Love and Irritation: One Truth About Long Term Relationships

By Anne Ketcham

It’s been fifty-five years now that my husband and I have been marking anniversaries in one manner or another. Elizabeth and Robert Browning weren’t so fortunate. Having been coupled probably four times as long as they, we have many more currencies to count the ways of love. Now that we have seen the modern movie classic “About Schmidt” and reflected on the marriage of Everyman Warren and his wife Helen, we are blessed with a few more.

I think particularly about one of our rituals and will frame it as a riddle.

Every day—usually about 325 times a year we position ourselves six feet apart and commence an exercise of pulling and tugging against each other. We move at an unequal pace and wait for the other to catch up. What are we doing?

Clue: 1: We smooth and stretch, we estimate what we need and sometimes overestimate. W e adjust giving a little here, taking back there, sometimes cheating a little along the way so that we come out even and satisfied. What are we doing?

Clue 2: We’re on our aging knees during the exercise, sometimes complaining about a move the other has made, but more often chatting aimlessly throughout. What are we doing?

Clue 3: The: exercise is completed in approximately two and a half minutes and we rise to our feet in sections with the grace of camels. We both know that doing it alone would take three times as long with a great deal more effort. What are we doing?

Clue 4 (final): This ritual, is one of the few similarities between us and a tribe of gorillas in the wild, who do this individually 365 days a year.

Moving right along, with my anniversary reflection, I am aware now, after such a long partnership, that these rituals of our bed-making continue throughout the day, throughout the months, throughout the years. We have a goal, an agreed-upon task, we approach it from our two separate perspectives, we tug and pull against each other, we smooth out wrinkles, we sometimes annoy by finding fault in what the other just did, we wait for each other to catch up, we usually comment on the degree of common satisfaction that we have just reached. That’s life in at least one long marriage, which I celebrate on this anniversary.
Warren Schmidt gave us another way of looking at our long-term relationship. Writing to the little African boy he had started to support through Childreach, he spoke of his deceased wife and “the thousand little ways she irritated me…” The words came from the depths of his grief with a startling honesty that we had not yet seen from him in the movie. And yet it is a friendly truth for many of us in long marriages. We know it and sooner or later we must accept the irritations and deal with them.

Returning home from About Schmidt my husband and I started to count the ways of our irritation. Just for starters, he likes to use up in our shower all the tiny round soaps we get from traveling. I dutifully pick one up, drop it, and slip while bending to hunt for it. Conversely, I do not find it necessary to push in bureau drawers all the way, or close closet doors fully and this invariably offends my husband. Digging deeper into this rich vein, I entered our marriage fifty-five years ago expecting to live in a cheerfully, fully lighted home every night. For the first fifteen years my husband kept a list of things I should do or do better and turning off lights in unoccupied rooms was near the top. During the next fifteen years (with my encouragement) he threw away the list and softly reminded me of all the lights that needed to be turned off. In the third period of our relationship, I turned off a few lights as I passed through a room with the understanding that he would refrain from approaching the whole subject. Now, in the fourth quadrant of our partnership, we have devised a useful system of “overlooks,” meaning that we agree to offer each other a certain number of specified irritations a year which the offended party will verbally and firmly overlook in order to keep the peace. It works adequately given that the partnership is composed of one very legal lawyer and one person who is not only prone to, but actually enjoys a bit of hyperbole.

So here we are fifty-five years into an affair which encompasses pulling and tugging against each other, smoothing, adjusting, waiting, complaining, trying to control, bargaining, negotiating and all the other things we do daily to be both separate and together. Today I celebrate it all. That bed we make so carefully brings nightly and early-morning comfort that in turn adds to the affection, respect and support upon which our partnership depends. We can, quite honestly count our blessings, knowing that the ways of love are far stronger than the ways of being irritatingly human.

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