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My Marriage

"Now that we're having a baby," says my husband, "I'm really going to get in shape. I'm going to strengthen my core. Need to be fit for that baby!"

"Well, me too," I reply. "At least I'll start running again."

My husband throws up his hands in a defensive way. "I wasn't implying anything about you! I wasn't saying that you need to run!"

This is the sort of semi-evasive conversation that happens with some regularity in my marriage. I have been told, in expensive therapy sessions, that it's important to state, to your spouse, in a sensitive way, precisely the stuff that is on your mind. So, in a rock-solid, gold-star, we-did-all-our-homework arrangement, you could say: "Honey, I think you could lose a few pounds." And no madness would ensue.

There's a guide to marriage--written by a divorce lawyer--that suggests, as maybe a number-one principle, "Send That Difficult E-mail." In other words, if something faintly vexes or perturbs you, you must not sweep it under the rug. You must not second-guess yourself. You must put the uncomfortable thing center-stage. You must send the e-mail.

Easier said than done. My shrink seems to find the task of confrontation slightly less challenging than other people. He merrily suggests that I consider saying nutty things all the time. Once, I was describing a particularly garrulous friend, and my shrink said: "Why don't you try this. Go to him and say, MY DEAR! So much talk! Let us just sit in silence and hold hands."

In group, my shrink once had advice for a man whose love life had gone slightly stale. "Thank you so much for that," said my shrink, role-playing, imagining himself in bed, "but there is another sexual position that I also find especially inspiring." (There's a language gap. My Italian shrink could use the adjective "inspiring," mid-coitus, and no one would laugh at him. But, if you're a native speaker, this might be a bit more difficult.)

I'm amused by some occasional gulfs in the marital dialogue at 16 Walnut Ct., in South Orange, New Jersey. For example: When my husband makes his somber announcement about his core, I do *not* opt to say: "You've made that observation maybe seven times in the past month." (My husband doesn't like this particular sentence, which does seem to paper over some difficult emotional truths--does seem to say more than it actually, literally says--now that I think about it.)

When my husband throws up his hands, he does *not* then choose to say, "Actually, why *don't* we shine the spotlight on *your* weight, for a minute?" This sentence isn't articulated, but it nevertheless does seem to be there, in the air--at least if you ask me.

My husband actually wrote a book about marriage--once. It's called "Winning Marriage." The title works on several levels. It's about *winning* the *right* for gay couples to marry--all over the United States. The title also alludes to various "winning marriages" we might consider: the marriage between America and a commitment to equality, the actual, charming marriages of various homosexual couples, the professional marriage between some brilliant political strategists who changed our country. That title does a fair amount of work in just two words.

A married couple we know--however--discovered yet another meaning. They had the book on display, and their guest thought it was a kind of self-help tome: "How to WIN IN your Marriage." (How to defeat your spouse.) This third party looked at my friends, and smirked, and said: "So? Who's winning?"

I long to write about my marriage, in part because that's the material at hand. Phillip Lopate wrote "Bachelorhood" when he was, in fact, a bachelor. Arnold Lobel wrote his series of love stories--"Frog and Toad"--when he was, in fact, in love.

If I were to tell the story of my marriage, long-form, it would likely look a great deal like Lobel's picture books. Not too many earth-shattering, cataclysmic moments. Also, not without thorns. There are those challenging discussions about one's "core," and, this past Saturday, there were some tense words about a "shared" dish of pecans that one of the two of us had devoured, full-stop, in a span of twenty seconds.

These are issues that Toad has surely encountered.

Anyway, all of this is to say that, like Toad, flabby "core" or not, with or without a regular, enviable running schedule: I'm quite a lucky guy.

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