On the flight to Las Vegas, Heather, my sassalicious/salacious friend who likes to front like she’s tough, cracked and cried and gushed about how much she loves her husband. To be fair, she’s terrified of flying and was flying (high!) under the influence of two Ativans and three vodka cranberries.
Please note: very very bad combination. Do not try this at home, or anywhere. It gets messy. Heather knocked my laptop off the seat tray and then knocked her drink into my purse and later knocked boots with her camera in the airport bathroom. To summarize: inadvisable.
I digress. This is part three of my Las Vegas trilogy. Las Vegas is all about money and sex and I’ve mused about the meaning of those things already. So now let’s talk about the place – other than Las Vegas – where money and sex unite and ignite: marriage.
Kelly: Do you get butterflies about Tyler? Or is he like an old shoe?
Heather: What kind of shoe are we talking about? Be specific.
Kelly: I don’t know. He’s your shoe.
Heather: Yeah, I do. Last time he went away…when he came back, I got the butterflies.
Kelly: Like your stomach flipped over?
Heather: I had been alone with the kids for three and half days/years. I was REALLY happy to see him.
Kelly: If Tyler wasn’t your husband, would he be one of your best friends?
Heather: If he talked more, or at all, sure…you know, we did the long distance thing before we got together. So I guess we were friends first.
Kelly: How did you talk on the phone if he doesn’t talk?
Heather: He talked then. He worked hard. We talked for hours and hours on the phone. That’s why we had sex on the first date. It was all that talking.
Kelly: Can I write that you had sex on the first date in my blog? Does your mother read my blog?
Heather: Is it in Canadian Living? My mother only reads Canadian Living.
Kelly: We should be fine.
I asked Heather this because she’s my sister from another mother except she’s a reformed tramp. (Reformed in the sense that she only slings it in one direction now because she’s happily married and them’s the rules, usually.) I ask Heather because she’s like me and she’s got what I want. But I ask other people these questions because I wonder – eternally, constantly, with every breath – if passion is a sprint, a marathon, or a long slow walk that keeps rockin’ fifty years later in twin rockers on the porch.
And because love and marriage are everywhere in Las Vegas.
The couple in the row behind us kissed all the way from Bellingham to Las Vegas. In Vegas, there were sex cards galore…and brides. I saw a bride kick a cowboy straight in the shins.
In my head, I cheered on the shin-kicking bride. (I’m a terrible pacifist.) Earlier, that same cowboy was insistently and persistently friendly with me while I tried to have a drink with my colleague and his wife. Cowboy desperately wanted me to meet his friend. He told me his friend had “mustache rights”. This meant nothing to me, but it meant something to my co-worker who got very, very upset.
After Cowboy left, I was brought up to speed on the meaning of mustache rights.
It is not a good pick up line.
Sometimes this human mating game is perplexing and other times just plain unfathomable. Thirty-sex years into it, I’m still figuring out the rules and I like them less and less the more I learn. And one thing that I have learned for sure is that love doesn’t play by the rules – hence our need to make them. We think codes and lines and boundaries and laws will keep us safe. But love is an outlaw.
And oh, how I love love.
Cowboy’s attempt to play drunken wingman for his mustachioed friend interrupted a great love story. My coworker and his wife were telling me how they met and married.
They were high school sweethearts who broke up when he went off to college. He graduated, got married and stayed married for twenty-four years. He got divorced and got married again for twenty-four months.
In the wake of his second divorce, he signed up at Classmates.com. A week later, he had a message from his former sweetheart, saying “I don’t know if you remember me…I’m married and living in Florida.”
He wrote back and told her about his life, his divorce, and his pending trip to Florida, asking “Can I take you and your husband to dinner? I’d love to catch up.”
She wrote back “Funny you should mention your divorce…I’m in the middle of a divorce, myself.”
He called her, and when she picked up the phone and it was like they had never stopped talking.
He went to Florida to see her. He started going to Florida every six weeks. Then every four. Then every two. Then he was out of airmiles and free trips and told her that it was time for them to live in the same place. She quit her job and moved to Washington, DC with him.
And then they got married – in Vegas – on January 1, 2003. Every year since then they end and start the year in Las Vegas, the place where they ended their days apart and started their life together.
My big, burly friend – who, a few days earlier at a company dinner introduced me to filet mignon and the Manhattan (steak and bourbon. I like ‘em. Who knew?) and explained to me in abrupt, gruff detail the meaning of Cowboy’s mustache rights – then leaned over to me and said, “I bet you didn ‘t know I was so sensitive, did you?
No I didn’t . But now I do. And I’m so glad I do.
This story – this long, interrupted, lost and found love story – ran honey through my veins.
It could be straight from the pages of Lost and Found Lovers. In a study of 1001 participants, Dr. Nancy Kalish found that lovers who reunite later in life end up staying together (78%) and have an astonishingly low divorce rate of 1.5% compared to the national average of 51%.
That seems to me to be good odds for a gamble, and better odds than most. When it comes to my heart, I like to know my numbers.
Months ago, I wrote that there is research correlating the length, success and happiness of marriages to length of courtship – but not in the way you might expect. The longer the courtship, the shorter the marriage. A courtship longer than thirty-one months predicts divorce within one to four years. Couples who marry in haste - nine to eighteen months after starting a relationship - make it past the seven year mark and report very high levels of marital happiness.
