18 Years of Books (now it's 25!!) (and now it's 30!!!)

I wrote this eleven years ago and it still holds true.

I met Erica in January of 1995 when she walked into Café Jones, the coffee shop where I was the late-shift barista. It was well below freezing that night in Billings, Montana and the shop had been empty for an hour or two. I was getting ready to close up early when I heard the door open and looked up to see two women come in, cacooned in layers of cotton and wool. My reaction was NOT love at first sight. In fact it was much more of a feeling of annoyance. Instead of getting to shut down early and go home, now I was going to have to stay for a while and dirty up the espresso machine I had just made sparkle.  Even worse was the possibility these two women might want food, which would cause even more mess in the now-spotless food prep area.

But then, as the two women removed hats and gloves and coats and claimed a table for themselves, something about one of them caught my eye.

Less than 4 months later, we were talking about getting married.

Today marks 18 years since we said our vows and drove away from the church in Grandma Nita’s mint green Ford. This post is a simple “Happy Anniversary” to the love of my life, Erica.

It is impossible to sum up 18 years of marriage, so I am not going to even try. Instead, I want to write about one thing that we have done since before we were even married. It is something we have done alone together in bed, in a car and on trains and planes and boats, on mountainsides in Montana and in quiet parks in Connecticut. We have even used a computer to do it a few times while one of us was traveling. It gives us both great pleasure.

Of course, I am talking about our tradition of reading out loud to each other. Ever since the spring of 1995, Erica and I have always had an out-loud book going. We generally alternate who chooses the book and we also switch off who reads and who listens. I have a very clear memory of Erica reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams in the back seat of her parents’ car as her father drove to Miles City, Montana—heading for my first exposure to the craziness that is Easter with Erica’s enormous extended family. As the main characters headed inevitably for a sex scene, Erica blushed a bit to be reading those words within earshot of her parents and we put the book aside.

In the years since, we have read some truly great books this way.  A few that stand out are Oscar and Lucinda, Possession, The Fool’s Progress, The Shipping News, The English Patient, Winter’s Tale, Lincoln in the Bardo, and the entire Harry Potter series. Occasionally, we will start a book that is unfinishable. A few in this category were Accordian Crimes and Freedom. To be a good out-loud book, a book must be good, (of course), but simply being good is no guarantee that a book will make for an enjoyable listening experience. Writers like Philip Roth have sentences that are too long and it is easy to lose the thread if his words are not on the page in front of you.

The best out-loud books have a strong story with characters who are easily differentiated. Extended meditations on anything, especially those with many parenthetical asides and tangents, make it hard to listen. A pet peeve of mine that has developed over the years is when an author will give a character a line of dialogue and then, AFTER the line is spoken, add a descriptor like “he said in a whisper.” When I am reading the book out loud it would be helpful to know the line is delivered in a whisper BEFORE I read it at full volume.

As it has become easier to watch excellent tv shows on demand on the Internet, our out-loud book tradition has taken a hit, but we are both committed to getting it back to its rightful place in our marriage. There is something intimate about reading a shared book to another person—most of us already know that from being kids and having a story read by a parent or older sibling. Anyone with kids knows how special it can be to curl up on the couch with a child and a book and create a world for a little while.

Our out-loud books helped Erica and me create a bubble around ourselves while we were on our honeymoon, camping all around Portugal and reading a non-fiction book about Christopher Columbus and the Age of Explorers. It has been true ever since. When she was pregnant with Isabel and we were preparing a bedroom for our new-baby-to-be, we were reading the first Harry Potter books out loud. Erica painted some Winnie-the-Pooh characters on the walls of Isabel’s room and as she did, I sat on the futon and read all about the Boy Who Survived and He Who Shall Not Be Named.

On long drives out West and in heavy traffic back East, the hours are so much more enjoyable with Erica reading a good book out loud. I remember hearing one of Carl Hiaasen’s very funny novels while driving from the Florida Keys up to the airport in Miami for an early morning flight. It is a way to share something at the end of a busy day, a way to have something to say to each other even if we are not feeling especially connected, and a way to be close. Sometimes it is a way for us both to turn our minds off and forget about something stressful so that we can fall asleep.

