loving work

It used to bug me when people who had been married 50 or more years were asked the secret of staying married that long and they would respond that it was something they worked at.  That sounded unpleasant!  


Last month I finished a photo book of our trip to France.  It's a lot of work and takes hours to complete the task. Sometimes it gets tedious and I just want to quit.  But mostly I receive joy and satisfaction from the creative process.  It is enjoyable work.  No, that is not an oxymoron.  Work can be enjoyable and fulfilling.


Recently Mark was quoted on his cyber board (you know, the one where he has his imaginary friends).  It seems he had posted something about love and marriage well over a year ago and forgot about it, but then someone re-posted his comments.  It was in response to one of the guys on the board who wrote: It isn't reasonable to ask a 20-something to make a choice that will have to be honored by the same person as a 40-something.  People change, and those promises that are made fail to take into account how people change.


Mark responded (his name on the board is PAC, thus I am Mrs. PAC):  I’ve found the quoted view to be widely shared, and rather sad. It’s like Woody Allen’s response, after Mia discovered he was sleeping with their daughter (his stepdaughter), Soon-Yi: “The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to these things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that.” That view treats “to love” as a passive verb; it just happens, and you run with it. Love is simply one batch of hormones calling out to the other, and a relationship rests on the hope that one’s partner won’t find a more attractive deal down the road. But that makes marriage a marketplace, not a committed relationship.

Genuine commitment requires the view that love is an active verb. Even in those times in which you don’t like your spouse very much, you continue to love him/her, behaving and doing things that look like love, and shunning thoughts and behaviors that don’t. The cool thing is that eventually the thing that peeved you about your spouse, or the allure of someone else, eventually subsides, and your active behavior of “loving” your spouse makes your passive “love” greater than before. If one doesn’t take that approach, then each spouse is simply waiting and hoping that a better deal doesn’t come along for the other.

As great as she is, there are times when She Who Must Be Obeyed bugs me (admittedly, often the cause of this annoyance is my fault, but still...). I’ve come to realize that I have a choice. I can focus on the annoyance and let it fester, I can succumb to the flirtations of an office assistant or work acquaintance (sadly, these flirtations are coming far less often in my fifties), I can feel sorry for myself, etc. After a brief wallow in self-pity, I pull out the mental DVD collection I have in my head that features many dozens, even hundreds, of memories of Mrs. PAC in action: by her side at childbirth; holding her hand as she struggled through a miscarriage; vacations with the kids; vacations without the kids (including, e.g., a memorable drive to a Maui hotel—there’s an extensive Adults Only collection in my memory); mile 80 of our first century when we came up behind a small group of serious riders I knew I could pass but was concerned if the missus could keep up, and then from right behind me I simply heard the words “Jam it!,” and we cruised past the group; and “those thousand decencies that daily flow from all her words and actions,” as Milton wrote of Eve. As I focus on Mrs. PAC’s Greatest Hits, whatever ill feelings I might have had toward her, or the warm fuzzies I might be feeling about the office Lolita, shrink to insignificance. 

We married when I had just turned 22, and Mrs. PAC wasn’t quite 21. We will celebrate our 35th anniversary this summer. Other things being equal, I’d recommend people wait longer before making the commitment. But once the commitment is made, I think in most cases it’s possible to make it work, and work very well. People do change, but if the focus remains on actively loving the other, the change can be for the better, for the couple as well as the individual.

I love that man!