On Marriage
You, by some miracle, kept writing back…
Note: We decided to write a piece together this week in honor of our wedding, which is coming up on Wednesday. We thought we’d write about how we got together and our feelings about marriage more generally. Turns out, though we both have a LOT to say on the subject, and we didn’t even get to half of it, so this is going to be a multi-part series…
Paul:
I was single for much of my life.
Not much dating in high school. None, really, although I had a few adolescent flings that meant little. They were educational experiences, no intimacy or even self-knowledge. I was a teen-aged boy, after all.
I had given up on the idea of a girlfriend after my first year in college. I was too shy and too introverted. I spent most of my time getting high, listening to music, playing guitar, and leading a solitary lifestyle. The people drinking at bars did better, but I was not a bar drinker. I pretty much gave up on trying to date. Then I met my first girlfriend, halfway through my sophomore year.
We took acid on a double date with another couple. She forgot her sneakers in my room and we moved in together the next day. By the time we got married, at the age of 25, things had already gone downhill. I was a wreck and so was she. The details are not important here. Getting sober saved my life, but could not salvage the relationship. We got divorced after ten years together and went our separate ways. It was the right thing to do, but it still hurt and I experienced real loss. We also had to split up the two cats, against my wishes.
By the way, that other couple from the acid double date is still together and happy.
I spent the next 10 years living alone - with some adventures, hit-and-run relationships. I played in bands, did freelance work and took lots of road trips. I was learning to enjoy my own company, maybe for the first time, and to value being with myself. It was the 1990s and I had a good time, although I’m not sure I knew it when it was happening. It was the dawn of the internet and I went looking for love online. I found all kinds of weird stuff, but not love.
And since we are doing a back-and-forth here, dear Tonya, and I plan to continue with my sordid timeline after your response, I’ll now send this to you.
Tonya:
Okay, wow, you’re really taking this story back to the beginning. Now I’m trying to come up with a Cliffs Notes version of my entire relationship history…
When I was five years old, a boy at my babysitter’s house gave me a brief little kiss on the mouth. I’m sad to say I don’t remember his name, though I do remember his blond bowl-cut hair and his cowboy boots.
In the sixth grade, I had a few flutters over the boy who declared his atheism in my second-period catechism class at St. Elizabeth Seton school.
In my early teens, I was so repulsed by boys that I decided to be a lesbian. This decision lasted two or three years. I dated three very sweet girls in a row, and felt nothing. Eventually, I gave up on the idea.
In my late teens, I traveled a lot. I was kissed by an older man in France. I was kissed by a younger man in Athens. Back home, I saw a few different guys, but I could never get my heart into any of it. I remember an artist whose drawings were the only interesting thing about him. And then the therapist with the motorcycle. The semi-retired actor with a terror of women…
And then, what, college? All of my college relationships were unfulfilling, each in a different way. Only once was I more interested in the boy than he was interested in me. I’d like to say he left me for clown school, because it sounds so much better, but it isn’t true. He’d already graduated from clown school. He left me to pursue someone else. After that painful last conversation with him, instead of telling him how hurt I was, I spent the night playing poker with his roommates. We stayed up until dawn drinking and making jokes, and they proclaimed me the most glorious chick they’d ever met. This was my revenge. I made sure, for as long as he lived in that apartment, if my name ever came up, it’d be followed by, “Whatever happened to her? She was awesome!”
I made enough dumb mistakes in my youth, in that short span of college and just-post college years, that I exhausted the romance of being young and free. I don’t regret it, by the way. Not really. I wouldn’t want to be a Diane Arbus now, flinging myself into dark, seedy rooms in middle age because I’d never had a youth. That can happen when you don’t know what it’s like, all that meaningless stuff. We call it fun, but it ends up not being fun. Anyway, I saw enough. I sowed the oats and whatever else. Yadda yadda. In the year after college, living in New Haven, things turned particularly bleak and self-destructive, and, at the wizened age of twenty-one, I fled gratefully to the first solid ground I was offered. That is how I ended up married the first time.
And I’m realizing this is a really depressing story so far.
I noticed you only made it to the 90’s. I’m going to hope, if I hand it off to you, things will perk up a bit…
Paul:
Two asides -
First, I left out grade school and high school because little happened. I could tell some funny dating stories, along with a few horrifying ones, from my teens, but let’s save that for another back-and-forth, possibly “True Nightmares I Survived and Cannot Forget.”
Second, there really was a time when everybody knew SOMEBODY who went to clown school. If you were to tell that to almost any young person today, they would not believe you.
Where was I when we last tuned in? Ah yes, my long journey through the 1990s. Years of solitude, road trips, some crazy times and wanderlust. I had to learn to enjoy my own company. I ended up ringing in Y2K - remember Y2K? - playing three long sets with a reggae band at a downtown club, bringing my guitar and amp back home, then taking a car service to Newark Airport at 5am for a flight to Arizona.
They had been predicting that planes might fall out of the sky on Y2K, but the computer programmers saved the day. I was fine with whatever happened, so I got on the plane and met my friends in Arizona for a hot spring road trip in a rental RV.
