At the start of our multi-decade marriage, my husband and I had a Noah’s Ark social life. In the evenings anyway, we went out with other couples; single friends were for lunch. Around the time that I stopped performing such housewifely functions as putting the very heavy bedspread on the bed in the morning (to lug it off again only hours later), I got up the nerve to make an occasional dinner date on my own – usually with a woman friend and usually on a night when my husband already had something else going on.
As time passed we got in the habit of feeling free to make our own plans for the evening – after checking with each other. And occasionally we would both spend an evening in one of either of our friends. Of course, we continued to double-date too. While some couples were totally compatible, others included one person we liked and one we tolerated – not always the same one for both of us.
I hadn’t really considered the differences between single friends and couple friends until recently, when my husband and I had occasion to get together with three different pairs of long-married friends – people we have known forever, and love very much, but who live in different parts of the country and aren’t on our regular social timetable. It made me think about the special relationship we have with each and both of them and how that has changed over time.
With single friends, even in a group, the intimacy is one-on-one. With couples, I once calculated, there are twelve relationships among four people – each with each (including one’s partner, whose behavior may be affected by the other people in the mix); that mathematical fact complicates the dynamic exponentially. In the past, I had been very aware of the interplay between the partners we were visiting. In one case he was very successful and she very (overly?) supportive, in another he was a kind of a stumblebum and she quite critical, and in the third she struck me as very spiritual and he not on her wavelength.
This time, though, the rough edges between them were less apparent – to me, anyway. The supportive wife seemed much more assertive and her husband more appreciative; the critical wife seemed more accepting and her husband more on top of things; the less spiritual husband revealed a deep and abiding inner life. In each of the visits, our friends spoke openly of their affection for each other; it was the first time that I could remember. They all seemed so much better suited to each other. Who knows if my original take on their relationships ever had any connection to reality – what I perceived as new compatibility may have been what they saw in each other from the first. Maybe it was something in me – that I am less dismayed by difference than I had been earlier. Maybe I see them that way because there are fewer rough edges to my own partnership.
I suspect they had similar observations to make about us. Something does happen over decades of marriage. If you are going to last this long, at some point you – I, we – close the divorce option and conclude you are in it for the duration. At the same time, if you are going to enjoy it, you stop trying to change each other – you “give up” in a way, but what is lost are unrealistic expectations and worn-out gripes; what is gained is, if you are lucky, a rediscovered appreciation for the less-flawed aspects of each other. Over all, you become more relaxed about the relationship. If this sounds boring, I guess it can be, but as I contemplated us and our friend couples, I was moved by the realization that – for better and for worse – we had each become less than two but more than one.