Interlude: The Marriage Rule, and the Big Question

DK and BK: a marriage that worked/works.

This series describes my Vermont “country life” of 1978 to 2002. I won’t be writing about the years 2002–2017 for this, so it’s no spoiler to say these later ones are the years of my third (and final) marriage, which ended in my husband D’s death from cancer. It’s been, and in a strange way still is, a marriage that really works, with a lot of joy and strength.

D and I used to observe the people around us in terms of what we came to call “The Marriage Rule”: If one person’s obviously messed up and crazy, and the other seems perfectly normal … the second person is just better at hiding it. People don’t stay together for more than a second date, unless they each are gaining something from the relationship.

My marriage to R clearly had flaws — maybe better described as volcanic fault lines. One involved his consuming passion for firearms, which, coupled with a lack of forethought, created some dangerous moments that are way too memorable. The second involved a pattern where he raged against the unfairness of his life and things that broke and things that disappointed him, roaring and smashing things as small as a plate, as large as a car, and I ducked for cover. Many people would have walked away from such a relationship pretty early. I stayed for nine action-packed years, including the conception and birth of two sons.

So the Big Question is: Why? Was there something I gained from this?

I’ve come to see it as fulfilling an instruction manual for life that dates back to my parents … and to theirs. Watch for clues. There is, in fact, a Big Answer.