WHO AM I TO GIVE MARITAL ADVICE, you ask?
So many smart people have already weighed in on the subject!
I’m glad that Sari Botton wasn’t worried about my credentials as a connubial commentator. Experience doesn’t always translate to expertise—I mean, Donald Trump is both older than dirt and dumber than dirt, so go figure.
But I have been married for thirty-nine years, which testifies either to bad judgment on my wife’s part, or certain skills that each of us has developed, given my long history of screwing up.
I distilled our cautionary romcom into a recent column for The Oldster Magazine, and that became a flood of new subscribers to the Road2Elsewhere. Everybody wins!
If you’ve been here a while, may I ask why…um…you’re not a paid subscriber yet? Perhaps I may offer a bit of an enticement? If you click the “subscribe” button below, you’ll find my special midsummer pricing on a subscription.
The livin’ is easy! So’s the subscribin’!
Below, you’ll find an amuse bouche of nuptial delicacies (huh?) to fuel, or safeguard, a step down the aisle. If you enjoy it, say “I do!” in the comments, along with your best unsolicited marital advice, so Sari will invite me to discuss, the alchemy of lead into gold, the conjugation of irregular French verbs, and the delights of multivariate calculus. With drawings!
Oldster Magazine and Peter Moore
Text and all illustrations by Peter Moore.
THE OFFICIANT WAS PEPPERING my fiancée and me with questions.
How long had we been together?
Why were we getting married when there were so many alternatives to marriage?
Did we want kids, and if so, how many?
Had we merged finances?
And how were our parents’ marriages, anyway?
We were overwhelmed by all this, so okay, maybe we were guilty of dodging full answers. We just wanted rose petals to be strewn in our path, not to contemplate reality until death—or boredom!—do us part.
That’s when the minister leveled us with an Old-Testament-prophet gaze and said: “A marriage can’t end well. Either you’ll fall out of love and split up, or one of you will die and leave the other alone. So this relationship had better be worth it.”
Ouch. Nice job stuffing the cork back into the champagne bottle, Rev!
Still, we seem to have passed the exam. At the end of May, we celebrated a very Oldster event: Our 39th wedding anniversary. Only a third of marriages last that long. The rest are like the ones enjoyed by my buddy Theo, who married once per decade from the 80s onward. He has a lot of marital experience, too, but maybe not the right kind.
Each year in the U.S. about 2 million couples make their way toward the altar, uttering the magic words “I do.” But maybe they should be asking questions, instead. The scary bit: each of these questions can lead to relationship interruptus, if unaddressed.
So, as our minister told us: You better get it right.
1. Who are you, exactly? No, really. Who?
In 1987, when Claire and I wed, the average age for a first marriage was 26 for men, and 24 for women. Not exactly the golden moments for self-knowledge, right? By 2022, those first-marriage ages had risen to 30 for men and 29 for women—about where Claire and I were on our big day. Today’s married people will have been around the block a few times, which is good: They’re more likely to know why they’re saying “I do,” and who they’re saying “I do” to.
2. Wait. Sex isn’t everything?
For a decade I worked at Playboy magazine, back when that still meant something. But before then I thought of it as “the sex magazine for men who aren’t having sex.” All fantasy, no engagement. What happens when the fantasy ages out, and you still have your body and your needs, and so does your partner? In a seasoned relationship, lust can give way to listening. And listening goes straight to your head. That’s the path to sustainable sex.
EVEN MORE, AND BETTER, ADVICE + DRAWINGS AT OLDSTER.SUBSTACK.COM….
There’s more to know about our wedding. For one thing, it was covered in the New York Times. The day after out wedding, we opened the Newspaper of Record to find this:
And yes—the Times made a mistake! Claire McCrea retained her own terrific name, with all of its delightful alliteration, after our marriage.
And good for her.
