First Comes Love
My favourite sentence of Phil Christman’s essay, “How to be Married,” was omitted from the Harper’s edit. “If adolescence lasted even six months longer than it did,” Christman writes, “it would certainly kill us all.”
That is a very good line: hyperbolic bullshit (aka irony) that functions as free indirect discourse. Yes, that is how it felt, to some of us. And this is how we feel about the fact that it felt that way. The whole essay is voiced between teenage disbelief and the knowingness of middle age.
Christman meets his future wife when they are teenagers and nothing happens for six years. When he recounts the meeting, he sustains the affectionate eye-roll:
She enjoyed theater, she told me with her mouth—the exact right shape for a mouth, I suddenly realized. Her nose had very light freckles. She eventually used the word “existentialism,” which made the connections between us altogether eerie, for I, too, knew what that was.
He kisses her briefly, once—a kiss that, six years later she describes as “the most romantic moment of my life.” This may be the most romantic essay I have ever read.
Not that I agree with everything in it, even the best lines. Here’s one: “A good marriage is a eucatastrophe: it ends a phase of your life well but decisively.” Well, maybe, but to my relief, the paperwork didn’t make much difference.
Here’s another: “the reason to get married is that you have met a person interesting enough that, death being inevitable, you’d prefer to experience it with them.” Christman reminds us of the “many deaths before death” that you experience together. But with death itself, the sentiment is off—as though, if you make it to the point of dying in each other’s arms, you win. In truth, however well you played, you lose. As WOPR learns in WarGames, the only winning move is not to play: life is not a game to be won or lost.
There are well-known essays about love, but how many of them are “love essays” the way a song about love can be a love song? We all have our favourites. Mine are by The National, purveyors of what my kid delights in calling “sad dad music.” This is possibly the best recording of the greatest love song ever:
In Life is Hard, I write about love and friendship, loneliness and loss. But I’ve never written a love song or an essay about love that is like one.
It’s not that it wouldn’t be interesting to read, or to write: happy marriages are no more alike than unhappy ones. Perhaps it’s an aversion to washing one’s clean laundry in public. Or perhaps I am just not up to it, erring towards deflation. As I wrote to my wife on our last anniversary: “Thanks for 18 happy years (20 total).”
I get closer to sincerity when I write acknowledgements, but if I am honest, I struggle with them. Words fail me—a suitably trite excuse. I wish I had the wit and nerve to make my thanks an essay in love.