Eat Drink and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife Read online

  My parents came for a visit and liked him a lot, as did the Stolars. Both my mother and father were amenable to my announcement, at age twenty, that Newt and I were going to get engaged—perhaps because Mother had been twenty-one when she married Father. Toward the end of August we planned to go to New York City to pick out a ring. The only problem was that as the summer’s end approached, I changed my mind. I was no longer sure he was someone I could see myself with for the long haul. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I had cooled on the whole idea. I told him as gently as I knew how that it wasn’t him, it was me, but that I couldn’t go forward. He was crestfallen, and I felt terrible that I had said yes—and then no. And I had no good reason for backing out—just the feeling that this wasn’t right for me. Mother asked why, and all I could think of to say was that his voice had begun to annoy me. Although I sensed their disappointment regarding Newt, my parents accepted my decision and did not pressure me to reconsider. I always felt they gave me the freedom to find my way and make my own mistakes.

  As I know now but did not know then, a picayune complaint is never the real reason. I just couldn’t get at what the real reason was, so I landed on his voice—something that had been endearing in the beginning but was now something I didn’t wish to wake up to every morning. Years later, when I followed in my mother’s footsteps as an advice columnist, if people wrote me about some triviality that was annoying to them, or if they said they didn’t even know what was bothering them about the other person, I always advised making every effort to pinpoint the real issue, and then evaluate where it fit in the scheme of things. A petty thing that seems to be an irritant is actually a stand-in for a more serious disconnect. Should the real fly in the ointment remain a mystery, my advice typically was to put the relationship on ice until the feelings were clarified. Self-knowledge is an invaluable tool when selecting a partner.

  What I would eventually come to understand about my relationship with Newt is that the real reason I decided to marry him and then changed my mind is because I was an impulse buyer. I was impatient, and like many twenty-somethings and their hormones, I was inclined toward instant gratification. It never occurred to me to get to know him better. A decision that is supposed to be permanent requires, if not demands, an extended version of “sleeping on it”—yet I was not willing to do this once my feelings for Newt began to cool. Later, when I would get letters about rush-job romances where things were going really fast, I always advised the writer to ask him or herself the question my mother often asked me, “What’s the hurry?” This is not a question, alas, that I ever bothered to ask or answer in the summer of 1960.

  I had always just lived in the moment, and luckily (or maybe not) if the moment didn’t work out, I would be given another moment. Impatience, I have come to learn, is responsible for many blunders, in all areas of life. It has been said that maturity is the ability to wait, and whoever said it was right (I think it was my mother).

  There was also another probable reason for my pulling away from this lovely guy, which only occurred to me years later, and I bet it will resonate with many women: he was too nice. I was not experienced enough to value that at the time, and now I feel embarrassed to even write it.

  One thing I did know, even then, was that I had not broken the engagement from fear of commitment. Rather, commitment was exactly what I was looking for. I knew my next step was marriage because I didn’t believe there were any other options. I was not going to grad school. I had no interest in getting a job and neither did I have any qualifications. I was a liberal arts major who was not paying terribly close attention. Like so many of my contemporaries then, I really believed the only possible next step was to get married.

  (At that time the country was on the cusp of the women’s movement, and although I regret it now, I didn’t cotton to their message then. I’ve spent some time over the years analyzing the reasons for distancing myself from the movement. My nonresponsiveness likely came from the fact that I didn’t need them. I never felt unfairly treated because I was a woman. Actually, I found it useful—both literally and figuratively—to bat my eyelashes. My mother was living a feminist’s life, to be sure, but she, too, did not wear the label. While she used her professional clout to push for the Equal Rights Amendment, at no time did she identify herself as a feminist. However, looking back, I find that my view was too narrow. Just because I felt I didn’t need “the sisterhood” did not negate the fact that a lot of other women did. I suspect that had I been five or ten years younger when all of this was in the air, I would’ve been much more receptive … just as my own daughters took it as a fact of life that they would work and that they would not take any guff because of their gender.)

  So in hindsight I figured out that my evaluations of suitors were visceral, not thoughtful. I passed up a few gems, most likely because I had no specific criteria. As a young woman I wasn’t factoring in quality or character; it was all about instinct and all about “now.” I wasn’t looking for someone rich or good looking, the goal of a lot of girls, but neither was I looking for someone solid, talented, or stable—someone who, to use my mother’s phrase, “would wear well.” I was unwilling (unable?) to think things through or decide what was important. Emotionally, even at age twenty (a sophisticated twenty in some respects) I was still the willful child. This may have had to do with the fact that, up until then, everything had gone my way.

