If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (23 page)

“Have you even met Robin?” I asked suddenly, referring of course to the thoughtful mystery bride.

“Sure,” he said. “She comes to watch Kent play ball sometimes. She’s great.”

“You never told me that any of the
wives
come to watch you guys,” I said angrily.

“Oh, they don’t,” he replied. “Only the girlfriends.”

For some reason this infuriated me. All of a sudden I felt like Joe had this whole secret life that I knew absolutely nothing about, a life that only
girlfriends
were invited to participate in.

“I think you’ll really like Matty and Tony’s wives, too,” he added sheepishly, struggling to mollify me.
Who?
And just like that it dawned on me: This wasn’t going to be the romantic little getaway I’ d envisioned; it was going to be a flipping fiveday bachelor party and I was going to be stuck with a posse of equally bitter and bitchy wives with whom I would surely have nothing in common or else why hadn’t I ever been introduced to them before? I snatched both massage certificates out of the bucket and told Joe I’d be back in a few hours.

The first big pre-wedding fiesta of many in the exhausting schedule of events was that night. I met the impending newlyweds, and they were shockingly lovely. Then Joe introduced me to the rest of the guys and
their
wives, and again I couldn’t believe how cool everyone was. How on earth had my husband kept all of these people from me, and more important—why? We were always looking for other couples to double-date with and invite over for barbecues and swap free child care with; I just didn’t understand why Joe had never arranged a meeting.

“We play basketball,” was Joe’s nonsensical response.

“I can see how you might not be running up and down the court talking about your deepest feelings or sharing your best marital advice or bragging about how amazing your wives are in the sack,” I conceded. “But you guys go out after you play every single week! What do you talk about all night?”

“Talk about?” he asked, genuinely perplexed. “We don’t really talk. We just, you know, drink beer and watch whatever game is on in the bar.”

My husband has a theory about friendship that I don’t quite share, and after careful consideration I have decided that it must be a guy thing. Distilled down to its essence, Joe’s philosophy goes like this: “You don’t really know someone until you play sports together.” I get what he’s saying in theory—that a person can claim or even pretend to be honest and fair and considerate and all of that crap, but if he’s a ball hog on the court or the type to cry foul when the play was obviously good or isn’t a gracious loser, his core is rotten so you might as well save yourself the trouble of getting to know him any better. But I have hundreds of friends (not even counting Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and LinkedIn) and I’ve known many of them for decades and would swear that I “know” them as well as you can ever know another human being, even though we have never once tossed a Frisbee back and forth or swatted a tennis ball at each other or even gone for a nice Rollerblade together. I have forged lifetime alliances with these women (and a handful of men, despite what Harry told Sally) through long, meaningful conversations, shared play dates with our kids, hairdresser recommendations and breakups, endless recipe and book exchanges, miserable lice outbreaks, summer camp carpools, and in many cases an ocean of wine. We call each other on our birthdays, celebrate each other’s achievements, bake each other lasagna when we have babies or surgery or just a little extra time, justify each other’s purchases, borrow each other’s champagne flutes and cowboy boots and suitcases, hold each other’s hair when the other has to puke even if we’re putting ourselves at risk because the puking is from the stomach flu and not a wild night out on the town, and mourn each other’s losses—whether it’s a breast or a parent or a job or a worthless cheating spouse that’s gone—as if they were our own.

My husband? Not so much. He can probably tell you the year, make, and model of the vehicles most of his friends drive, and whether they are left- or right-handed. (It’s a sports thing.) He might know where they went to college, if that establishment had or has a decent hockey/football/basketball team, and if they’ve ever spent any time in jail. Beyond that, his buddies could be a bunch of banjo-playing cross-dressers and Joe would be oblivious to it.

“Did Kurt find a job yet?” I’ll inquire.

“I dunno,” Joe replies.

“You had lunch with him yesterday,” I remind him.

“Yeah, I forgot to ask,” he admits.

“What did you talk about?” I ask.

“Stuff, the Celtics, I don’t know,” Joe mumbles. “I think he said he got a dog, or he was thinking about getting a dog or maybe his dog died.”

Because of our fundamentally different approaches to forging and maintaining friendships, you can imagine how fun it is when we are courting a new couple.

My husband hems and he haws and he rumbles and he grumbles and I just know that having them over won’t be any fun at all because I’ll have to carry the entire conversation (“You’re the social one,” Joe always insists), which is exhausting, so I say good-bye to my group-vacation fantasies starring Jack and Meg. They have a boat, too, damn it. It truly is a shame.

Like most people, we have Caller ID at home. If my husband doesn’t recognize the caller’s name or if he doesn’t
like
the person calling, either he won’t answer the phone or he’ll pick up the receiver and then immediately hang it up. This has to be the hardest thing for me because I think it’s terribly rude. He says, “It’s my phone and I’m not talking to anyone I don’t want to talk to.” It’s very annoying.

THRESEA

 

 

A landmark study out of UCLA a few years ago confirmed what scores of women could have told the researchers before they sacrificed years of their lives to gathering data: Women rely on their friends to reduce stress. Before this particular study—when the majority of stress-related research had been performed exclusively on men and then the results had incorrectly been extrapolated to pertain to women, too—the theory was that stress in
both
sexes resulted in the infamous “fight or flight” response. In other words, whether you had a penis or a vagina, when the going got tough you either stood up and faced the music or bolted to safety. But the UCLA study found that the complex female brain actually has a larger behavioral repertoire than the male brain. A woman under stress produces the hormone oxytocin, which makes her want to cuddle her children and gather with other women. (Men produce the bonding hormone, too—but the extra testosterone they crank out when anxious or upset all but cancels out the attachment urge.) The more a woman engages with her kids and her cronies, the more oxytocin she releases, which further mellows her out while fueling her need for even more closeness. It’s a lovely and positive little cycle that plainly illustrates how good begets good and proves that women, therefore, rock. This is why we gals, after mulling a marital spat over with our girlfriends for a nonstop day or two, are usually ready to move on, while our partners are over there teeming with testosterone, pounding their fists and sprouting new body hairs and humping the arm of the couch.

