Everyone Has to Figure It Out on Their Own

This pertains to marriage. 

We had lunch the other day with a former student of Jerry's and his wife.  They had an announcement to make:  They're going to have a baby!  Congratulations!  They've bought a house!  More congratulations! 

"The house has four bedrooms," they told us.  "And we each have a study.  We thought about the two of you."

As though we're a  Marriage Model.  Isn't that flattering?  I thought back to the last time we saw them, how they stayed until 2 am asking us about our marriage, how we make things work.  They seemed hungry for information.  How do we deal with Jerry's frequent field trips?  How do we make sure we each have alone time?  The list went on.

When Jerry and I were working out a lot of this, I remember looking around for a couple we could use as a model.  No go.  We didn't know any couples who had a marriage that looked like the right model for us.   I remember wailing to my therapist about this. 

"You have to figure it out for yourselves," he said.   "Do what's right for you."

Like taking two cars on vacation, having two studys (not unusual at all now, but it seemed to be then, especially when you sacrifice a guest room to achieve it, and it's the wife's), accepting time apart as a good thing.

But now, I think our usefulness as a model has pretty much ended for Dan and Michelle.  We chose not to have a child.  I can tell them that sabbaticals can be wretched for the accompanying spouse (Dan's a professor), that it's important for each person to have a separate source of money (Michelle's a teacher), that you don't have to wait around on the trail while the field biologist catches moths. 

But I can't advise on adding children to the mix. I can say only that you can have a fine, enduring marriage without them, and people seem to have  happy marriages with them.  Good luck with all that, which is pretty much what my therapist said to me.  Get to work.