So – don’t trust me, trust Ted Huston, PhD. I’m just wondering about butterflies and new relationship energy and the recipe for happily ever after. So I ask around. I look around. I get around. I poke around in books and libraries and make queries with my bff, Google. And what I’ve noticed is that the happily loved-up people I know seem to have a couple of things in common: it was passion, right away and they liked each other. Like, really really like each other, like spending time together, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. They hang out. They would be friends even if they weren’t lovers. But they have to be lovers because of all that passion.
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Love it. And damn, I am glad I’m going to visit my man friend in Miami tonight. Also, I’m meeting Mr. Hugh MacLeod at his Miami meet-and-greet tonight. Have the stars aligned? Loved living vicariously through you this week via these posts.
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I have no idea what mustache rights are. Is that like mustache rides? I’m so confused…but your friend’s story is adorable. Awww.
The part about the length of the courtship amuses me, if only because I’ve seen a lot of people get up on high horses about short engagement/relationships (Matt & I had been together for about a year and a half when we got married, so we’re right at the tail end of the good group there
).
Also dear, I keep having comment errors here – if I let the page sit for a while before commenting, it gives me a timeout error. This has happened a time or two, I don’t know if it’s just me or if others are getting the same problem.
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Those last couple lines are perfect. One thing my mom says about my dad is that “he always makes me laugh.” And I noticed early on with my boyfriend that laughter comes so easily when we’re together.
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“Love is an infinite feeling in a finite container, and so upsets the intellect, frustrates the will.” (Louise Erdrich)
Yes. Love – no rules. Hence our focus on making them, to make it more understandable, more controllable (all futile, right?).
Those statistics about lost and found lovers are amazing.
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I would like to publicly thank you for being such a fabulous travelling buddy. I was telling tyler about how I felt about not drinking without him and how I was thrown for a loop when realizing that I would have to carry my own suitcase and it came to me that you were my true man friend while in Vegas. For that I thank you. XXOOO
PS I am super bummed I missed the man/car/nipple incident. THAT is right up my ally
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My gorgeous man and I got married at 19 – two Catholic sex-crazed teens who got married so we could feel less guilty. We will be celebrating our 25th anniversary this summer and I am more crazy about him then ever. But we had some bad times in there – times when we forgot how much we liked each other. Times when we contemplated the big D. But John Gottmann, mr. love lab down in Seattle, helped us find our way back. And we thank him every day for that.
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Love this! Gives me great hope as I’m on this crazytown journey to find that right partner. I’m not ruling out any venues or strategies. But I’m ruling in me first this time – those were the mistakes of long ago
Thanks Kelly! You really and truly always tell stories in a perfect way.
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My husband Shawn and I met when we both worked at Silver Star Mountain Resort in Vernon, B.C. He was a ski instructor with hot red pants that zipped down each side…..(I’ll tell you that story another time.)
We got engaged within 6 months and married one year from then. We’ve been married 19 years now. Everytime we ski together, which was just this morning since we now live 20 minutes from the mountain, my husband says he thinks about having sex with me (those are his words, I’m not going to fluff it up and call it “making love”). That’s why I went out and bought seasons passes.
Let me tell you….the apres ski today, was hot….chocolate…..with whip cream.
I think the secret to our long marriage and our excellent relationship is that we make time to do things together, alone, and with our children. The fact that we had passion when we met also helps. Open communication, respect and never going to bed angry help too!
Thanks for this story Kelly! It made me laugh. (by the way, my husband doesn’t have a moustache, but he used to!)
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what the HELL are moustache rights? why do you mention it twice and then NOT SHARE THAT INFORMATION????? ARE you talking about moustache rides? Clarification, please.
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kellydiels
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on December 16th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
turns out I got it wrong. Martinis make me hear things. It is not “mustache rights”, it is “mustache ride“.
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I have to say the last part is definitely true. My husband is my very best friend, but it could never be platonic between us. Seven years and three kids after we got together I am proud to say we still gross our family out with our PDA.
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Marriages that last are different than a lasting marriage. One is cruise control, the other is pedal to the metal. My wife had a boyfriend when I met her, a guy who tried hustling my current girlfriend. So I hustled his girlfriend with some of the talk he’d been doing. I’m married twenty three years since.
What united us initially was The Confrontation, when her boyfriend found out I was in the picture. Words at that time were useless. He wanted to fight, I didn’t. I instinctively knew if I won, she’d shower him with pity. So I lost on purpose. I took a dive, and the kicks and punches that make a dive believable.
When enough was enough I said, “Free time is over. We can stop. If we don’t stop, I’m going to hurt you.”
If you want a relationship to work, then take one for the team. It doesn’t hurt, really.
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If you want to see a good movie about a cross-country quest for the meaning of true love, check out “Paper Heart.” Starring Charlyne Ye and Michael Cera, Released on DVD December 1, 2009. It makes you laugh and it makes you cry. It includes interviews of people who have managed to find true love and hold on to it. My husband and I were interviewed for the movie on our 50th Wedding Anniversary.
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well, shoot. now i know why people say you’re a not-to-be-missed writer. sharp, crisp, smart – yes, you are. (“shoot” because now my detour (read: procrastiantion) will last longer than expected as i enjoy more of your past posts.)
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