28 Years of Marriage

And reflections on two marriage memoirs

This August, Ryan and I will celebrate 28 years of marriage. In June, we will also celebrate the wedding of our oldest daughter, Audrey. She and her fiancé are 23 and 24 respectively. Like everyone who marries young, they can have no real sense of the potential scope of time between “I do” and “Until death do us part.” I recently read a wonderful line about marriage, that it isn’t just about making promises but about “surviving each other’s changes.” That feels right to me. (And before I start blabbing on about marriage, please go and read this gorgeous essay by Karen Stiller about what happens when death finally does part husband and wife.)

At the beginning of marriage, we have and hold, for better and for worse smooth-skinned versions of ourselves. Those are naïve promises—promissory notes written with no clear idea of the amount owed. Years into the enterprise, we have and hold different people than the ones we married. It’s not just our bodies that do the changing during those years. It’s our desires, our longings, our experience of the world, our ever-expanding repertoire of pain and suffering. What a miracle, what a grace, that any of us can keep at the having and holding. When one of our children said to us recently, “You guys have a great marriage!” I wanted to ask, “Which marriage do you mean?” There have been as many marriages in these 28 years as people.

I was thinking about marriage a lot when, last summer, I read Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make this Place Beautiful. Key tells a story of his wife’s lying and cheating; his marriage was saved. Smith’s book traces a similar plot, though it ends very differently; her marriage breaks irreparably. I thought of Smith’s book recently when a Substack reader brought it up as a connection to my recent post about leaving a story or leading a life.

In How to Stay Married, Key is irreverent, funny, and self-implicating, and his narrative is propulsive. So many people have loved this book, including Ryan. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if this isn’t the kind of story, redemptive and beautiful though it is, that needs more time. (His wife’s last infidelity was in 2021; the book was presumably handed into publishers sometime in 2022 for a 2023 publication.) Perhaps Key meant the book as a way to confirm the repair they both attempted. He would release the book and publicly remind himself of the forgiveness he had granted and was continuing to grant, no matter how many times he was tempted toward a rehearsal of wrongs. But if he were my friend, I might have said gently, Let the story settle a little bit. See what it says in 5 or 10 years.

Poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a very, very different book than Key’s. Smith’s memoir is a collage of questions with which she was left after her husband’s betrayal—how to carry this, how to set it down, how to forgive, where did it go, what is mine, how to grieve, how to remain myself, how to heal, how to live with the mystery, how to change, how to make this place beautiful. Smith’s writing is imagistic, fresh, honest—but also far more discreet than Key’s. As Smith says at the very beginning, hers isn’t a tell-all book, but a “tell-mine.” Truthfully, I think hers a wiser tact. Our stories are never entirely ours, and there’s a lot of honor we show in protecting the stories that others may never have the public privilege to share. (To be fair, in Key’s memoir, his wife is afforded the opportunity to write a chapter in her own words.)

“Tell-mine” is a concept Smith complicates in her story. How neatly can “mine” be separated from “his” and “ours,” given the twenty shared years between her and her husband? The “tell-all” book might have satisfied some readers, but as Smith asks readers at the moment she confronts her husband with the incriminating evidence she’s found in his leather work bag, “Why would you want to be in that room with us? Why would you want to see the faded turquoise quilt on our bed, and the laundry basket full of clean, folded clothes near the closet doors, and the narrow sliver of streetlight making its way through a crack in the curtains? Maybe I’m sparing you something.”¹

Smith is clear to identify her work—and her work travel and work success—as a sticking point in their marriage and reasons her husband found for resentment. She described feeling “that I needed permission, authorization, to clock out, log off, hand the work to someone else for a few days.”² The lopsided version of marriage partnership that Smith depicts is one I would have recognized from years ago in my own domestic arrangement. Gratefully, it is not the marriage I currently have. We marry young versions of ourselves, presumably more selfish iterations, but here’s the thing: people can grow. This is at least what I’ve told a young woman recently, who was looking for marriage advice. I told her: find someone who seems committed to grow.

Although Smith’s book is lyrical and profound at points, Smith ends up arriving at a binary between marriage and self that I just can’t concede. “Walking home from our last counseling session, I knew,” she writes. “We’d separate, definitely. Divorce, maybe. He’d get his own place, at least for a while. We’d have the family talk that breaks kids’ hearts. I’d been trying to save the marriage, but I needed to save myself.”³ Her memoir ends with a poem she published in The New Yorker after the divorce. The poem is entitled, “Bride,” and it concludes like this:

I do. I am my own bride,

lifting the veil to see

my face. Darling, I say,

I have waited for you all my life.

Smith’s question is urgent: Can we save a marriage and somehow also find a self? Or does the commitment to covenantal commitment somehow enforce an abnegation of the self? (Insert Smith’s preoccupation here, that what’s really at stake is the self of the wife and more rarely, the self of the husband.) This is a question that many people ask, whether they are thinking of ending a marriage or beginning one.

I can certainly say that after 27 years, there is more self-forsaking in marriage than seems comfortable. It has not been possible for Ryan and me, over the years, to pursue our individual dreams and ambitions at the same pace at the very same time. There was certainly a way in which, in choosing our marriage, we have been constrained in ways difficult and uncompromising. But I don’t know what otherwise might have been done, if the having and holding was to hold.

Smith’s marriage fell apart. She had proof that her husband had been lying to her, had been visiting another woman in another city, and she lamented the eventual loss of her marriage. I am certainly not here to judge her. Judging isn’t the point of reading, really. But I’d like to press her further when she binds us to a binary between marriage and self. Because as she’s already said, when a marriage is lost, selves are lost too: selves of the former love, of the altar, of the marriage bed, of the shared years. There is a tangled togetherness not so easily undone, even when papers are signed.

“You know what one of the saddest damn things is?” Smith asked her therapist. “One of the parts of all this that I’m grieving the most? When I lost my marriage, I lost all that shared history. I lost the person who knew me in a way no one else does, and when I lost him, I also lost being known like that.”⁴

It isn’t that neat after all, this fault line between self and marriage, between I and we.  Maybe I could even say it like this, as a Christian: that in holding to our spouse, we hold also to ourselves, if also to God. Because this is the logic of the commandments in the Christian faith: to love our neighbor is to love God is to love ourselves. Just as no love for God will be hatred to our neighbor, no love for neighbor will be hatred to the self.

As a Christian, Key knows this. He forgives his wife, and this isn’t simple an act of mercy for her but for himself and also his children. His scandalous story of forgiveness looks, in Jesus’ words, a little like losing his life in order to save it. It is, as the sub-title reports, the “most insane love story ever told.”

1. Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, (New York: Attria, 2023), 6.

2. Ibid., 102.

3. Ibid., 100.

4. Ibid., 275.