Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART III
Love and Marriage
12
Getting Married
TICK TICK TICK
Can you hear me? Let me adjust the microphone.
TICK TICK TICK
Any better? No? Okay, let me try again.
TICK TICK TICK
I’m sorry, I’m having difficulty reaching you over the deafening ticking of your girlfriend’s biological clock.
A lot of men’s hands may well slam this book shut upon hearing those words. It seems like one of the great unspoken sources of tension in relationships—a woman who feels she’s in her ideal window of opportunity to have children, involved with a man who’s convinced he’s just not ready.
As both of us get older, the “forty is the new thirty” philosophy becomes more appealing. We like the idea that our “prime years” could go on much longer than previously thought. Nolan Ryan hurled no-hitters at age forty-four. Michael Jordan scored forty points in a game … at age forty. The late actor Christopher Lee released a heavy-metal album after he turned ninety. And Monica Bellucci is going to be a Bond Girl at age fifty.
But there’s one key aspect of human biology that doesn’t always play along with our altered life schedule: human reproduction. We’re not going to say there’s an age at which you should have children, but we are going to say women have good reasons to want to get started in a particular age window.
Before we go any further, let’s note that there’s an enormous range in human fertility. Once again, those paranoia-driven school health classes may have given some folks the wrong idea. (“Remember, boys, if you stare at a young woman for too long, you may get her pregnant.”) More than one couple trying to have a baby has chuckled at the irony that after years of being told to take every conceivable—okay, maybe that’s the wrong word choice—every possible precaution to avoid pregnancy, they engage in repeated marathon bouts of gymnastically challenging unprotected sex and yet, no pregnancy.
You can’t force the twists and turns of your life to fit a timetable. But many women are wary about having children after age forty, and they’ve got some good medical data to back up that perspective. After the fourth decade, it’s more difficult to get pregnant and many couples begin to explore the expensive option of in vitro fertilization. Also around that time, the odds increase for a slew of difficult outcomes: miscarriages, Down syndrome, preterm deliveries, problems with the placenta… . We’ll refer you to your wife’s OB-GYN and other medical books for the full debate. Many women have children later in life and everything turns out fine. But obviously, many women want to complete their family before age forty, and they need a husband who agrees with that timetable.
Why is all this fertility and baby-making talk in a marriage chapter? Because many people, including many women, envision their lives with a marriage first and kids second. Biology gives women a deadline—if not a firm one, then a blurry one, and they work backward; if the last child is born around age thirty-nine or forty, then a preceding child or children have to be born in the preceding years. Which means marriage would ideally occur some stretch before then.
Ideally, you and your girlfriend can have an honest discussion about these issues.
Most young men, even young husbands, don’t think about fatherhood very much, outside the context of trying to avoid it. (“What do you mean, you’re late?”) Once again, my suspicious eye turns to those middle school and high school sex-ed classes, where the catastrophic consequences of teen pregnancy are drummed into the minds of teenage boys in a near-Orwellian fashion. We probably shouldn’t blame the health teachers; the heavy-handed techniques are a desperate attempt to shake those teenage boys out of their daydream of impregnating the teenage classmate sitting next to them.
Maybe we need some sort of society-wide class reunion, when men are getting into their late twenties, where their old health teacher will show up and say, “Okay, now it’s perfectly fine to have unprotected sex and get your wife pregnant.” No demonstrations please, Mr. Virgil.
So You’re Ready to Pop the Question …
We’re very pro-marriage guys. So on behalf of young men out there, let us declare loudly, here and now, if society wanted young men to be more enthusiastic about getting married, it would lower the “entry fee” considerably. Oh, sure, there’s no official entry fee,* but society imposes pretty clear expectations. If you get down on one knee and offer a ring from a box of Cracker Jacks, you’ll either get a “no” or a lot of quizzical looks from her friends and family later.
Besides the marriage license fee, of course. The state of Minnesota charges couples $115 for a marriage license! They knock it down to $40 if you complete twelve hours of “premarital education.” Doesn’t every moment with your fiancée count as some form of “premarital education”?
That rule of thumb that an engagement ring should cost about two months’ salary? That came from an advertising campaign by the De Beers diamond cartel back in the 1930s,* and must rank as one of the most effective advertising messages of all time. Ever since, when it comes time to pop the question, we run to the jewelers with wheelbarrows of cash and scream, “TAKE MY MONEY!”
Laurence Cawley, “De Beers Myth: Do People Spend a Month’s Salary on a Diamond Engagement Ring?,” BBC News, May 16, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27371208.
