Marry Me a Little
When Kim and I met in 2005, I had been separated from my second marriage for four years and been through several other relationships, looking for but not yet finding my next marriage partner. I knew myself enough to know that I was someone who wanted and needed to be married. I’ve never understood those who resolve “never again” after a bad marital experience. I don’t know if I’ve just made it up or if it is something hardwired in my brain stem, but I have always believed that primordial man developed the institution of marriage because life was too hard to go it alone. That’s simply not the case any more for the most part. Some families may feel they need a dual income to survive, but the statistics show that 40% of all children are now born to single parent households. That says to me that marriage is certainly less necessary than it used to be. But there is necessary and there is necessary. I have never needed marriage for economic reasons, but I have always needed it emotionally. I had never found casual dating to be my forte. I am by nature, a man of focus in all things, and I like the focus of a primary relationship. I found Kim very worthy of my focus.
One of the added dimensions Kim brought to my life was her focus on musical theater. I had always liked musical theater, but it was certainly not something I had much experience with. Music overall was far more peripheral to my existence than it was to most people that had grown up in the 60s and 70s. Thanks to Kim, I have come to enjoy the pleasures of music in several forms, especially cabaret and now her vocal group performances. I think that for me the secret of that enjoyment has been to let myself go and to enjoy the peacefulness of listening to the music and wallow in the novelty of it all for me. I try to attend each and every performance of Kim’s even if it is repetitive. And whenever she asks me if I want to go to a performance that she wants to go to or feels she needs to go to, i try hard to join, as I did yesterday. Her vocal group’s musical director was putting on a performance at a local church where he also acts as musical director. It was a small-time fundraiser, which cost us $20 apiece to attend…and that included refreshments provided by the parishioners.
The show was a two-hour recital with a piano, a clarinet and a flute as well as two singers. The music was a blend of a bit of everything from an operatic aria from Carmen to ragtime (or what they called “razztime” for their incorporation of some jazz bars) to several recent show tunes from Broadway. There were several instrumentals featuring the flute and piano together, a duet on the piano (a particularly interesting Turkish song) and a trio of Stravinsky clarinet tunes. While I don’t think I had ever heard any of the songs before, I tried to listen intently while relaxing and letting the music speak for itself. To be honest, it was an overcast Saturday afternoon and thus the perfect time to practice finding peace in music.
We were sitting in the second row with other members of Kim’s vocal group. The performers (other than the musical director) were in the row right in front of us. In front of me was the woman who had been the assistant musical director and was both singing and playing piano as needed. She tended to sing the Broadway tunes since the other singer was more of a trained opera soprano. One of the songs on her roster was the Sondheim song Marry Me a Little, which Kim knew, but I had never heard before. Like most Sondheim pieces, it was both a catchy tune and very interesting lyrics. In fact, sitting and listening to the lyrics really made me think. The operative lines are:
Marry me a little,
Love me just enough.
Cry, but not too often,
Play, but not too rough.
Keep a tender distance
so we’ll both be free.
That’s the way it ought to be.
That sentiment flies in the face of everything I have ever thought about love and marriage, and I really didn’t understand it. It seems to suggest that all-in love with abandon is not such a good thing and that it somehow brings about the loss of self. I come from the school of thought that loss of self for the betterment of the relationship is part of the bargain. Or maybe said better, opening up oneself to change and perhaps equally contributing oneself into a newly combined configuration. Sitting in that church next to Kim, I had time to think about what those lyrics were trying to get across. Was that the way it ought to be? This song was written for a show about a thirty-five-year-old bachelor who really had a hard time giving up his freedom to get married. In some ways that’s anachronistic. First of all, there is much less pressure to get married these days and the “necessity” of it is rarely at issue. When I was in college the average age of marriage for a man was about 23 (I was first married at 22). Today, the average age for men getting married is closer to 30 (my youngest son just got married at 28). I understand that generalizations about how people think about or conduct their marriages is a minefield, but nonetheless, I feel inclined to comment.
Kim and I both seem to share a view that marriage is all about the passion of full and complete commitment and that there is no interest on either of our parts to be married “a little”. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t respect one another’s need for some degree of self or independence. We see and know couples that want to be joined at the hip and don’t do anything if its not together. Some even work together. We have a hard time understanding that approach and it certainly feels too confining to us. At the same time, we see others, especially the younger generation that seem to view marriage as a convenient and efficient way to live but they seem to spend the majority of their time pursuing their own interests. They certainly work on their own and often even vacation separately more often than we can understand. One might argue that they came to marriage later and thus had more fully developed selves with which to contend. But I met Kim at age 51 and had been separated for four years and she was 47 and had never been married before, and I think its fair to say that we were as fully developed as we we were going to be as individuals. My guess is that we have both continued to develop ourselves, but I for one find myself developing more because of what I get from Kim and I hope somewhat of the same is true for her.
I know it takes all kinds to make the world go around and that there is room for everybody’s approach to something as fundamental as marriage. We all need to accept that our cultural mores constantly shift with the times and maybe marriage will be in continual decline, but I suspect not. I think there will always be people like Kim and me that want and like being married, not a little, but a lot.