Meanwhile, I norted everything about our wedding in my Daily Journal of Record, entry #3,152. So, you’ll receive a closer view of this than my mom did, and she was in the front row!
Here comes the bride.
30 MAY 1987
I SLEPT OK on wedding eve, with only a minimum of ceiling-staring. I had a fitful breakfast at my parents’ condo, then [best man] Don and [groomsman] Mike blessedly came by to shepherd me through this day of days.
And I needed shepherding!
First, I drove them east to their hotel when they wanted to go west to New Haven, then I missed the exit on I-95. Finally we returned to the Trumbull Marriott for an afternoon languishing around the pool. I had one beer and an incredibly expensive hamburger, and Don [lawyer] and Mike [Catholic priest] watched over me as I swam laps and listened sympathetically as I mumbled.
We waited forever for our poolside meal service, then ran back to the rooms to change our clothes for the wedding.
My wedding!
I hopped into the shower and had the immediate sensation that my vision was going blurry. I was having a stroke!
Oh wait, no, I’d forgotten to take off my glasses along with the rest of my clothes.
I’d never done that before. Just like marriage.
After a few fumbling attempts, I finally knotted my bowtie, then pulled on my double-breasted blazer from Burberry. Everyone agreed that yes, by God, I looked like a groom.
We left for [Claire’s childhood home] in Bethany at about 2:30 and arrived a half an hour later—one hour to game time.
Nobody cares about the male members of a wedding party—as long as they show up, that is. So my groomsmen and I hid in the bushes and courted the breezes, as slack as they were. This was the hottest May 30th in Connecticut history, which led my brother (an electrical engineer) to observe that our relationship would be heat-annealed, for durability.
The minutes passed, in the shrubbery. Finally my dad suggested that we go into the house—AC-less and steaming—and suffer like the women, so we did.
But not for long.
Soon we were choosing up sides for the processional, and I caught my first glimpse of my bride, on wedding day.
Heartbeat time!
The string quartet struck up the processional—Pachelbel’s Kanon in D—and my mother slipped her arm into mine. In a low voice, she began, “Well, Peter, this is such an important day of love, for your lifetime….”
I hissed “Don’t start, mom!,” lest she turn me to jelly on the most important public occasion of my life. She put a cork in it, and I had gathered my composure by the time I reached the altar.
Claire was there, too, which made it more fun.
I was nervous throughout the ceremony, but maintained the illusion of being an upright person by leaning strongly to left, against the terrain in Claire’s side yard.
I enjoyed singing the hymns—Simple Gifts, Song of Thanksgiving—to dissipate the tension, and I was strong and steady of voice during the vows. Yes I said yes I will yes, just like Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. Claire was appropriately, beautifully tearful during her vows, and that was as it should be.
The only glitch came as our minister somehow failed to cough up his magic words: ”By the authority vested in me by the state of Connecticut, I now pronounces you stuck together by fate and circumstance.”
But, no.
Instead he whisper-shouted “Go!” at us, and flicked his wrists vehemently. The quartet had been listening for the same concluding phrase, so they failed to strike up our recessional—Brandenburg Concerto #3, Allegro.
We sprinted back up the aisle in silence—like fugitives from the land of single people!
After the ceremony, my mom wrinkled her brow and asked: “So is it official? The minister never pronounced you husband and wife!”
Legit or not, we formed a receiving line, and I gave a lot of people sweaty, soggy hugs and smooches. But hey, they were dripping, too, so it was only fair.
Next we gathered in the side yard for the presentation of a marriage quilt with squares decorated by our families and friends. Claire’s brother John, who’d orchestrated the project, used an heirloom sword to point out the highlights of the quilt .
And perhaps to remind his new brother-in-law to treat his sister well, or he might use that sword to amputate some of my personal flaws.
A bit later Claire and I escaped to her childhood bedroom for our first moments alone as husband and wife. I fetched her a glass of cranberry punch. It was a hot day! I was in love! I was feeling generous!
