that, if a man married a rich woman, he could no longer take his right to do what he liked with her property for granted, and married women gained a degree of power thitherto, I believe, unknown to them. (When I asked Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, she wasn’t so specific as to name a particular date or law, but she said I had the right idea; she added that the change in attitude toward monogamy continued in the twentieth century with the wider availability of divorce and contraception, aided by the increasing importance of what she called “the love match.”) Society had never stopped turning a blind eye to men who had extramarital sex and frowning on women who did the same, it’s true, but with the Married Women’s Property Act women were finally in a position to do something about the double standard. Either they should be allowed to have affairs too, or their husbands should be forbidden to do so. Since the first option required abandoning the basic principles of inheritance—if your wife could sleep with other people then how did you know you were leaving your property to your own son and not somebody else’s?—men had to get a lot more discreet about their mistresses if they ever wanted access to their wives’ money again.

As a result, the only person left to love with the approval of society was your spouse.

And nobody noticed it, but since then marriage has had to carry the double load of work and love. And that’s some heavy cargo.

Because really the old arrangement made a lot of sense, at least for those who profited by it. Gay men have just been more honest about it; my understanding is that roughly a third of gay male couples are monogamous, a third claim to be monogamous but one partner or the other cheats (or both), and a third are either explicitly non-monogamous or what author and sex columnist Dan Savage brilliantly calls monogamish. (Of course there are non-monogamous straight and lesbian couples too, but either there are fewer of them or they’re more discreet.)

I have no stake in other people’s decisions about monogamy. Secretly I feel smug and superior to men in non-monogamous couples but even I know there’s no justification for this feeling; I just seize every opportunity I can to feel smug and superior. I suppose I take a dim view of cheating, but really what business is it of mine what anybody else tells or doesn’t tell his husband?

I’ve realized, though, that, for me at any rate, there’s a very good argument in favor of monogamy, which is: I want to guarantee my emotional intimacy with Mike. And if he’s my sole sexual outlet—if monogamy has cut off any other options—then I’ll have to maintain emotional intimacy in order to satisfy the fundamental human need for sex. If he does something obnoxious and plants thereby a tiny seed of resentment in me that grows slowly into something hale and poisonously healthy, then if I can have sex with other people I’m just going to continue resenting him and go off and have sex with whoever until that resentment becomes a mighty, poisonous oak that I’ll never be able to chop down, and I’ll just keep having sex with other people and that tree will always be there and I’ll never feel close to him again. (I’m working here on the assumption that it’s not possible to sustain willingly a long-term sexual relationship with somebody toward whom your strongest feeling is resentment.)

Obviously it’s possible to bridge distance and uproot resentment in the absence of monogamy. But I’m so frightened of conflict that I can easily see doing nothing about the situation and growing old in a loveless, lonely marriage and being miserable until I die.

So if that’s the alternative, then eliminating all options except the one that forces me to maintain an emotional closeness with Mike seems the obvious choice.

Not that that makes it easy. And of course, I don’t know whether monogamy is the chicken or the egg in this situation. Those fantasies I begin to spin when I see a potential The One aren’t just emotional, and sometimes when one of The Ones notices me shifting to cover the physical component of my fantasies he smiles at me in such a way as to make it clear that I needn’t do so on his account, and very occasionally he even suggests that we do something about it. (I don’t mean to suggest that men throw themselves at me wherever I go, which is certainly not the case, but I do live in New York City, after all.) After Mike’s father died and he and I were growing more and more distant because of that whore the television, my Facebook chats with my friend Eric (he of the giant penis), who is gorgeous and smart and sweet and who has made no secret of his desire to sleep with me, got longer and longer, and when I had to take a trip to the city where he lives I couldn’t keep myself from asking him whether he had an extra bed. Luckily he said he’d be out of town while I was there; I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have ended up sleeping with him, especially because we have conflicting preferences in a certain question of practice, but I was also fairly sure I wouldn’t break my left hand when I tried to do a flip back when I was on the gay cheerleading squad in my twenties, and look how that turned out.