  It took me years to learn that decisions about important things ought not be made impulsively. Granted, this sounds like something you would find stitched on a sampler, but it’s amazing how many people put aside this truism and dive right into … whatever. In my own case, I had a bit of a gambler’s instinct. A cautious person, at twenty, would not meet someone in June and get engaged in August. While I know people for whom this accelerated, love-at-first-sight timetable has worked, I believe they were lucky, not smart—and probably possessed greater emotional intelligence than most. Walking, not running, into marriage gives you much better odds. Under the best of circumstances, one cannot look into the future and see how two people will grow together, or not grow together—hence the number of “gray divorces” we are now seeing, the couples who part after thirty and forty years.

  In my own case, I learned through Freudian analysis (which, alas, took place too late to have influenced this engagement or prevented my first marriage) that I was a bit of an excitement junkie. Not at a conscious level, certainly, but had there been a cartoon bubble over my head during that summer in Washington, it would have said: “Well, this will be fun! I think I’ll get engaged and see what that’s like.” With age and lots of experience I have come to understand how being “in love” and “loving” are entirely different things. This distinction was crystallized for me when I became an advice columnist. I cannot tell you the number of letters I received saying, “I love him, but I am not in love with him.” (And yes, this is most often a woman’s plaint.) That phrase is far and away the one that made me want to scream, and the thing that it made me want to scream was, “Grow up, Lady!”

  New York Times columnist Jane Brody astutely pointed out that a long-running “being in love” state is an impossibility—and a good thing that it’s an impossibility. She wrote, “The feelings that prompt people to forget all their troubles and fly down the street with wings on their feet do not last very long, and cannot, if lovers are ever to get anything done.” She cited a study by Richard E. Lucas showing that the happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness—or unhappiness. The idea of loving someone but not being “in love” may be the #1 American Mistake when it comes to romantic relationships. I find “settling down” to be an apt phrase.

  In the recent past, when my son got married in England, I was delighted by a portion of the vicar’s wedding blessing. He referenced the novel Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières wherein a young woman’s father tells her this:

  Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not a desire to mate every second of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. The reality is that love burns like a furnace for a while, but then settles, and then it has to be worked at. The romantic and sexual love described in The Song of Solomon has to grow up, to be adult. There is no future in being “in love.” What you need is the strength and wisdom to go beyond being in love to loving.

  How wonderful to hear a learned man confirm that being “in love” is unsustainable. Amen to that.

  And then there was my mother’s famous and oft-quoted definition of love, to which, alas, I paid no attention:

  Love is friendsh
ip that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

  Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future and it doesn’t brood over the past. It’s the day-in and day-out chronicle of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories, and working toward common goals.

  If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don’t have it, no matter what else there is, it’s not enough.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wherein I somehow—again!—make a hasty decision. Hard to believe, I know.

  Later in 1960, when I returned to school for my senior year, a hall mate fixed me up on a blind date with her fiancé’s cousin. This man had a purple Cadillac and not a lot of hair. He was also a smidgen shorter than I, and at five foot two, I was no Amazon. Being a bit of a brat and reading the tea leaves, I announced when I saw him that I felt the onset of a spastic colon attack and we could either bag the date or I could go and just have tea. I should not have offered him a choice because he chose to continue with the date. We wound up at Locke-Ober Café, my favorite restaurant in Boston, and I was stuck with a pot of tea. And him. Apparently he was a perceptive chap because he quickly determined this date was a twofer: the first and the last. And so it was that he suggested that his good friend John Coleman call me because Coleman was planning to move to Chicago—and I was from Chicago.

  My first date with Coleman was not what anyone would call auspicious. He collected me in Waltham and basically did not talk to me for the drive into Boston which, at that time, took about 40 minutes. I made a stab at drawing him out but with little polysyllabic success. He was a freckled redhead, trim, of average height. His facial structure was sharp angles, and he was also somewhat chin-deficient, which seemed rather English (which, to me, translated to being distinguished looking). Were I describing him today, I would say he looked like an unattractive Prince Charles—but I was never one of those girls particularly drawn to guys with traditional good looks.

  We went to the Ritz-Carlton for dinner with a married couple he had invited and then on to the movie premiere of West Side Story. Interesting: a first date with a guarantee of no conversation for two hours. He also left his seat three times to smoke. (I smoked, too, then, but I never interrupted a movie to do it.) It did not register in any serious way that he was one of those people who, as Jewish grannies used to say, had “shpilkes.” A fair translation would be “ants in your pants.”

