I am surrounded by love and it is lovetastic. Bombastic. Most of it is regular ol’ heterosexual, married, monogamous, suburban love, but those seemingly prosaic and unremarkable relationships are in fact unique and compelling and teach me things. Things I need to know. Things I’m really curious about.

I’m not in love – I’m loved, I love, I have dependants whom I stroke and feed and they reward me with smiles and kisses and erratic and sporadic good behaviour etc etc – and I’m not in A Relationship.

This means I have lots of time to contemplate relationships – I have OODLES of time to think about relationships because I’m not actually required to be in one and generate The Relationship Products - and muse about what they are and are not, what they can and cannot be, what they should be, and of course, what I want. Maybe. One day.

[Which is closely related to that age old question what do women want, dammit? but not exactly the same. Because those sorts of questions are bullshit, really. There is no one representative, summative Woman, so how can we possibly know what women want when we don't even agree on what Woman is/means? Still, it is fun to write frivolous pieces about what women want, but let's all admit that what they really tell you is what the woman who wrote it wants. And, in case you missed it, the answer is: To Be Desired (and respected, and even protected, but To Be Desired, mostly). That's my story and I'm sticking to it, because, well, Hi Mom.]

[I digress. But you liked it.]

Here’s what I’ve learned, recently.

First, most of my happily married friends started out sleazy. Or romantic – whatever you want to call it. What I mean by this is most of the couples I spend time with fucked on their first date (or before) or very close to it; some were in other relationships; and passion swept them away and they woke up two years later knocked up and/or married or thinking that now that they had kids they should probably get married. Except sometimes it wasn’t two years, it was one year. Or less than. It all ends the same place, really, and that place is sweat pants.

There is a saying “marry in haste, repent at leisure.” That old chestnut is hairy. And it is a lie.

What do happy, successful marriages have in common? According to a study by Ted Huston, PHD, the answer is an average courtship of about twenty-five months. In his study, couples who dragged their feet longer than that – who courted for thirty-six months or longer – tended to divorce quickly, between two and seven years of marriage. Passionate, fast-moving courtships, on the other hand, had better results. In Huston’s study, couples who got engaged after nine months of dating, and married by eighteen months, had marriages that lasted longer than the slow movers (more than seven years) and the couples reported feeling strongly enamoured with each other. So marrying in haste might not be such a bad idea, after all. (Just ask my trampy girlfriends and their happy husbands.)

In my humble opinion, the greatest obstacle in the path to a happy marriage is children. Having little kids, under the age of oh, eighteen (I mean four), is not sexy. If your relationship suddenly sucks, and your child is four, don’t despair. It is the kid’s fault. And oh yes, biology and evolution, too. They’re all bastards and they’re in on it together.

Helen Fisher – and others, but I like her work best – notes that the evolutionary purpose of love is to bond a couple long enough to mate, have a successful pregnancy, and stay together long enough to ensure that the resulting child will survive infanthood. All told, that takes approximately four years. So, evolutionarily speaking, love isn’t necessarily built to last more than four years.

I’ve never been a huge fan of ‘natural’ arguments. They end up looking like this: oh it isn’t natural for women to work, they’re mean to be knocked up and chasing kids; oh there’s a reason men rule the world, it is just the natural order of things; oh gay folks can’t get married, because it isn’t natural, because they can’t reproduce (note: heterosexual couples who don’t have kids should promptly get divorced). So let’s not accept the love-only-lasts-four-years thesis.

Or, let’s accept it, but with the strong caveat that we are not ruled by our biologies, because we are gifted with great big brains and lurid imaginations and reason and so we can make our own possibilities and create our own destinies and make love last if only we so choose, so long as we have lots of childcare and hot sex (the two are directly associated with each other). Opposable thumbs are also cool. Yay, Darwin.

So…other than courtship length and evolutionary drives, what are the predictors for long, passionate marriages?

That question is exactly the problem. I think we often split the adjectives: are we seeking long, stable marriages; or are we seeking passionate, loving marriages; and is longevity the enemy of passion? (Because, frankly, I’m not doing long without passion.)

There has been a lot of discussion recently about love, relationships and marriage – mostly about how it all sucks.

I suscribe to this theory, sometimes. Sometimes I’m exasperated with the whole damn package. I’m dating, and I’m amazed at how tentatively mid-life adults approach relationships; at how we compulsively risk-manage and look for red flags (and invent them); how we’re supposed to be finished products who’ve worked on themselves and are ready for a relationship (that would be the most boring person on earth, and I’m totally not sleeping with him); how we invent shit-tests for partners to prove themselves to us; how we’re supposed to be so self-contained that we want a relationship but don’t need one; how we talk about ‘stalking’ as a code for ‘please don’t show too much interest’ (and kill me now, but who wants a partner who doesn’t show interest?); how we resolutely pretend to be unaffected by the other person (mmm, nothing says I want you like a poker face); and how boring and Borg-ish and hive-minded and safe it all is, most of the time.

