I Am So Popular: Crazy For Love

I admit that, while there are certainly more flashy and trashy breakups going on all the time— confession: even though I don’t watch TV, I do read People.com as a replacement act of stupidity— the Gores split has me curious. Really— after forty years, why bother with divorce court? Couldn’t they just stay roommates? Aren’t they going to miss each other? Did they hate each other all along?

My curiosity is piqued by a number of factors. I attend thirty or forty weddings each year. I don’t show up as a mere guest. I actually perform the weddings, which means I am responsible for legally binding folks together. That’s right, my signature is mighty and powerful enough to give two people the legal bond they will then either struggle to maintain, regardless of what hard circumstances they face, or struggle to dissolve, often at very high emotional and financial cost. I’d say the majority of these folks enter into the arrangement not out of practicality (like health insurance benefits) but out of a romanticized notion that love will keep them together, despite greater than 50% odds that really, love will give way to the opposite at some point.

I ran into one of my past brides the other night. Since I meet around 4,000 new people every year courtesy of all the weddings I perform, I needed a little help remembering her name. She told me, and added that I’d performed the ceremony a couple of years before. I asked how the couple was doing. They’re getting divorced, she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, then tentatively added, “Or, congratulations?”

She said a friend of hers had coined a term, I think it was “sor-gratulations” to try to capture the mixed feelings that can come with such a split. Though the word doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I appreciate the all-encompassing sentiment. For my part, when friends are divorcing, I want to lean more toward giving them a high five rather than offering up condolences. Because I know, from not one but two divorces, that once you clear the wall and have taken enough steps forward to look back with clarity, the satisfaction of no longer being with “that person” can make you downright giddy.

But reaching that spot is a process, something else I know, and so I keep my irreverent high-fives mostly to myself, unless and until a grieving-from-the-split friend announces that the bad feelings have left the building.

Perhaps the most well known definition of insanity is that bit about how this state of mind is best exemplified by people who do the same thing over and over again and wrongly expect different results. Not long after my last divorce, I ran into a mutual friend of mine and my ex’s. She said he’d stopped her in a grocery store and, with no prompting on her part, explained that the marriage ended because I was crazy.

Initially, this got my goat, likely his intention as surely he knew word would get back to me. But when I thought about it, I realized this might’ve been the one accurate observation he’d ever made. I was crazy. Not as a permanent state of being. But in the context of that particular situation, I damn near lost my mind. Many factors contributed— too many to list here. But a big one was that I was forced to live in the shadow of the wife who preceded me, the dead one, whom I was told, repeatedly, had been nothing but a saint and far better than I could ever hope to be. Or, as my ex told another friend, the difference between me and the saint was that I dared complain when I didn’t like the way things were going, whereas she allegedly never complained, not one bit, but rather kept her mouth shut and went to work, turning over her paycheck so that her man could score speed and “stay home with the kids.”

Yes, yes, I must now concur—I was crazy on some level. Crazy to get involved with the guy, crazy to marry him, crazy to try to stay with him even as I was surrounded by my predecessor’s portraits on the wall, clothes in the dresser, ashes in the spice rack. But that craziness has long subsided, courtesy of time and therapy and learning to make choices that don’t involve putting myself in the role of perpetual martyr, a nasty habit I had for a very long time.

Warren and I are fast coming up on three years together, easily a world record for each of us. Don’t get me wrong—we’ve had more than a few trying times, and plenty of moments where we contemplated (and once even tried) a split. I’m not making any predictions about whether we’ll make it to four years or forty or— beyond the scope of my wildest imagination— for the rest of our time on earth. I do know neither one of us harbors any desire to marry. And I wonder if this assists us in maintaining what we have. Who knows?

Such is the mystery of who makes it and who doesn’t. In the news stories of the

Gores, there is always a comparison to the Clintons— Bill who can’t keep his dick in his pants and Hillary who seems not to care. The gist of it is that if anyone had put down bets on which of the marriages would fail, the big money would’ve been riding on the latter union’s demise. I think this fascinates the six people following the story more than anything else, that age old, never to be solved mystery of what prompts some folks to stay together and others to split.

Every time the online edition of New York Times runs a story that asserts some researcher somewhere has “discovered what makes couples stay together,” that story invariably lands in the Most Emailed box on the site. Same is true of articles touting the latest thoughts on weight loss. Everyone is looking for the one magic whatever that will find their waistlines shrinking and their feelings of love swelling with as little effort as possible.

Having been up and down the scale more times than a professional piano player (bouncing between over 200 pounds all the way down to 125), and in and out of marriages on two different occasions, I remain as clueless as everyone else. Knowledge and application some days seem to overlap easily— eat less, exercise more, argue less, appreciate each other more. Other days, I have to trot out the big girl pants and/or ask Warren for a little space lest I say something irretractable, damage done, forgivable but not forgettable.

In the end, at least for today, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s something along the thin line between hope and insanity that keeps us repeating ourselves, even in the face of statistics suggesting we’re more bound than not to fail at goals like staying fit and staying married. (Aside: and then there is the study showing that women who live with partners are more likely to gain weight, but don’t even get me started on that.) I think never being able to figure it out for certain combined with a collective inherent addiction to drama, and—perhaps above all—some romantic notion that, no really, there is some one other person out there who truly has our back forever and ever, means lots of us are going to keep trying. Which also means I’m going to be in the wedding business, if nothing else, til death do I part.

Spike Gillespie hopes those of you divorcing find elation soon enough. She blogs for JetBlue, KnitBuzz, and herself.