Yes, it should be a ring that pleases her. Yes, it will be on her hand for the rest of her days (or at least that’s the plan). But it should be a ring with a cost that makes financial sense. Someday later in life, when you get the big promotion or win the lottery, you can upgrade.
This is a circumstance where a little flexibility on the part of young women who dream of a happy marriage would be appreciated. If we want to lament that Maxim cover starlets and adult entertainment stars create unrealistic expectations in the minds of young men, let’s save a little cultural teeth-grinding for those bridal magazines that amount to wedding porn and the cable shows that seem to celebrate “bridezillas.”
You can make a case that young men’s difficulty in getting married is a giant threat to world peace. In most of the Middle East, it’s very difficult for a young man to get married if he doesn’t have a job that pays enough to support himself and a home of his own. Because good-paying jobs for young men are rare, a lot of young men have no real interaction with women and no real prospect for marriage and settling down … easy pickings for the apocalyptic ramblings of the radical imam down the street who’s promising seventy-two virgins in the afterlife.
Listen up, wedding industry: if you make it more expensive to get married, then the terrorists win.
According to a 2013 Gallup poll,** 14 percent of Millennials who aren’t married say it’s because of financial concerns. That seems to be reflected in the 66 percent of Millennials making less than $30,000 who say they want to get married yet are single. Among those making somewhere between $30,000 and $75,000, 25 percent are married but 59 percent would like to be enjoying wedded bliss.
Frank Newport and Joy Wilke, “Most in U.S. Want Marriage, but Its Importance Has Dropped,” Gallup, June 20-24, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/163802/marriage-importance-dropped.aspx.
One of the advantages of marriage is that two can live almost as cheaply as one. Rent is shared, as are utilities. Some of that might be offset by the marriage penalty in taxes, but if you’re poor it’s not much of an issue. Yes, you could shack up together, but that’s ultimately just a housing situation with benefits. What you’re looking for is a marriage, and it’s perfectly okay to struggle at first. In fact, it’s normal. We’re surrounded with cultural cues to be extravagant, and it would not be surprising if fewer people are getting married in part because of what weddings have become.
Let us put it bluntly. If you can afford a $100,000 wedding with live doves and a cascading fountain of single barrel whisky, awesome. Please send us an invitation. But never, and we mean never, go into debt to pay for your wedding (or your kid’s wedding for that matter).
The wedding website TheKnot.com says that the average cost of a wedding is now a whopping $30,000 (honeymoon not included).* In Washington, D.C., it’s closer to $40,000. In Manhattan the typical wedding is closer to $87,000. This is nuts. It’s a simple truth: your wedding day will be special, no matter how much or how little money you spend on it, as long as your marriage is special to you.
Melanie Hicken, “Average Wedding Bill Hits $30,000,” CNN, March 28, 2014, http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/28/pf/average-wedding-cost/.
The Case of the Missing Preacher
We spent less than $300 on our wedding, and my wife and I have been married nearly twenty years. We’ve bought more than that in alcohol for some of our anniversary parties, and we still look back on our wedding day with incredibly warm memories.
We paid $75 for our justice of the peace (an ancient man who was incredibly nice but bore an unfortunate resemblance to the creepy undead preacher from Poltergeist II), and my betrothed bought a white dress on clearance at a local department store for $30. I came straight from work, and wore khakis and a shirt and tie. My wife baked our wedding cake and made some desserts for our reception (held at the duplex into which I had moved her and the kids until we were married), which brought the total close to $200. In addition to our marriage license, my soon-to-be wife needed a form of identification, and her driver’s license from New Jersey had expired, so she ended up buying a fishing license (cheaper than a driver’s license, and she wasn’t driving my car at the time) in order for us to get our marriage recognized by the state.
Our parents were both mad at us, because they thought we were rushing into a terrible mistake, so it was a small affair. Her dad was nice enough to send flowers, which we used for her bouquet. There wasn’t a single acquaintance at our wedding, just close friends.
Though we were getting married in a public park, we refused on ideological grounds to pay the required fee (I hope the statute of limitations has run out, but if not I suppose I stand ready to answer for my civil disobedience). We made a tactical matrimonial strike on an unoccupied gazebo in a garden spot void of other wedding parties or people, and waited for the justice of the peace.
Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be seen at the appointed hour. Only my soon-to-be-wife and I knew what he looked like, so I ran through the park in the August heat until I finally found the old man shuffling along a path near a creek.
“Rev..er..end Fish..er..,” I gasped. “Over … here!”
He looked up and smiled, and I started to lead him back to the gazebo. Suddenly (and I wish I was only joking about this), a couple of young guys wearing tuxedos appeared on the bridge behind us.