The glass had a few ice cubes and an orange slice in it. When she tipped it to her lips, the orange slice flipped forward and sent a cascade of crimson liquid onto her white dress. It was like that ghastly scene in The Deer Hunter, where a bride drips red wine onto her chest, foreshadowing the violence of Vietnam.
Only, this wasn’t foreshadowing, this was the beginning of our married life, and we hadn’t yet taken any photos of that formerly snowy, now vividly stained, dress!
After panicking, a lot, we launched a useful dialogue:
Groom: “Who has experience dealing with food stains?
Bride: “A caterer!”
Well, the photos were saved, anyway. We’ll have to work on the marriage part.
Still shaken by cranberrypocalypse, we walked out into the backyard, people cheered, and we took photographs with absolutely everyone. Dinner broke that up, or we’d still be there, still grinning. My cheek muscles were exhausted!
Now began my evening of brief encounters with people–50 seconds here, a minute there, for hours. My best man gave a wonderful toast, calling these major occasions—birth, marriage, death—the constellations that guide us through life. Then Claire’s brother Pierre rose up to question what Claire was doing, leaving a family of three brothers to join one with four. The crowd roared. Then he reduced us to tears by invoking Claire’s late father, who died when the bride was nine years old.
Thanks for everything, Jack McCrea.
Jack wasn’t the only hero that evening, however.
Dave Clement, M.D., the obstetrician who had ushered Claire into the world thirty years earlier, put in a word for the bride, as the man who encouraged her first breaths as a newborn.
He would also prove to be the hero of Yikes III, when Claire’s stepdad Ed shifted in his chair, which caused the chair legs to sink into the lawn, which pitched him over sideways. He hurtled toward the table bearing the wedding cake.
It was much noted that Dave caught the bride at her birth, then caught the cake at her wedding.
They don’t make doctors like that anymore.
After the cake-cutting ceremony—we used that sword, again—the dancing began. First an oldies tape—I included my mom’s favorite song, The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B—and then a youngies–tape, laced with Talking Heads.
We had quoted the lyrics from “Naive Melody/This Must be the Place” on the wedding program.
I can’t tell one from another Did I find you, or you find me? There was a time before we were born If someone asks, this where is we’ll be, where we’ll be…
Love me ‘til I’m dead Eyes that light up, eyes look through you Cover up the blank spots Hit me on the head
And you love me ‘til my heart stops
I’ve got you-oo-oo-ooo-oooo—ooooooooo…..
After we’d enjoyed five hours of well-wishing, my bride proposed that we leave the reception. Good idea! The whole party gathered in the driveway to cheer as we drove off into married life. They’d sneakily filled our getaway car with balloons, and we left a trail of them bouncing down Sperry Road.
We drove to the Lawn Club in New Haven to collapse as husband and wife. I carried Claire over the threshold of our room, then I pulled out my L.L. Bean duffle bag to find my toothbrush.
But it meant that our marriage had been well and truly consecrated.
And so it has remained.
“It’s wonderful to be married to an archaeologist — the older you get the more interested [s]he is in you.” —Agatha Christie
MY DAILY JOURNAL IS A CORE SOURCE of this Substack. Like for instance, that time I pissed into a volcano. Or when I told the story of how my journal-keeping began. Or any of the excerpts from my journal-based memoir, which you can catch up with here, here, or here.
My journal has offered up some of my most popular posts, so thank you for clicking on them, dear readers. I only wish that the American Publishing Industry would catch on, and publish it all in book form.
Not yet, anyway.
Share this post with literary agents you know, and ask them “What the f*&% are you waiting for? Sign this guy to lucrative book contracts!”
Until that happens, I cordially remind you that I work hard doing this, and you’re my Medicis. I’d be much obliged if you’d subsidize my attempts to tickle myself and others.
Thank you for walking the aisle with me here on the Road2Elsewhere.
I do. Do you, too?
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