I can’t say exactly how many books we have made it through in this way, but it must be well over 100 by now—possibly more. I don’t normally give marriage advice. Every marriage is its own thing and to presume to know anything about what two other people should do in their marriage is crazy. (I have a hard enough time knowing what I should be doing in my own).  But I will give this one piece of advice and you are free to take it or leave it: pick a book and read it out loud with your partner before this summer is over.  Just give it a try and see if you like it. I think you might.

I joked with Erica last night that our 18 years of marriage have given me 15 or 16 of the best years of my life. Truly, each of the 18 has been a gift. Erica, you make my life interesting and challenging and exciting and I cannot wait to see where we go from here.  Our out-loud book is just one of the many things that makes life with you so good. Happy Anniversary, my love.

(2021 update) These are the most recent books---we finished the Louise Erdrich book pictured above a few weeks ago and liked it a lot. We are now halfway through Hamnet and LOVING it. It would not surprise me if it ends up being one of the best we have read.

(2025 update) And we are STILL reading books out loud together. Currently, we are working on Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. We are both enjoying the book a lot. Akbar is a poet and that sensibility makes itself known throughout the book. There are moments he manages to distill to a sharp essence that makes me stop for a beat to take it in.

 

Some others we have liked in the past four years are The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell and You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.

 

I had no idea back in 1995, riding out to that first Miles City Easter, that 30 years later we’d still be reading books with each other. Yet here we are. And it is still one of the best parts of my days, my weeks, my years, and my life. 

Marriage Rules

A co-worker recently got married. Before she did, she asked for some advice from some of her already-married colleagues. And although I have been married 15 years, I still didn’t feel qualified to say anything to her. To me, marriages are like children—when you really dig down into the nitty-gritty, they are all unique. What may seem to the outside world to be the perfect marriage might be a train-wreck behind closed doors. What seems like a bad pairing might be perfect for the people in it. Marriages simply cannot be judged by anyone but the people in them.

So I couldn’t really give my co-worker much in the way of anything useful. After all, she wasn’t marrying me or my spouse, so what insight could I possibly have for her? But after some thought I did come up with one piece of advice I shared, and that was to always assume the best of your spouse. Doing this can prevent fights, lead to kindness, and build in some empathy that hard times and short tempers can erode away. Assuming the best instead of the worst can change the whole tone of an interaction.

For example, rather than assuming that I have not fixed the falling tiles of the dining room ceiling because I am lazy and don’t care how the room looks, Erica can assume that I simply don’t know what I am doing and would fix those tiles in a second if I had the faintest clue about how. And instead of assuming that Erica is a slob who doesn’t care that her suitcases have remained half-unpacked in the middle of the hallway for a week since her last conference, I should assume that her year on the road has gotten old and she just can’t even think about unpacking, because that leads to thoughts of the next trip away next week.

Doing the mental and emotional work it can take to stop and step out of our skin and into our partner’s skin can really make a huge difference in the long term. I didn’t tell my co-worker any of this. All I did was give her one sentence: Always assume the best.

To that advice I would now add a second piece: forget the past.

I teach American history to sixth graders and when they ask me why we have to know about the Articles of Confederation or the Monroe Doctrine, I tell them that knowing what has happened can help us avoid making the same mistakes earlier generations have made. At some point each year I write on the board, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I believe there comes a point in every long-term relationship where the opposite holds true: “those who remember the past are doomed to replay it.”

After 15 years of marriage Erica and I have built up huge databases of wrongs perpetrated by the other—both petty and major. How could it be otherwise? So, when something happens to activate this database it is far too easy to come up with example after example of how and why the other is at fault. Rather than being about an isolated incident, a thoughtless word or action, or even a major screw-up, the ensuing discussion can easily slide into long-held grievances and accusations and universal statements like “Oh yeah? Well you never…”

Lately, I am finding it far more productive and helpful to our marriage to treat each case in its particulars and to refrain from those all-encompassing statements neither one of us can take back once they are said.

So, if my co-worker were to ask me now if I have any advice for newlyweds I would have three things to say:

1) assume the best until proven otherwise,

2) forget the past,

and 3) learn how to fight in the least damaging way possible.

Marriage is hard enough as it is. Life seems to conspire against long-term relationships, so why not decide to be each other’s ally? Why not decide to give each other the benefit of the doubt? Why not see the best in each other, even when the other can’t see it in himself? Why inflict unnecessary damage when the world and its vicissitudes will inflict enough damage of its own to bring down even strong relationships?

