Saying your wedding vows is one thing. Fulfilling them is an entirely different matter.
The first time my wife got married, she was wearing a big white dress and all our friends and family were there. The second time I married her, she wasn’t even in the room, even though her mother was. The third time I got married, it was just the two of us and our teenage children in the woods.
At the big white dress wedding, Allison and I were 25 years old and working hard to be the adults we thought we were meant to become. I had just returned from a year of study in Israel and decided that although I had stayed away from Judaism all my life, I was now very religious. So I wore the traditional white groom’s suit, prompting my mother to shout, “You look like a butcher!”
He wasn’t wrong.
I focused on the history of our ritual: what texts the rabbi would recite, and how to make the ceremony equal in a tradition that was not. A staff member who helped with the outdoor ceremony saw something I didn’t see — my wife’s bare hands holding a bouquet on a frigid fall day — and handed her a hand warmer. I focused on the ceremony. Him, in man.
The second time I married my wife, she was hooked up to an IV at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, her skin turning gray from chemotherapy. I was at home, 120 kilometers away, taking care of our two young children. I had tremendous help from my mother-in-law, Hazel, who also gave us her 10-year-old Toyota Corolla.
Hazel thought her daughter’s name should also be on the car’s title. Alison, who had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia six months earlier, didn’t need to bother with paperwork, she thought.
“It should be in both our names,” said Hazel. “I won’t give the car to you alone.”
“Hazel,” I said. “If I was leaving, I would have already left. Do you think I’d stay because of the Corolla?”
But the truth is, part of me wanted to leave. I was frantic and exhausted. After I put the kids to bed, I would sit on the porch, drink whiskey, and cry myself to sleep. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life as a widowed father of two children under 6 years old.
I thought I was committing to Alison at our wedding 12 years ago, but I was actually committing to an idea, a vision of what she was meant to be, who I was meant to be, and what our life together was meant to be. That vision didn’t include her being bald and emaciated or me being half-drunk and terrified.
I didn’t really marry her until after that vision collapsed. Not with a vision by which I can judge (and judge) my wife, but with a wife of my own flesh and blood, whose flesh has dried up and whose blood has attacked her. I wasn’t really married until I wanted so badly to leave my life and I didn’t.
None of us realized it at the time, but the most important part of the white wedding dress was a phrase we added to the ketubah, the Jewish marriage covenant. “We agreed to set aside a separate time and place each year, in the season of our engagement year, to review and evaluate the love and mistakes we made last year, and look forward to the time to come,” we wrote.
We achieved this, even before leukemia. Every fall, Alison and I would take a small retreat to reflect on the state of our marriage. We talked about love and the mistakes of the past year and wrote it all in a little black diary we bought at the airport.
“We love each other very much… and continue to work to keep him conscious in the depths of our being,” we wrote in 2014, a year after his successful bone marrow transplant.
When Alison got out of the hospital, we had a big party with a band and a bouncy castle. The pub in our neighborhood donated two kegs of beer, and it was as if our entire small town had come out to celebrate the doctor’s declaration: “He’s cured.” It was glorious.
His hair was growing. His blood was once again carrying oxygen throughout his body. Most importantly, her immune system can withstand the presence of our children and their germs.
We were happy. But we were also devastated.
Alison was afraid of dying and I was afraid of her dying…fears relatable to her, but she wasn’t the same. Now we were back in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, but we felt galaxies apart. Sometimes I feared we went through hell and then divorced after everything was fine.
“We have become much better at accepting each other’s human flaws, even though there is always a lot of work to do,” we wrote in 2016.
Those little retreats saved us. Two years after Allison returned home, we rented a small cabin with folk art Buddha statues in western Massachusetts. As we walked in endless circles in Great Barrington, we opened closets full of things we didn’t realize we were carrying: resentments about the compromises we made in each other’s lives, about the balance between challenging and comforting our children, about how we got through the darkest days of their illness. If there was a 24-hour divorce lawyer in Great Barrington, we might have stopped to see him.
Instead, we continued talking. At some point in those endless circles we walked, something broke. We began to see what we had never seen before: that each of us was starring in our own movie. For me, I was the director, screenwriter, hero, and sole spectator, and Alison was a secondary character. I already knew what she was going to say and was frustrated when she said her lines wrong.
In the movie Alison, I was the one who said my lines wrong.
Before he got sick, when we thought we were in the same movie, we thought we had a happy marriage. We got it, but we were also lucky. We didn’t really get married until our luck ran out.
The annual retreat we were promised in Ketubah was not enough. After we got back from Great Barrington, we started going for walks three times a week, just to talk. It sounds like a lot, and it was. Over time, we narrowed it down to once a week, and always started with the same two questions: When did you feel close this week, and when did you feel distant?
We stopped insisting that each other’s movie was the “right” movie and started learning to pause and watch each other’s movie for a while. We have learned that there is a gap – sometimes a chasm – between our intention and the impact we have on others. We learned that not naming our feelings or desires is not flexibility, but cowardice. We have learned that an “imperfect” person (one who is imperfect and unbelievable) can love and be loved by another imperfect person.
We have also learned to express our complex psychology so that our partner has the opportunity to understand the plot of our film. We learned to marry a person, not an idea.
Last fall, 23 years after the Big White Wedding, we returned to Western Massachusetts for our wedding anniversary and began writing a new “ketup” about what has now become our marriage.
We worked on that document for about a year, and a few months ago we got married for the third time. We printed those vows like a work of art and took them into the woods behind our house. No white wedding dress, no big party, no commitment to a specific vision of the life we were building. We were just one imperfect person committing to another.
We promised to stop blaming each other for our shortcomings and to each take responsibility for living our lives fully and authentically. We have pledged to stop holding onto every crime like a gem and welcome invitations to laugh at our stops. We promised to remember that our marriage is not something we own, but something we build every day, with every decision.
With our teenage children as reluctant witnesses, we made more concrete promises than we could have imagined half a lifetime ago. We’re committed to partners we truly love, not a movie director’s idea of who they should be.
We finally understand that marriage is not a one-time promise, but thousands of small commitments in reality, not in fantasy.
I guess it wasn’t our last wedding, but it was the best ever.