Advice I'll Always Remember

It was in the "relationship advice" category: A poll of couples who agreed that they'd been happily married for a long time asked the couples for their "secrets," and the wives' advice to women was "Always hold something back."

That didn't mean not giving in to the joys of marriage, they assured single baby-boomers. The joy of cooking, the joy of sex, the joy of running marathons together, and much more, were shared freely. But it's always a good idea, they said, in any relationship, to leave the other person wanting something more. 

The hint of further intimacy that's raised when people show a fresh side of themselves to their loved ones, a hidden talent, a life outside the family.

The absurd extravagance, with time if not with money, that never quite fits in to the schedule or budget. 

The "other story" that's not told in the story you tell.

The additional information that will be included in your next report, article, book.

The piece or touch you sell separately from the main product or job.

Some writer presenting this information to young ladies asked us what we were holding back in our primary relationships. I was holding back something with the boyfriend, of course. Nice girls my age took that as read and did not spell it out. I zoom-focussed on someone's claim that she never let her boyfriend know for sure whether she really liked him or not, and it seemed to have the desired effect of making him act "crazy about her." I thought "dizzy" was enough for my boyfriend to be, and although I liked his dizzy infatuated grin, very much, I scorned tricks like fake breakups and "lovers' quarrels," not calling back, and flirting with other men to aggravate the infatuation. 

Keeping courtships friendly and low-drama was recommended by my elders. I'd heard a few stories of what had happened when people let the excitement of courtship get out of hand.  A large bland slow-moving eighty-something had played another young man against the one she married--just a little--when they were in their twenties, and when the engagement was announced he'd committed suicide. A little soon-to-be-grandmother had pulled an Insane Admirer up short as he was explaining the detailed plans for the elopement, "But, Freddy, I never said I was going to marry you," and he'd gone home muttering that if he couldn't marry her no one else would, and been found, the next day, lurking in her closet with a knife. 

Anyway what I liked about my boyfriend, when I was twenty-nine, was the sweetness and light of hanging out together, being friends. Concerns about money, the illness and death of elders, and the possibility that either a minister or a bridegroom existed who'd seriously consider marrying our sisters, added quite enough drama to my life. It was just very pleasant to know a nice, stable, employed engineer who always had ideas about things to do for fun, often involving our parents, young children, and animals. 

As long as we were just hanging out and having fun, he and I got along very well. When we thought about our future careers, well, we were taking different roads in life. Compatible values; different priorities. I wanted to live in the country and write, and maybe adopt children if a partner who could afford to feed them came along. He wanted to live in the small city where he'd grown up, and add more wealth to what he'd started with, and adopt children if a partner who liked them came along. 

We even had a child in mind. His parents were professional foster parents; one of his foster sisters had grown up and had a baby she was always leaving at their house. Both of us liked that baby--toddler, actually. Her mother taught her to call us "aunt" and "uncle." His mother, who was the managing type, was prone to visions or visualizations of other people's futures. In her visualization, upon marriage he and I were going to adopt the baby. Of course that produced instant problems. The mother of the baby screeched "Nobody's taking MY baby away from ME! Youall are not that much 'better' than I am!" I thought we were making better life choices than she was, anyway, but I wasn't interested in fighting for custody of a child, and said so. 

"You don't realize how unfit that girl is to be that baby's mother!"

I realized she was nineteen years old. When I was nineteen years old, I thought, I'd been a child, and a wretched mess of one at that, in different ways than the baby's mother. When I was twenty-one, I was not ready to be anyone's primary parent, but being a secondary foster parent ("There's no way I'm old enough to be your Mom. If you want to adopt me, call me Sis!") to my adoptive sister had worked out well and helped me grow up. "It's a gruesome age to be. Our sisters that age are mixed-up kids, too, though at least they don't seem to be taking drugs or having babies. We survived being nineteen. So will they. By staying on good terms with the baby's mother, we can try to be a good aunt and uncle to the baby anyway." 