I am thankful Erica and I are discovering these rules together, even if in the end, they don’t really apply to anybody but us. I am sure I will never tell my co-worker any of this—that is not the sort of relationship we have. And besides, she has been married two months now and has started discovering her own rules.

Trying Something New

“If I knew back when we met what I know now about you and about marriage, I never would have married you.”

“You know what? I wouldn’t have, either.”

“Weird to think about that, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. I gotta go to sleep now. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“G’night.”

“Night.”


This is not a verbatim transcript of the end of a conversation I had in bed with my wife recently, but it is pretty darn close. And it tells me just how far my views of marriage have traveled in the almost-14 years since my wife and I exchanged vows.

At the time we first got married, I hadn’t ever really even thought about what a marriage was. I just assumed that the enormous momentum provided by the explosive power of falling in love was enough to propel us along a trajectory leading to happy dotage in side-by-side His and Her rocking chairs. A sort-of Relationship Big Bang. (More truthfully, I probably hadn’t even given the idea as much thought as that last sentence implies.)

The intervening years have shown that it would be hard for me to have been any wronger than I was about marriage.

For starters, I have come to see that no matter how hard I try, I just never will be Everything for my partner. My naïve view of marriage held that once you commit, you pretty much agree to forego anything you can’t get from your spouse. This seemingly romantic and idealistic misperception has turned out, in reality, to be a slow-acting poison that has done some real harm to my relationship with my wife.

Over time it has become clear to us both that we aren’t each other’s Everything. Sadly for me, it has become clearer-er that I am not able to be her Everything even more than she is not able to be my Everything.

The mechanism behind this state of affairs is one we have been long aware of in other realms of our lives together. An illustration so you’ll know what I am talking about: If the room is too cold, I will put on a sweater; Erica will tromp downstairs and turn up the heat. Another illustration: If our neighbors are being noisy while we try to sleep, I will close the window or put a pillow over my head; Erica will talk to the neighbors and get them to be quiet. A third illustration: If our yard has no fence, I will take our dog, Ginger, for a walk every time she needs to pee; Erica will call a carpenter and have him build a fence.

I change myself and my expectations to fit the situation; Erica changes the situation. In the end and after much thought about these two ways of being, I have concluded that really and truly neither approach can be deemed superior. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes, changing yourself really is the best way to deal with dissatisfaction. Other times, changing the situation is far preferable.

Applying our individual problem-solving approaches to our relationship has been a real struggle for us. Both of us have been dissatisfied by several aspects of our marriage and we have come together with the best of intentions over and over again to try to work things out. Yet, inevitably, we find ourselves going over the same well-trodden ground every few months. Erica will say that she needs more. I will respond by trying to give more of what she needs. Over time, we both realize that what I am giving is not what she needs. She identifies the problem and tries to change the situation. I acknowledge the problem and try to change myself.

I will tell Erica that I need more. She will listen and acknowledge my needs and try to get me to have deeper and more satisfying friendships and relationships with other people so that maybe I can get what I need from them. What she suggests is that I build myself a life independent of her and invite other people and activities and interests in to give me what I want from life. All I really want is for her to adopt my approach and change herself to give me more.

But it doesn’t work. So we find ourselves several years older and no closer to a satisfactory solution to our problems.

When we are NOT focused on our dissatisfactions, we have a pretty great marriage. We love each other more deeply then we did 14 years ago. We respect each other more than we did 14 years ago—and that is no small accomplishment. We give each other something valuable. I give Erica a place that is home. She makes me want to stretch myself and grow. We are allies and cheerleaders for each other. At the end of the day, we both want to come home to each other, and that is more telling than any other detail.

So just last night, Erica came up with what seems to be a real solution to our perpetual dissatisfactions. It is a solution that both of us, with our diametrically opposed approaches to problem-solving, can live with. Erica proposes that we simply decide to be happy with the marriage that we have and forget all the ways in which we wish it were different. She can stop trying to make it different and getting frustrated when not a lot changes. I can stop trying so hard to be more like I think she wants me to be (and failing) and just be who I am.

What this means for us and what comes next are unclear. But even in the moment as she said, “What if we just stop trying so hard to change our marriage and appreciate it for what it is?” I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I don’t know what our marriage will look like, but the prospect of ending all of my trying so hard and failing so often is enough to make the experiment well worth it.