Couplehood

“Happiness is the quiet lull between problems.”

—
My Father

Author’s Warning

You will notice in just a second that this book actually begins on page 145. Don’t be alarmed—this is not a mistake. Don’t try to get your money back. You didn’t miss anything.

It’s just that I know when
I’m
reading, I love being smack in the middle of the book. Pages behind me, pages ahead of me. It’s too overwhelming to know there’s so much left and you’re only on page 8.

This way, you can read the book for two minutes, and if anybody asks you how far along you are you can say, “I’m on 151—and it’s really flying. It just
sails
, baby.”

You’ll feel like you’re accomplishing something, and
I
get credit for writing a bigger book. Everybody wins, and it costs us nothing.

—P.R.
Los Angeles

W
hen I was 12, I remember holding hands with this girl—I want to say, “Patty,” but I’m guessing here—and something about the way she held hands was just … 
wrong.
Our fingers didn’t line up right.

You know how when you grab someone’s hand, the fingers sort of automatically slide into place, your thumb next to
their
thumb, second finger next to
their
second finger? Simple, right? Not a lot of ways to screw that up. This girl did.

I think what she did was slide her fingers in too
early
so they were all out of sync with mine. (I’m sitting here, holding hands with myself to try to explain this to you.)
Okay … here’s what it is: I like my pinkie to be on the outside. And she started one finger too soon, so
her
pinkie was on the outside, and
my
pinkie was smushed up between her third and fourth fingers.

Now, I’m not saying she’s a bad person. But the second we held hands, I knew she wasn’t for me. We just didn’t
fit.

And I knew I couldn’t explain it to her, either.

Because, the way I figure, there are two types of people: those who
get it
and those who
don’t.
If they
get it
, there’s nothing to explain, and if they
don’t
, there’s no point in trying to explain. They don’t get it. Move on.

But I remember thinking that if you’re going to be with someone, you should find someone who gets it. And someone who fits.

N
ow, the search for this person starts early. From the minute we’re born, boys and girls stare at each other, trying to figure out if they like what they see. Like parade lines, passing each other for mutual inspection. You march, you look. You march, you look. If you’re interested, you stop and talk, and if it doesn’t work out, you just get back in the parade. You keep marching, and you keep looking.

I was lucky. When I met the woman of my dreams, I
knew. I saw her, and I was immediately unable to speak. My throat locked up, my stomach was in knots, I was sweaty, clammy, and nauseous. I had learned years before that feeling nauseous often means you’re in love. (Other times, it simply means you had bad clams, and you want to learn to distinguish between the two.)

But I knew this was it. And the more time we spent together, the more convinced I became—we fit.

I
nteresting thing: Ask most guys why they marry the woman they do, and they’ll tell you, “She’s the first one who called me on everything.”

All the things you tried to get away with in the past, all the games you designed and mastered for the express purpose of keeping people at arm’s length were, it turns out, all just a weeding-out process, a search for the one person who
doesn’t
fall for it—the one who can sidestep your tricks and see right through you. And, ironically, you’re not upset. In fact, you’re impressed. You think, “Wow, good for you.” And the message goes forth: “Okay, no more calls, we have a winner.”

I
remember officially proposing. Actually asking this woman to literally, legally, officially, marry me. I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt so
dopey. So cliché. “Asking for her hand in marriage.” I felt like I was in some bad Ronald Colman movie.

And it was a moment, after all, I had started planning when I was four and saw a girl jump off the monkey bars and watched her hair bounce off her shoulders. I had given this moment a lot of thought. And suddenly, there it was.

I worried I might do it wrong. Should I be on my knee? Two knees? Should knees even be involved? Should we be somewhere else? Should I have hired a band? Would someone else be doing this better?

But I asked. And for all the silliness, I was amazed when she actually said “Yes.” I mean, not that I thought she’d say “No.” We’d discussed it. We knew we would be doing this eventually, so popping the question wasn’t a real risk. But still, there’s something so powerful about a woman saying “Yes.” The mutual agreement, the shared desire, the consent—it’s staggering.

Think about it. The first time you’re intimate with someone, is there anything more exciting than hearing them say “Yes”? It’s wild. You can actually get dizzy.

“I could lean and kiss you, and that would be alright?”

“Yes.”

“Really. Hmm … You have no problem with this?”

“No.”

“You’re saying, I could put my hand for example … 
here
 … and that would be alright?”

“Yes.”

“Unbelievable.”

S
o there we were, on the brink of the Next Big Thing. Forever. The Final Frontier. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I thought, “Uh-oh, if this person’s going to be with me
forever
, she’s going to find out what I’m really like. That can’t be good.”

I mean, she’d already learned
some
things. That’s what the first few years are for; you tiptoe into the water and reveal the not-so-appealing stuff one thing at a time.

“You know, don’t you, that I won’t
always
be wearing cologne? That was really more of a ‘while we were dating’ kind of thing.”

Start small.

“You know, when I butter a piece of bread, I don’t butter the whole thing. I do each bite separately. Each piece gets buttered individually.”

“I know. I think it’s cute.”

And then you can tell her the whole story.

“Well, the only reason I bring it up is because I once lived with a woman who left me because of that.… Or at least that’s what she said. I remember, I was in the
middle of buttering a very tiny piece of bread, and she looked at me, swiped the bread out of my hand, and said, ‘I don’t think this can continue.’ … It may have been other things, too.”

S
ee, a lot of times we’re just clueless. We walk around, scarred from previous relationships, thinking we’ve learned something, when in fact, things that may have been deal breakers in the past may not even
bother
the person you’re with now. (Learning what actually bothers the
new
person is how you spend the rest of your life.) But there is this need to disclose potential problem areas.