In two recent issues of The New Yorker, cartoons by different artists showed couples in bed. In one, they’re propped against the pillows, books in hand. The woman says, “I never knew a sexless marriage would involve so much reading.” In the other, the man asks the woman, “When was the last time we had explicit sex?”
When I went looking for these cartoons to check their wording I noticed several others that offered a less-than-rosy view of married life:
A woman tells a friend that she and her husband are “only staying together for the sake of the pets.”
A husband sitting on the opposite end of a very long sofa from his wife suggests that “a smaller couch with fewer throw pillows would help this marriage a lot.”
“How was your day, dear?” a superhero wife asks her superhero husband as he comes through the door. “Aw, baby! Those forces of evil are relentless,” he says. “That’s nice, dear,” she says, without looking up from her book.
Clearly, marriage has an image problem. The implicit common denominator, I’d say, is habituation, a word I recently came across in yet another recent issue of The New Yorker.
“Habituation is why you don’t notice the stuff that’s always there,” says psychologist Jonathan Schooler. “It’s an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement.”
Schooler wasn’t talking about love, but he might as well have been. Relationships are like groceries with sell-by dates. The longer they last, the staler they get. From hot tomatoes to yesterday’s mashed potatoes. A fine romance, indeed.
Think of what happens with touch. The first time someone you’re attracted to lays a hand on your arm or knee you feel a jolt of heat or electricity. Let the same person make the same affectionate gesture after you’ve potty-trained a toddler or remodeled a kitchen together and it doesn’t feel all that different from placing your hand on your own knee.
Now picture this: It’s some enchanted evening. You see a stranger across a crowded room. The stranger returns your glance, with interest. Wow, right? Danger – high voltage.
We’re like quarterbacks unprotected by 350-pound tackles when it comes to the habituation problem: It blindsides us. Think back to being an adolescent. If anybody had told you that a time would come when you would not necessarily have sex every night with the person in the bed next to you, you wouldn’t have believed it.
So how do we stay fresh?
In the 1950s, women were told that their men did not want to come home from slaying the woolly mammoth to a messy house and a wifey who looked like she had spent the day cooking and cleaning, even though she had. The recommendation: make yourself fabulous, whip up a fabulous meal, greet your conquering hero with a drinky-poo and watch those dying embers glow and then blaze.
The ‘60s version: Wrap yourself in cellophane. Or was it fill the tub with Jell-O?
Contemporary couples are likelier to go on “dates” or take turns planning weekend getaways. The edgier version is to do what Brangelina do in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”: Arrive separately at a bar and pretend you’re strangers who hook up.
I propose a less gimmicky solution: devotion. This isn’t a word our culture uses much anymore, but it’s a better one than “work,” which is what we usually say is required for relationships to last. Work can be joyful, but it can also turn into drudgery, the worst sort of work. Here is where you play the dutiful spouse not because you want to, but because you know you should. Soulful kisses give way to pecks on the cheek. Spontaneous gifts become auto-pilot bouquets on Valentine’s Day.
Devotion, on the other hand, is joyful. If falling in love is a kind of conversion experience, devotion is what comes after. It’s like going to church for the true believer: not a chore, but a way to reconnect with that original ecstasy.
Devotion might be as simple as showing your beloved with a hug, a kiss, a word, a look, that you are grateful for his or her presence in your life. It doesn’t always have to be a pretty speech or a Ralph Kramden ‘baby, you’re the greatest’ smoocheroo. But it can’t be perfunctory. And it needs to be frequent – every day, preferably.
Look at it this way: If you make time to maintain your body through regular exercise, you should be able to find time to maintain your relationship by really talking and touching and yes, gazing into each other’s eyes.
That’s the formula, anyway: Devotion sustains love. I’ve been around long enough to know that life has a way of resisting formulas, but I think this one is worth a try. In devotion lies the possibility of familiarity breeding contentment rather than contempt — which is more satisfying, ultimately, than flitting to the next rose in the garden.
