But could spending the spring of my thirty-second year with the marriage advice on (aggressive) offer to my parents when they were thirty-two teach me and my husband anything-even by counterexample? Could it teach any of us anything? Couldn’t hurt to try. We’re not the types to get wrapped up in self-help books. My hope was that I’d read the terrible advice they’d gotten and be able to confirm something: Of course they split! With advice like this? They were doomed!Īnd what about us? We’re cool, we’re skeptical. This might have been a comforting thought for some, but for me, it was a little menacing: My parents ended up divorcing, and not amicably.
My suspicion was that advice for a happy marriage hadn’t changed much in thirty years.
If I was being honest with myself, the project was more than ironic. In other words, we could pretend we were our parents, who seemed to have had it all so together at our age. Besides, it was Covid-what else were we doing? We could even commit to the bit and order a fondue set and some royal-blue wineglasses to drink pinot noir out of like it was really the nineties. I viewed it as an ironic little joint reading project, and Mark was game. I don’t want to kill him, but I don’t not want to kill him.
Not to mention, Mark had recently started saying “Cool, cool, cool” every time one of his coworkers asked him to do anything, a habit I loathe. It’s not like we were having problems qua problems when I picked up a hardcover copy of the 1992 self-help best seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, by John Gray, Ph.D., but after a year of quarantine, we weren’t exactly in any position to be turning down marital advice in any form.
There is no door separating the bedroom from the living room in my 650-square-foot apartment, where my husband, Mark, and I have spent the past year together.
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