Never Go To Bed Angry, Don't Watch Screens at Bedtime, and Other Various Pieces of Advice that Occasionally Fall Apart in the Face of Real Life
They say you should never go to bed angry with your spouse, which in theory is all well and good and something we tried hard to practice in our early marriage years, except I’m (occasionally) a passive-aggressive Enneagram 9 who waits too long to get in the first word, so that by the time I start telling Maile how angry I am about something, she’s asleep. Reality is often where good advice goes to die.
Being self-employed parents of six children, we rarely have the energy to hash things out once the room has gone dark. We lie there, weighing up the benefits of entering into the difficult conversations, and by the time one of us decides that, yes, we should talk about it, the other person is asleep.
On one such night, after realizing that our argument had faded into the gentle sounds of Maile dreaming, and me still feeling the sharpness of discontent, I ponderously rolled out of bed, hoping the deliberate movement would wake her. But no, she slept on, like a baby, so to speak. So I stomped to the door and opened it loudly…her only response, the continued sound of her gentle breathing.
Fine.
I retreated to the boys’ bedroom, where the bottom bunk remained vacant, since a few of our children are neanderthals and prefer sleeping on the floor. Maybe if Maile woke up in the middle of the night, she’d realize my side of the bed was empty and feel immediate remorse. I imagined her wandering the house, looking for me, finding me in the single bunkbed, tilting her head to the side, forgiving me for everything and realizing just how wrong she had been.
That did not happen.
They say you should never look at screens while you’re in bed, but I was still feeling agitated, so, in the cozy confines of the lower bunk, I pulled out my phone and doom-scrolled various social media feeds. By this time, it was 2 a.m. The house was silent apart from the droning of box fans. Our dog came in, probably wondering what in the world I was doing, stood there wagging her tail at me, and when I didn’t get up and follow her back to my bedroom, she sighed, curled up beside me, and went to sleep.
It was when I was doom-scrolling that I found out friends of ours were splitting up. Irreconcilable differences. An unexpected (at least for me) parting of ways after a long period of growing apart. Who knows the details, none of my business, and even though we hadn’t hung out with this couple for a long time, it made me very, very sad.
There I was, alone in the bottom bunk, feeling anxious and frustrated with Maile, reading about another couple who had probably felt that way, too, over and over again, until it was preferable to live apart.
And, there in the boys’ room, I could understand. I grew up being taught divorce was a sin, and so as a teen and young adult I had a very judgmental view of anyone who got divorced. Surely they didn’t try hard enough! They should have gone to counseling! Why were they being so stubborn!
But now, in my 47th year of life, and our 24th year of marriage, reality paints a different picture of relationships, one where people grow apart and back together again, and apart, and sideways, and maybe back together, if you’re fortunate. I feel less disappointed with my divorced friends than I do completely flabbergasted that any marriage lasts, that two separate people can somehow keep coming up with reasons to stay together, keep saying, “I do.”
I was sad for my friends,. I ached for them, knowing that sensation when the person you live with is making you insane, and you feel yourselves growing apart, feeling lost, and I was sorry for the complication that breaking up can bring into a life.
But mostly I hoped they were finding relief apart, and peace, and love in new ways, from new sources.
They say you should never go to bed angry.
I can’t remember what Maile and I were fighting about that night. That’s the ironic thing, isn’t it? That something could so consume me in the moment, but literally a few months later the details escape me?
But I do remember waking up around 4 in the morning, stumbling through the dark, tripping over a plastic nerf gun, feeling Winnie’s questioning gaze and then hearing her light paws following me back to the bedroom. I felt my way to the bed and tried to crawl in without disturbing Maile and lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to her breathing. Eventually, slowly, with a sigh, I moved my hand, ever so slightly, towards her side of the bed. Her hand lifted in her sleep, without even knowing it, and came to rest on mine, barely touching.
Sometimes, you count marriage in 50-year celebrations, and sometimes it’s in decades. Sometimes you mark its passing in years, and early on, you count the months. But sometimes, later, when you sometimes go to bed angry, you count the passing of a marriage in a night, or in hours, or even minutes—the minute it takes to come back from the boys’ room, the second it takes to reach over, the moment it takes to feel her hand come to rest on yours.
People sometimes look at us when they hear that we're celebrating 39 years this year, and ask us what the secret is. There are no secrets to a happy marriage that I know of. People say you have to fight to make it work, an old man I once met said the secret was to hope you don't fall out of love at the same time. That made sense. We say the answer is humour.
I ran across a poem in Ada Calhoun’s “Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give” called “The Longly Weds Know” and your post reminded me of it. I think you’d like it. Beautiful writing!