“Hey,” one of them shouted. “Hey, that’s our preacher!”
I honestly had no idea what to do. At any moment, I expected the Park Police to arrive and ask me for my permit. I would be hauled away to jail on my wedding day. My new job as a reporter for the local news radio station would vanish. And my wife was, at that very moment, literally waiting at the altar for me to arrive with the good reverend.
I tried to explain that, no, this was my justice of the peace, but they were unconvinced. To this day, I have no idea why they didn’t believe me. Who on earth would lie about that? The octogenarian pastor seemed just as happy to go with the tuxedoed men as with me, which didn’t help. It wasn’t until another couple of tuxedoed members of the permitted wedding party appeared on the horizon and shouted that their preacher had been found that they let us go.
Is it any wonder that after all that I forgot the wedding vows I had written, and had to make them up on the fly?
The point is, your day will be memorable because it’s the day you start your life with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. It’s like no other day on this planet regardless of how much money you spend on it. To me it seems silly to make it a fairy tale day. Let it be about the love in your heart, not the money in somebody’s bank account (or, more likely, credit card balance or bank loan). There will be plenty of memories to treasure without being serenaded by the original cast of the Jersey Boys during your first dance.
At least one study backs me up. In 2014, researchers Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon from Emory University surveyed three thousand folks who were married, and they found that while having a high household income increases your chances of a strong marriage, “spending $1,000 or less on the wedding is significantly associated with a decrease in the hazard of divorce,” while spending more than $20,000 “is associated with an increase in the hazard of divorce.”* Maybe that’s because the high rollers are emphasizing the wrong things.
Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon, “‘A Diamond Is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration,” Social Science Research Network, September 15, 2014, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480.
Interestingly, Francis and Mialon also found that strong marriages correlate with attending church, having a child with your spouse, having a good number of people at your wedding, and going on a honeymoon. A big ring and a fancy wedding, on the other hand, don’t seem to help and may even hurt. So focus on what really matters, not the day of your wedding, but your commitment in marriage.
The Truth about Weddings
Congratulations, you’re engaged! Now stay out of the way.
In a better world, weddings would indeed be partnerships, and the bride and groom would go through each major decision in a generous spirit of compromise. But for some reason, the world has decided “it’s her day.” She gets to be the only one wearing white; you’re wearing the same tuxedo as a half-dozen other men up in front of the chapel/church/synagogue/public park. It’s as if you’re leading an assembly line of penguins.
I hope you’ve begun gathering intelligence about your bride-to-be’s views on weddings beforehand. I completely concur with Cam’s points about wedding debt, especially when you keep in mind a good portion of the day will fly by in a blur. It doesn’t need to be an Olympic opening ceremony.
Figure out what both of you really need to make your wedding day special, and cut the chaff from the wheat. Your beautiful bride-to-be deserves a wonderful, unforgettable, happy day. What she shouldn’t expect—nor should you—is “the happiest day of your life.” Talk about putting pressure on yourself! Dispel that notion every chance you get, because it’s inherently declaring that it’s all downhill from here.
I hate to break it to you, but the day isn’t really about you guys. And it may very well end up being a seesaw day of highs and lows, of cheer and stress, of laughing and ah, crap, Uncle Leo is drunk again. Once, in human civilization, weddings were happy gatherings celebrating the union of two souls and the beginning of a new family. Now we’ve decided they’re an opening endurance test of an engaged couple, a marathon of stress and Byzantine logistical details that need to be worked out to the satisfaction of way too many people.
I realize we’re swimming upstream in our culture; a vast white-lace conspiracy has decreed that weddings must be ludicrously expensive; brides should be encouraged to get in touch with their inner demanding toddler; the springs of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings must become can-you-top-this competitions of ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption—Donald Trump vs. Liberace.
If you’re contemplating a “destination wedding,” don’t. I’ll skip over a long series of profanities and just clarify that when you say, “We’re getting married in Hawaii!”* all your friends hear is, “I’ve decided what you’re doing with your savings and your vacation days!” Sure, maybe you have always dreamed of getting married on the beach in Oahu, and for you, that happy moment is worth the cost. But your potential best man, maid or matron of honor, groomsmen, and bridesmaids haven’t always dreamed of shelling out for airfare and hotel and tuxedo rental and dress purchase to go to the beach and watch you get married. Unless your aim is to get a lot of invited guests to have to politely decline, save the fun exotic travels for the honeymoon.
This assumes you don’t live in Hawaii, nor is it the hometown of the bride or groom.
If you, as a groom, really want to have a say in the details of the wedding, then prioritize—figure out what really matters to you and on what issues you’re willing to say “that’s fine.” Do you really have a strong opinion on centerpieces? As the groom, one of your traditional duties is to plan the honeymoon, which is actually a lot more fun.