  He asked me out again and I accepted, probably hoping he would talk this time. He did. On our second date, I found out he was five years older than I and that he was working at Tucker Anthony & R.L. Day in Boston, learning the investment banking ropes. He did mention that, starting in the sixth grade, he was reading Barron’s. He’d gone to prep school and then to college at Rutgers. After graduating he went to Harvard Business School—but dropped out during his first semester, deciding that he knew more than they did. The drama of his life was that he was adopted. Everyone in his family knew, but he did not find out until age twenty, when he went to city hall for a passport. Perhaps this situation, both traumatic and angering, contributed to his chilliness.

  He was, however, showering me with attention and wanted to get together every night. This I could not do, but we did have four dates within a week and a half. Things moved fast, and I was strangely drawn to him, perhaps because he was such a controlled personality, and I couldn’t help but embark on the unconscious challenge “to get through to him” (making me, I guess, one of those icebreaker ships and him the iceberg).

  On the fourth date he told me he was madly in love with me and asked me to marry him. Reader, I said yes. Do not ask me why because I could not tell you. It was then that he told me he had a minor bit of business to take care of: he needed to get a divorce. A what? Where was she, I asked? Was he dating even though he was still married? Well, he explained, they’d been separated for much of their two-year marriage, and he had not planned to rush into a divorce, but now, of course, his plans had changed. I accepted his explanation and went along with the engagement. I really do not know what possessed me. I’d had a romantic history of boyfriends who were smitten with me, warm and devoted. All I can figure out, in retrospect, is that his very different kind of personality was somewhere between a change and a challenge for me, and I was intrigued. A rare tribute, perhaps, to be chosen by a man who seemed so aloof, but loved me? His personality exhibited characteristics I had never experienced in a romance before. He was introverted and remote, the classic loner. And he was driven. There was something of a wounded soul about him that called out to me. It was as though he needed me. Think Jay Gatsby if he found Florence Nightingale (and not Daisy Buchanan).

  I now believe I misread his chilliness as mystery, and his “I need not conform” attitude as power. I realize that he may have been my “bad boy,” even though I did not know at the time that subliminally implied danger could serve as an attraction. Many years later I would learn—firsthand, as well as from girlfriends and my work—that bad boys were sometimes irresistible. Had I been objectively evaluating what I’d been observing in John Coleman, I would have seen that this was a man “practically woven out of red flags,” to borrow critic Emily Nussbaum’s perfect phrase. But I was blind to these red flags at the time. For instance, I failed to process the information that on some occasions we would wind up at his apartment and he’d pass out. He was a big drinker, which was nothing I’d ever experienced with anyone I had dated. But I ignored it.

  This brings us to an aspect of human behavior that informs many facets of life, and very often romance: self-deception. We don’t know what we don’t want to know. An emotional decision can often override good sense because, in essence, your mind is already made up. On a wholly unconscious level I discounted this flashing warning light because I’d decided to go on this adventure with someone who was certainly “different,” and therefore I blocked off any examination that would have proven me wrong. Had I been less determined, I would’ve taken more time and entertained the negatives. Any acknowledgment of uncertainty would have propelled me to seek counsel—doubt being one of the key motivators for people to ask the advice of others, whether it be therapists, advice columnists or friends. And in my case, a great resource was a phone call away, and it would have begun “Hi, Mom.”

  With no inclination to talk this decision through—with my mother or anyone else—the day after I said yes to Coleman, I called Mother to announce that he had proposed and that I had accepted and was very excited. I told her all about him, making the minuses sound like pluses—not to fool her but simply to pass on to her what I had told myself, totally unaware of what I was doing. The chilly, remote attitude of a loner, in the telling, became Yankee reserve. The noncommunicativeness morphed into his being a good listener. I translated his single-minded drive to succeed as healthy ambition. Of course I did not mention his alcohol intake, having convinced myself it didn’t mean anything and would probably taper off, and also because my mother was a teetotaler whom my father called “Carrie Nation.” (More fodder for Dr. Freud: many years later both Mother and I figured out that Father was a high-functioning alcoholic. He always had a Scotch in his hand, but his personality didn’t change, and drinking did not stop him from successfully running a huge corporation.)

  * * *

  Hearing my news, Mother said the four of us should definitely get together in New York so my parents could meet Mr. Wonderful. A month later we all rendezvoused at the St. Regis. Wanting “to meet him” of course translated to “look him over.” Look him over they did. Win them over he did not. Clearly having magical powers of perception, they both told me that going forward with this man would be a colossal mistake. They found his personality odd and thought he was a drinker. I ignored this. After all, it was my life, my choice. I was shocked at the resistance, however.