Ultimately, though, I can’t help noticing that the level of my temptation to take advantage of any given opportunity to be monogamish instead of monogamous usually correlates very directly with how close I’m feeling to Mike at the time. And I guess what keeps me on course is the understanding that the part of me that feels empty is not the part giving in to temptation would fill.

The day finally came in couples therapy when we reached the central issue in our relationship, or at least what I saw at the time as the central issue. (I still believe what I said before, that many of my fights with Mike could be avoided by his not being an asshole, but I think that’s actually a side effect.)

“You’re so goddamn self-sufficient,” I said to Mike. And I realized that was it. “You won’t let me in. And if you don’t leave any room for me to support you emotionally, then eventually I stop trying.”

“ What?” he said. “I have to be emotionally self-sufficient, because if I don’t support myself completely, you certainly aren’t around to do it. You’re too busy worrying about your damn ketubah.”

“I suspect,” said Dr. Basescu, “that we’re looking at a vicious circle.”

And I think this is the one problem that, according to Mike’s friend Tony, our relationship has; everything else boils down in the end to this. Mike will have a particularly busy two weeks at work and I’ll feel shut out, so I’ll stop paying attention to him. Then he’ll feel ignored, so he’ll become seemingly self-sufficient, meeting all his own needs. This self-sufficiency makes me feel further shut out in turn, which makes me stop paying attention to him, which makes him feel further ignored, which makes . . .

This is, Dr. Basescu helped us realize, what was going on after Mike’s father died. If I could have supported him, he could have let me in. If he could have let me in, I could have supported him. But we couldn’t.

Since discovering the issue we’ve gotten a little better at noticing when this happens and pointing it out to each other so we can step back from it and let it go its merry way, but when we’re in the middle of the fray, we can be rendered even today so incapable of real communication that we might as well be living in the Pliocene Epoch, before human beings developed language. Here are some examples.

What I say : “Honey, come in here and hang out on the couch with me.”

What I’m thinking: “What if he says no? That would mean I’ve chosen to spend my life with somebody who doesn’t even want to spend time with me, and whereas before I was alone with the potential to meet a life partner, now I have a life partner and I’m still alone.”

What he hears: “I demand that you abandon whatever you’re doing, come here this instant, and hang out on the couch with me.”

What I say : “What’s on your mind?”

What I’m thinking: “He’s quieter than usual. Is he mad at me about something? What is he mad at me for? If I can figure it out then I can apologize before he tells me and then I’ll get credit for knowing what it was and apologizing before he even says anything.”

What he hears: “I don’t care that you’re worried about your mother; I’m more important.”

What I say : “What are you ordering [from the menu]?”

What I’m thinking: “Is he going to get a margarita or not? Alcohol makes him fall asleep the instant he gets in bed, so if he gets a margarita then I know we’re not having sex tonight and we haven’t had sex in like forever so if he gets a margarita then obviously it’s because he’s not attracted to me anymore.”

What he hears: “Will you hurry up and make a fucking decision already?”

“Oh, are you looking at pictures of your new husband Cole again?” asked Mike as he passed by a few minutes ago.

“No,” I said. “Cole is a hateful, hateful blackguard and he and I are no longer married.”

“It was my fault. I saw him in another reading and left yet another Facebook post on his wall about how great his performance was.”

“Yeah, which I realized about one second after I clicked send. And then I proved myself to be even more desperate by messaging him when I saw him online and was like, hey, you were great the other day, and he was like, I did see your wall post, and I was like, something stupid, and he was like, something forbearing, and I was like, something even stupider, and he was like, isn’t the weather great, and I knew what we’d had was gone forever.”

“Let me see.” He moved to look over my shoulder. “You and your bland blonds.”

“I do, too!” I said. “As a matter of fact, he’s on his way over right now.”

7

Taking Stock of the Relationship