You may think of the honeymoon as your reward for surviving the wedding. Just try not to say at the conclusion of the wedding, “We’ve now shared a very special moment with all of you, and we’ve never felt so close. Now we can’t wait to get on a plane and get an entire continent away from all of you people, so we can go and have sex in peace.”
My wife and I were the first in our circle of friends to get married, which meant we were the guinea pigs. As you attend and participate in weddings, you learn parts you like and don’t like.
If you have a head table, you can only talk to the people on your left and your right. If your table is a circle, you can at least theoretically talk to more than one person.
One of our friends had the groomsmen—which included me—have some special dance with the bridesmaids—which didn’t include my wife. This arrangement would not be my first choice. I’m a self-conscious dancer, while my wife might as well be Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. If I absolutely have to go on the dance floor in front of a lot of people, I want to get credit for doing so with my wife.
I had all three of my groomsmen give toasts; natural hams, they all excelled at them. There’s nothing wrong with multiple toasts if they’re quick—funny, funny, funny, funny, sweet, end. If any of your relatives have the public speaking instincts of Fidel Castro, warn the DJ or band to have a version of the Oscar time-to-get-off-the-stage music ready to go on your signal.
The dance between the father of the bride and the bride is always sweet. The dance between the mother of the groom and the groom is tougher, because there aren’t a heck of a lot of songs that are (A) about love, but not romantic and (B) danceable for the dance-challenged guy like myself and sweet old mom.
Looking back, my wife and I have only the regret that we went along with a couple concepts out of loyalty to tradition that we thought were necessary, and we’ve concluded we didn’t need them at all.
Nobody smushed cake in each other’s face at our wedding.
I can only assume that tradition came from divorce lawyers who asked, “Hey, how can we ensure a marriage gets off on the wrong foot immediately?”
“Okay, people, our caseload is getting thin, we need some ideas to sow marital discord early on. Let’s go around the room, just say the first idea that pops into your mind—Wilkins, whaddya got?”
“Um, uh, have the bride and groom smash pieces of expensive cake in each other’s faces, while everyone’s taking pictures, when they’re wearing some of the most expensive clothes they’ll ever wear, and she’s spent half the day completing her makeup and hair!”
“Love it! Let’s start talking this up as a fun, loveable, harmless tradition!”
But cake-smushing is small potatoes compared to the Freudian psychosexual public ritual involving the bride’s garter.
Tossing the garter—where the hell did this twisted tradition come from? Everyone has just gathered in a church to pledge their love for each other before God and everyone they know. The bride is wearing white, and the only reference to sex so far has been the always uncomfortable reading of “My lover is like a swift gazelle or a young stag” from Song of Solomon during the ceremony. And then, all of a sudden, everyone—Grandma, Aunt Edna, Uncle Leo—get together and watch the groom try to get to third base under the wedding dress. What the hell? “Hey, bring over the young nieces and nephews, make sure they get a good look at this!”
(I looked it up and found out this is a European tradition. Figures.)
As if all of this wasn’t bizarre and embarrassing enough, the groom then tosses the garter to the single male guests. Now, I’m a pretty traditional, old-fashioned guy, but this practice feels like it goes back to cavemen—or at least the Vikings. Why am I sharing my wife’s lingerie? Why am I sharing my wife’s lingerie in front of everyone I know, including elderly relatives? Under what other circumstances would this not be creepy and weird? Try this at Thanksgiving, and see how long it takes until someone calls the cops.
“Look! Fellow men! I have determined that my bride wore lace high upon her thigh! I have removed it, and I will toss it to the mass of ye rampaging jackals, and you are to claw each other for the right to hold my beloved’s dainty undergarment!”
The bride tosses the bouquet. Then—as if wedding traditions were put together by some twisted reality television show producer—the guy who caught the garter is supposed to put the garter onto the leg—thigh and points north—of the woman who caught the bouquet. Ooh, forced sexual contact between random strangers! Quick, gather around all the distant relatives and coworkers! Take pictures!
How wrong can this go? Well, I remember one wedding where my good friend caught the garter—I had gotten married and was quite happy to be able to opt out of the Larry Flynt-sponsored aerodynamic matchmaking ritual—and the bouquet was caught by … a twelve-year-old girl who had run out, wanting to catch the bouquet and not really understanding the connotation.
Awk-ward.
At that wedding, they thankfully skipped the second half of that bizarre, twisted tradition.
It’s one tradition to drop.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
He did it—he got married (to his high school and college sweetheart).