So things went for about a year. Then my twenty-ninth birthday party was ruined when the baby's mother and one of her boyfriends got into some sort of disagreement. While preparing to bring the baby to the party, apparently, they started yelling at each other and each gave an angry tug on the baby. The baby screamed and kept on screaming. Apparently they'd tugged hard enough to damage a leg. X rays showed a "spiral fracture." 

"They all but literally pulled that child apart! Now do you think they should have custody?"

The hospital social worker had apparently told the teen mother that she couldn't take the baby home, herself. "So, do you want to send her home with your foster mother, brother, sister...?"

"None of them," the teen mother apparently screamed in one of those emotional storms that happen to nineteen-year-olds when they get themselves into stressful situations. "Send her to some other foster family! Anybody but them!"

"That poor baby," I said. "If that's the way the mother feels, that's the way she feels." I thought my potential mother-in-law ("I'm not saying the mothers of the fellows I've dated were witches, but two of them were called Wanda and Glenda," and that one was Glenda) had probably contributed a lot to the situation. Not that she was consciously class-ist. I thought the way she took it as read that all of her foster children were capable of going to college and having careers was classy, actually, on the whole, but it wasn't working for all of them as well as it was for some. The corporate glass ceiling was an issue at the time, but a separate "women's issue" was that many women have zero interest in climbing corporate ladders. I had none. Glenda had none. So why should Glenda push foster daughters toward corporate jobs they didn't want, either, when she didn't even want one for herself? I thought the baby's mother might have trusted her foster brother and his fiancee if she hadn't always seen us as dutiful guests in Glenda's house, but the situation was what it was.

So then the toddler we loved was sent home with some other people at the far end of the county, and Glenda decided I was just too laid-back for her son. She thought he needed an ambition-driven managing type, someone like her, to push him up the corporate ladder. I thought human beings make enough mistakes for ourselves that we ought to know better than to try to make choices for others. So Glenda made it her goal to come between her son and me. 

"The Bible says 'A man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.' Of course that's not a reasonable thing for him to do. His whole life, his job, his position in his community, are all wrapped up in his extended family in Tennessee. If he did want to give up all that and live on a poor little hill farm, and always be 'the one from,' and drive fifteen miles to and from his job, he'd be 'crazy about me' enough that I'd have to marry him. If he's not, well, I'm certainly not making any commitments to try to live among, or please, people who find fault with me." 

"But he's such a prize..."

"He is a prize and a prince, but if he continues to listen to that Glenda, after the way she's spoken to me, then as far as I'm concerned he just turned into a toad." 

Maybe I should have played games, let the boyfriend wonder whether I still liked or respected him at all, that winter. I didn't want to play games. I didn't want a marriage that would depend on driving a man "crazy." I assured him that I still loved him, but I thought his mother might do well to wake up and realize how much harm she was doing with her demands that everybody fit into her mold. I was not going to spend time around people who did not respect and appreciate me, just as I was. He just had to choose between his family and me.

Of course a lifelong family man was not prepared to cut himself off from his family, not even for a strategic year or two. I didn't blame him, then or now. We had taken different roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEE3ycDH9_8

How much should women hold back, before marriage, to avoid smothering the man's need to pursue and "win" a mate? I thought withholding the act of marriage was enough, and hadn't planned to withhold anything else, in particular, beyond that. What stuck in my mind was that, within a month of saying that I thought saying "I love you" before marriage was appropriate, I was saying it in a different way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bEZH6ZqG4

Later that year I started flat-sitting, in exchange for the use of my future brother-in-law's address as my business address in Washington. Later I met my husband. All I have to regret is that he really had had cancer, though he'd come to believe he didn't have it, when we met, and the cancer came back and killed him ten years later. 

I came home. I met the man I would have married first if I'd met him first. There were six good years of working together, waiting for his foster son to be "full grown and on his own" because I didn't think teenaged boys needed to have to live with stepmothers. The lad was just about to join the Army when my Significant Other went down with Lyme Disease, and since it was easier for the 6'2" lad to lift his 6'4" foster father than it would have been for anyone else, the lad ended up staying around, providing family care, for what was mostly a phone friendship for the next eleven-plus years. 