I think we have collectively lost faith in our ability to survive rejection and heart-break so we try and risk-manage the process up front, and in so doing, we neuter love. We clip its wings. Love requires abandon, irrationality, surrender, butterflies, feeling, vulnerabilty, risk. Get over the fear. It will all be fine. I know I will get rejected; it sucks; it hurts; but I will always be just fine. I have complete faith in my own resilience. I’ve recovered from heartbreak before and it was never pretty, but I’ve never regretted a love, even when I’ve suffered for it. Love is always a risk. The good stuff always is.

I think love has the possibility to be more abandoned and
passionate and generative than the self-helped, middling version that I see lauded and pursued (or at least, I mofo hope so). I don’t think we have to be perfect, need-free, finished products; I think you learn and grow in relationships and that relationships make you better (the good and the bad ones). One of my friend’s partners nailed it when he said this about his relationship: “I’m here to love unconditionally. I’ll fuck it up, I’ll make it up, and I’m here.”

It is always someone else’s boyfriend who gets it and says the heart-skipping good stuff. Sigh.

Anyways. Lots of writers have been talking – and, naturally, writing – about love and marriage.

Christina Nehring is out pimping her new book, A Vindication of Love, in which she rails against the same flaccid vision of love that I’m bored with; and I was totally there with her, cheering her on, until I read this: “As I write these words, I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.” Um, yeah, Christina, you had me until the cutting started. Next.

Sandra Tsing Loh wrote an essay last month about her flailing, failing marriage for The Atlantic called, I kid you not, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off“. She had an affair; she finds that after 20 years of domesticity she cannot substitute the image of her husband for her lover in her romantic imagination; she notes that she is just too damn over-taxed by mothering, by working, by household drudgery, to do the work needed to rekindle her marriage. And so she wonders: “Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?”

And oh yes, all of her forty-something married girlfriends are in sexless marriages. So I think her question is legitimate. I am just saying no to the sexless marriage. I mean, you can have it if you want, but I am NOT. Next.

Then there’s Caitlin Flanagan, the faux stay-at-home mom who writes for Time and the New Yorker, who, as always, touts the benefit of marriage to society, for the children, blah blah blah blah blah, and god forbid you be so frivolous as to want to be happy. (Confession: I left my children’s father for exactly that reason. I was not happy. I was so not happy that it required medication and girlfriends prompting me to open the blinds. I think not being happy and wanting to be happy is a perfectly reasonable reason to leave a relationship.) Next.

Then there’s Aaron Traister, who notes all of these things, and wonders, “Am I the only person who enjoys being hitched these days?” He goes on to write:

I’m starting to feel like there is something wrong with me, because I actually enjoy being married.

My wife and I have been married anywhere from seven to 150 years (I’m not good with dates). During those years we have moved six times, and each move was like an exotic gift that happened to be covered in shit. We have each had multiple jobs, and multiple uniforms with name tags. We’ve been broke, we’ve been well off, we’ve been broke again. We’ve bought our first house together, and it has a giant hole in the kitchen ceiling and sparks come out of the third-floor outlets if you hold anything metal too close to them. We have fought, raged, nearly cheated, and been totally out of sync with each other during chunks of our time together. We’ve also produced two enormous redheaded babies who are as terrifying to us as Mothra and Godzilla were to Japan in the ’60s. We have been depressed, we have wanted more, we have wanted different, we have wanted out. The years since we got married have been the most challenging and at times most frustrating years of my life.

They have also been the most productive, happiest and most hilarious.

Oh, Aaron. I would argue that your story is the story. You are a happy husband and you like – and love – your wife!

[Dude, I am jealous of you on so many levels. Salon and I have an unrequited love in that it has not yet discovered me, returned my affection or wooed me for my writing; your wife, Rebecca Traister, is a kick-ass writer who also writes for Salon so I lovehate you both; and you have a wife you love. I'm not looking for a wife, necessarily, but being married does look kinda nice from the bed I am sharing with laundry - mercifully, folded; all is not (yet) lost - and a laptop.]

And this, research concludes, is what predicts loving, happy, hopefully passionate marriages: happy husbands. Men who are not disappointed in their wives, men who like their wives, men who enjoy their wives and who pay attention to them and who are engaged in the relationship – these people have satisfying marriages.

I don’t know what that says for lesbian marriages that lack husbands, or gay marriages that have two husbands. These marriage studies tell a single story like it is the only one (just like this post).

Again, I digress. The point was this: happy men make for happy heterosexual marriages. Husbands who like their wives are nice to their wives and then everyone is happy and I’m pretty sure that happy is the address where the good lovin’ happens. Simple, really.

And oh yes, it doesn’t always end in sweatpants, because nothing says I love you like lipgloss.

P.S. Salon, call me.