It was bad news for me when the Wall Street Journal called the Gores’ breakup after 40 years the ‘new normal.’ because I’ve been married 40 years this month. AND, and my veil looked just like Tipper’s!
And the similarities don’t end there. Dave was in Al Gore’s class at Harvard, though he’ll be quick to tell you he didn’t invent the Internet. He says all he did was play Freshman Football and, since he couldn’t afford to buy the books, read his course assignments in the library, starting around 48 hours before Finals. He also played cards by the hour and just generally did a whole lotta Not Much Else until I came along his Senior year and we began hanging out with my big funny family. And it’s been such a Big Top of fun-and-fightin’ ever since I can’t imagine walking away after the early innings like the Gores did,
In that Wall Street Journal piece Jeff Zaslow also cites a survey sponsored by the British dating site ForgetDinner which reports that people married one year spend 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner talking. By 20 years, they’re down to 21 minutes, by 30 years, 16, and by 50 years all of three. To which I say: fiddle-faddle. We sure never spent 40 minutes over those first-year dinners. We didn’t have enough food for that. We could’ve eaten the roaches to extend things maybe, crisped ‘em up in one of the zillion fondue pots we got as wedding presents.
By our 20th anniversary it is true that our dinner-talk only lasted about 21 minutes but that’s just because we could hardly make ourselves heard over the offspring resulting from that yeasty early years. And by our 30th, we were too busy executing our kids’ desire to have people join us for dinner: pals of theirs, pals of their pals, even a doorbell-ringing solicitor if they took pity on him. And Dave and I, we just keep bringin’ on the chow. Who could talk?
Since the survey is silent about what happens at 40 years in I can tell you right now: At 40 years in you can break all the rules, because it’s just the two of you again.
David has recently taken a notion to eat standing up like a horse, maybe because he can’t wait to get back to the crossword he’s afraid to bring to the table since that time I took a match to his Sudoku. It used to drive me crazy to see him standing and eating at the island like a commuter at a pushcart – until I got the idea of sitting ON the island countertop, legs crossed under me, to eat my dinner like that.
And it works, We’re at eye level. We chew. We talk. And if people look in the window and see two diners, one a standing man and one a woman in apparent I-Dream-of-Jeannie-style levitation, sure they might be flummoxed. Hey, we’re flummoxed ourselves most of the time, and if not laughing 24/7, havin’ some pretty good times.
EXIT ONLY 