"No woman should stay engaged to a man for more than two years! If he wants to marry her, he'll do it. It's a disgrace for a woman to let herself be used for years of engagement that don't become a marriage..."

Hello? I wasn't being used. I was not "ghosting away" from a friend who developed a long boring illness--that really is a disgrace. I said Lyme Disease didn't I? The relationship was postsexual. I've not been altogether postsexual, all the years I've been blogging, but I might as well have been. I met men my age who were still single. When a fifty-year-old man is neither homosexual nor postsexual and is single, the reasons why he's single are usually obvious on first sight. At best they've been divorcees who seemed as if there might have been some hope that their wives and children would take them back. I can live without the drama of a bigamous marriage.

So, now my Significant Other's gone too. His foster son, born a more distant relative but blessed with much of the same peculiar DNA, is the sort of young man the older generation have to respect. 

I think the idea of holding something back is basically good, though how it works in marriage is hard to explain. Some of the wives in that survey said that what they thought they were holding back was a level of emotional intimacy somewhere beyond having and rearing children together, which might or might not even exist in this world. 

Do all husbands fantasize about that? I don't know. They wouldn't say it if they did, would they? Mine used to fantasize about spending a whole day in bed. That was not the way either of us was brought up, nor was it something we really wanted to do, until he had cancer. Then it seemed to be time to act out that fantasy, so during his last months we did. 

What is held back is not, of course, something the person can reasonably expect not to be held back. The story is complete; there's another, basically separate, story that's not told in the same book. The marriage is consummated; the mysterious "ultimate intimacy" may actually be dying in the arms of the one with whom one has lived, when the time comes. I don't imagine any of the happy couples did the sort of teasing some people dump boyfriends or girlfriends for doing. 

What needs to be held back in friendship and courtship is the kind of eager haste that, even when it charms the other person, also alarms because it sounds either desperate or, at best, infantile--as if the person doesn't understand what person appears to be saying. 

When I was in college someone stuck for a topic of conversation would say "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" I'd say that I had a sister and we'd lost a brother, and more than one eager puppy of a boy said at once, "Oh I could be your brother!" and I felt like saying, "Child. I doubt you could have kept up with my brother in any sport, on any job, much less in conversation." 

I had a distant, so distant we couldn't even work out how distant, cousin to whom I gave the screen name Oogesti. He had some disadvantages in life. For one thing he was as biracial as the rest of the clan but it didn't show; he had a nicer personality, but still, quite a strong resemblance to Donald Trump. For another thing he suffered from extroversion, had some talent--he sold paintings regularly, in "retirement," and had sung with a band that sold albums--and even did pretty well in elementary school, but he said that in high school all he wanted to think about was girls. Eventually he married one, lived happily, had children, and then when they were about eighty years old his wife died. When he started going out and talking to people again, he mostly talked to women, and even if they were married, even if they were relatives, they were "girl friends." My Significant Other was very nice about it ("He's eighty-five years old--humor him!") but some older people lacked that sense of cheerful detachment.

"Be careful! That nice old church lady might actually like you, if you don't scare her off acting desperate." 

"I don't like her!"

"Then why talk as if you did?"

"What else am I going to say to her?"

Maybe if a person's goal is not to have to go out on any actual dates, openly rating people as potential dates before the person has demonstrated crucial abilities like making conversation and keeping appointments would be a good strategy to cut off conversations the person feels unable to make. All I can say is, if a man actually wants a date with me, he needs to demonstrate competence and reliability first, as a client or co-worker, then a friend. He may look good, but I don't want a relationship that's all about "looks," so the better he looks, the more he needs to show that looks haven't spoiled his character. 

Men, too, need to hold some things back...not to tease or score points, but to show respect for themselves and others.