A relationship that matters

“It’s like the two of us,” I said. “Being married twice — it’s everything we overcame to hang onto love.”

My wife and I married each other two times. Our first marriage lasted 10 years and our second is in its 12th. We were apart — divorced — for 14 years. After we remarried, we ran into the rabbi who performed our first ceremony. He introduced us to the people he was with by saying, “I married them for life, they just didn’t know it.”

My wife monitors our relationship more closely than I do — I still take it for granted more than I should. She sets higher standards for it. During our first marriage, I too often viewed these standards as bothersome. I’d dodge talks on money, time and intimacy that we needed to have, often giving her the silent treatment. She’d get frustrated, try talking in more pressing tones, and I’d retreat even further.

To be together again, we had to change all of that.

When we remarried, she insisted that every Sunday we sit on our sofa and chat about our week together. For a half hour, we’d speak about how we were doing, how things were going. We couldn’t interrupt one another and we used an egg timer to help keep track of the time.

I rarely looked forward to these “couch talks” as we came to call them, but after each conversation I always felt re-engaged in our marriage. They made me examine what we both needed — individually and as a couple — and how we should go about making it so.

When I told other married friends what we did every week, most of them looked at me in wonderment, as if I was describing what life was like in a distant galaxy.

There is, I believe, a connection between those couch talks and what the country has been undergoing in its recent past. It’s as if everyone in the nation has been on our sofa, gabbing like crazy about the state of their relationship to their democracy. If you walked down almost any street, read any paper, watched any screen, there it would be. Passionate opinions — like almost no other time I can remember — about our democracy and how it should work. And with no egg timer to let us know when enough was enough. It seemed as if we could not stop ourselves from discussing and participating in what, for most of our lives, had only engendered a vague indifference.

Our problems will work themselves out, we had told ourselves. Eventually, they’ll get taken care of by those people we elect to office — the government — because they usually do.

This is certainly the autopilot way I felt about our first marriage, just before it ran aground under the weight of my own complacency.

For better or worse, all of us are married for life to our country of birth. This marriage may, at times, bring with it an irritation like all marriages sometimes do. We may even decide to physically leave it. But whatever else can be said about the last several years, this marriage to our country — this relationship — came to dominate our days and sometimes, like love, nearly overwhelmed us. But it also spoke about our urgent and passionate desire for re-engagement.

In our heated conversations, our nationwide marching, our historically high voting rate in the middle of a pandemic — even in our lying awake worrying deep into the night — we confronted the fragility of our country’s institutions and how, finally, we must choose democracy. We came to see that democracy doesn’t automatically choose us. That when we make the mistake of locking it away in one small room in the mansion of our lives, we will suffer an irreparable loss as citizens.

And now our memory of those sleepless nights must not fail us.

Our connection to those closest to us is often about our imperfections, and another’s desire to be with us anyway. So, too, our relationship with our imperfect country. This relationship that must always be vigilantly examined. Then, with all of our resources, with all that is in our hearts and imaginations, we must make that marriage to our nation more closely resemble the one we would like to inhabit, to respect, to love.

Mike Nagler is a trustee on the Burlingame Library Board.