Let me start by saying that my wife Shana and I have now officially weathered fifteen years of marriage. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these have been the most rewarding years of my life.
The marriage came after more than a decade of true friendship—we met in high school, as teenagers. Our first contact was a meeting of minds and voices. We both liked to sing.
I was obnoxious then. Or so I’m told. Shana’s mother will finally, after twenty-five years, admit that I wasn’t a total loss, although she thought, at the time, that I was an arrogant little weasel. Happily, my insecurities weren’t fatal impediments to my friendship with her daughter.
Back then, I had some strange ideas about love. I thought I knew what it was, only to discover that urgent emotional and physical need is not love at all, but instead a result of the bouillabaisse of hormones which alters and deforms the male adolescent.
When, in my late twenties, it became clear that my love life needed serious alteration, I made some painful and difficult choices. I figured out that I was meant to spend my life with Shana. This was not a convenient discovery. It meant a painful break-up with a good woman. It meant picking up stakes and moving to a different state.
But one finds, when one is in the grip of a certainty this deep, a strange kind of calm, like a scuba diver in a decompression chamber, knowing that some kind of waiting period is crucial to avoid light-headedness, or worse, the bends.
Shana and I have been happy with each other. Not goo-goo-eyes happy, or even constantly happy, but overall happy, the kind you see in retrospect. This is not to say that if Proctor & Gamble came out with a miraculous new product, a “miserable week remover,” that I wouldn’t gladly apply it to some of our rough patches. There are some weeks I wouldn’t hesitate to remove. Maybe even a whole month or two.
Being married to a writer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Writers are a selfish, solitary, envious lot, given to fits of godlike confidence and utter self-doubt. We howl like Allen Ginsberg; we wail like Bob Marley; we screech like Yoko Ono!
As much as I’m up and down, Shana is steady. It is really something to see, the way she weathers life’s nasty surprises, the kind that feel as though they’re being written on your family calendar with an indelible black pen, just so the misery will last forever. I’m talking here about disasters that can’t be fixed, the kind that leave a permanent mark on the relationship.
We’ve had our share of those. And we’ve outlasted them.
She has the kind of disposition that looks on everyday problems—family squabbles, career frustrations—as tempests in teapots. And this is not to say that she is never shaken. She is. But it takes a lot to shake her.
She is the pole star to our daughter, just as I am the fitful moon.
Shana is a gorgeous woman. Am I saying that I’m blind to every temptation, that my eye is never wandering? Not really. But I am keenly aware that I’m not exactly Adonis myself. Especially as I age, and my hair continues its great migration from the top of my head southward, and my skin hardens into bark.
She sees my advancing decrepitude and ignores it, or, if she can’t ignore it completely, at least treats my looks as a commodity whose worth’s vastly overvalued by the market.
She has almost single-handedly saved me from being unknown, although the process of knowing me hasn’t been easy.
She asks none of the questions that keep a writer up at night: has his popularity reached its height; what steps should be taken to salvage this or that manuscript; should the title be Love’s Arrow, not Time’s Arrow; am I a fool to be changing titles so late in the game?
Though her scribe be not exceedingly cheerful, at night, when she comes home from work, she never fails to offer her rosy lips and cheeks for a greeting. Even if the scribe is covered with sawdust. Or mud. Or worse. She’d be within her rights to wait until he was clean, to wait until his mind-bending blather has run its course, to wait until he’s finished complaining about the weed-whacker’s balky motor or the sickle’s unsharpenable blade. No, that evening kiss is like the day’s compass, the friendly meeting of lips, its lodestone.
Come bedtime, there’s either talk of love, or there isn’t. Nothing alters the essential fact: another day shared, another night to be shared. The writer reaches out, not with his words, but with his arms. Those brief hours together do their work, not by erasing the day’s trials, but by dividing them in two.
Hours becomes days, and days become weeks. And so on, until you’ve reached fifteen years. I hope this column doesn’t trivialize this mystery, but bears it out. Even to the edge of cliché, which is doom to a piece of writing.
By now, perhaps you’ve noticed that the words in bold face, scattered throughout this column, add up to the first stanzas of Shakespeare’s sonnet 116. I’d like to close with its famous couplet:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 22 October 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