My friend Leah and I were discussing the differences between male and female friendships, and we decided that it all boils down to our
Homo habilis
roots: Men hunt, women gather. Hunting, by nature, is a pretty noiseless pursuit. Talking shop while you’re stalking prey just isn’t a pastime that’s going to pay off out in the field or in the forest. But for the ladies, what’s the sense in biting our tongues while we gather? There isn’t any! We are free to gossip and grouse because it’s not like we’re going to scare the cherries away. We discuss what we’re gathering, why we’re gathering, and how we’re gathering. We talk about the most energy-saving, time-efficient, and economical ways to gather. We discuss who’s not gathering enough and who’s gathering too much and who could really use a bigger loincloth, if you know what I mean. We ask our friends, “Does this basket make me look fat while I’m gathering?”

Because Joe is biologically built to hunt and hump and not congregate with other men to forge deep and spiritually fulfilling friendships, he has a hard time understanding many of mine. He marvels at the fact that I know so many of these women’s phone numbers by heart and can recall the names of their hundreds of spouses and billions of collective children.

“Jerry?” he’ll whisper quietly, even though we are alone in the car.

“Jason,” I sigh. We’re on the way to dinner at the home of our friends Jason and Cheryl, where we’ve been a half-dozen times before. Sure, Cheryl was my friend first, but Joe and I met Jason at exactly the same time—more than ten years ago.

“And what’s the son’s name again?” Joe asks.

“Twin girls, Abby and Ashley,” I say, shaking my head.

“Right, Abby and Ashley,” he repeats. “They play water polo or something, right?”

“Track,” I deadpan. “They run track.”

“And Jerry’s in sales of some kind?” he asks.

“Jason
is my doctor! You saw him last year when you had strep throat and you couldn’t get in to see your regular doctor. You talked to
Jason
about buying his office building last time they were over for dinner.
Jason
played college football with some guy you knew growing up.
Jason’s
mom went to the same high school as your dad but five years later, so they never met. Is any of this ringing a bell?
”

“Jesus, Jenna, no wonder you can never find your car keys,” Joe says. “You’ve got all of
that
crap in your brain.”

My adorable, wonderful husband refuses to engage when it comes to acknowledging special occasions for
his
family. Every birthday, Christmas, or anniversary, it’s up to me to send a card or gift. And if it doesn’t get done, I get this weird sense that it reflects poorly not on him, but on me! He’s always like, “Well, I’ll call them.” For real? We are going to throw them a last-minute phone call? Why is my awesome man such a goober in this one area?

DIANE

 

*But you probably are, because don’t all husbands do this?

 

 

At least we can choose our friends; family is another matter. And when you marry someone, it’s not a one-shot deal. You get the whole famdamily, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse. It’s one of the greatest benefits to hooking up, in fact. If your families are equally fabulous, you get to share in the wealth; if one or both of them suck, at least now you’ve got someone to commiserate with and who can help diffuse the misery.

Beyond the basic male/female differences, saying that Joe and I were raised with dissimilar parenting styles in divergent environments is like saying mice and snakes sometimes have trouble snuggling. The youngest of four kids raised mostly by a very stoic, old-school dad, my husband is uncomfortable with conflict and tends toward all things conservative. Before I met Joe Sr. for the first time, my future husband described him thusly: “My dad doesn’t talk a lot, but what he says matters.” My own parents, on the other hand, fought and swore openly and robustly, and the definitive “winner” in any family argument was the one who yelled the loudest or slammed the door the hardest. Dad was a hilarious and extremely quirky son of a bitch, the sort who used the words
Democrat
and
Communist
interchangeably and found it sidesplitting to greet my new boyfriends with a friendly “So, are you banging my daughter yet?” At the dinner table we talked about having periods and smoking pot, and if you had an opinion you shared it without daring to care that someone else might disagree. On Christmas morning, whoever woke up first hollered until the rest of the family was good and awake, and then we raced to the tree and tore into our gifts simultaneously like a school of ravenous piranhas attacking a pile of bloody limbs. In Joe’s highly civilized household, everyone took turns slowly opening and appreciating one present at a time, often after showers had been taken and the breakfast dishes had been cleared. I don’t envy his past, nor does he pity mine; they simply were what they were, and we are what we are because of them. Which has made years of family get-togethers interesting, to say the least.

“Everyone is so . . . quiet,” I whispered to Joe upon first meeting his brood. I was starting to feel itchy.

“Do they ever stop talking?” Joe whispered to me upon first meeting mine. He was beginning to sweat.

For a while there, it took a paper-scissors-rock showdown to decide which group we’d spend our precious holiday and vacation days with, as each of us fervently preferred the comfortable companionship of our own (some of them admittedly crazy) kin. But a decade and a half later, both Joe and I have learned to embrace the benefits of our relative differences. I’ve come to appreciate how easy Joe’s family is to be around, and—especially now that we have kids of our own—I find their near-silent civility delightful and refreshing. Learning to mind my mouth and my manners has made me a better mother (although I still swear like a sailor in private—and in print—so I hope none of them are reading this, because that would certainly blow my carefully constructed cover). For his part, Joe has loosened up considerably, stockpiling his dirtiest jokes and most inappropriate stories to share with my people when they gather to drink too much. Because that’s what you do when you love someone.