The next few years, I went to grad school, where EVERYBODY hooked up with each other, but I did not. I actually broke up with a fine woman because I didn’t want it to interfere with my schoolwork. I moved, not by design, back to the block I had lived on in the 1980s and settled in for more quality time with myself. I took plenty of road trips. I drove down most every road in this country, took photos, went to hot springs, found a dog, taught at a few schools in New York City, and didn’t date much at all. In fact, I’m not sure what I did when I wasn’t driving or working or walking the dog.
I spent years waking up in weird motels, guzzling bad lobby coffee, turning the car key ten minutes later, and hunting for photos, looking to get lost or maybe find a sandwich in some strange town. It got to the point where I didn’t get into any relationships because I was scared that I might not get out. I had zero game, so it wasn’t a big issue. I was happy to be on my own. I was writing for a few websites, still teaching at a few colleges, and puttering around, customizing a van I had bought. Yes, I am the guy who actually bought the van. This was not a bad life, although some might have called it a midlife crisis.
I got into another fling that should have ended quickly, but didn’t. It blew up badly, and then continued, like a car with smoke pouring out from under the hood, but it just kept rolling down the highway. It ended. Then, like a bad video game, it started again. She got into trouble, I felt sorry for her and I took her back in. It almost destroyed me. Her demons took her to a place that was so dark, it’s not mine to describe. I could only watch from up close, but I was unable to get out of it for a few more years.
I finally got free around 2013 and then vowed to spend the rest of my life single. I planned to be the old guy in a rocking chair on the porch, surrounded by chihuahuas. No joke. I was really fine with that idea.
Then I met this woman…
Tonya:
This might be a good time to point out that we didn’t, in fact, “meet” for almost a decade after we first encountered each other. While you were digging yourself into a dark, scary hole in that last relationship, I was saying my wedding vows in Kansas. Not long after that, my husband told me to check out the Facebook page of a photographer he wanted to publish in our magazine. This would have been late 2011, I think.
I remember how it felt to pull up your posts for the first time and scroll down. All the photos. The short, funny little anecdotes. Conversations with your friends. I had an almost overwhelming feeling of recognition. A painful sense of something that might have been, if only things had gone otherwise. I added you as a “friend,” sent you a nice, bland message of greeting, and went about my day newly wrecked.
Many years later, we had a conversation about the multiverse. Did we believe that infinite versions of ourselves were out there living all our missed chances and unchosen paths? It took me almost a decade to risk that conversation with you, but I thought of the multiverse instantly on that day in 2011. In some other place, another life, I felt that I had already met you. It would likely have been in 2009 or early 2010, when I was living in Connecticut and riding the MetroNorth train into the city. You had such a powerful feeling of “if only” to me. If only I had taken the train to the city once more, on my own. If only I had walked up and down Manhattan, the way I’d wanted to, for whole days, until I had exhausted myself with the place. Who knows what happened in that universe where we met, or how we fared together? Whatever we had in that time and place, it must have been intense. You were meaningful to me from the first moment.
Which was a horrible feeling, given that I was newly married to someone else. The only way I could stomach it was to decide that, if we had met, you probably wouldn’t have liked me very much. We wouldn’t have been a good match, not in 2009, when I was so strung out on shitty relationships and drinking too much. Besides, you were with someone. And so was I. Clearly, this was just the way it was meant to be.
For years, I kept my distance with you. I would gather your new submissions for each issue. I would “like” your photos on Facebook. For a while, I liked too many, and my husband told me I needed to stop. After that, I would only allow myself a few a month. I left a comment once every few months. I portioned my interactions with you, not wanting to cause trouble with my husband, and not wanting to disturb my own conscience. You were an “if only,” a little fantasy I indulged when my own life felt particularly dark.
Then, ever so slowly, the universe began to re-shuffle our deck of cards. A door opened. In this case, it was a trip I planned with my husband in the fall of 2017. He had written to tell you we were thinking of taking the train down from Montreal to New York that October, and you offered us the use of your apartment while you were in London. This gave me a good reason, after five years of lurking in your feed, to write to you. Finally, I had an unassailable reason to ask you questions about your neighborhood. To ask about where you liked to eat or how you liked to spend your Saturdays. I kept thinking of questions for you, all through the late summer and early fall. Anything to justify another email. What are your favorite bakeries? Do you ever ride the ferries?
And you, by some miracle, kept writing back…
Paul:
Well, you jumped the gun with your response - although it made me stupidly happy to read it just now. I kept writing back because you are, by far, the best correspondent of all time. You always read my emails and responded in an intelligent, thoughtful way. BUT, before that happened, here’s how it looked from my end.
I saw you pop up on your ex-husband’s Facebook page and studied the photos in wonder. How did you end up out there? My life is NOT that New Yorker magazine cover, where you have Manhattan, then the Hudson River, then a few blips, then Los Angeles. I have driven back and forth many times from coast to coast and was familiar with all those towns in Utah and Kansas. I was curious, but also silent. I saw the photos, read your writing, and tried to cipher what stories might lie between the lines. Wondering what life was like for you. You held your cards close. The window into that life was opaque, as it should be, I suppose, on social media.
You were also someone’s wife and I was scrupulous about being proper at all times, in all my dealings with you. Even to myself, I could not admit that I liked you. Having been on both sides of infidelity in my lifetime, I went out of my way to honor the gods of karma. In other words, to do what I thought was the right thing. You were this fascinating, beautiful woman running some guy’s newspaper in a small town in Southwest Kansas.
You became my editor and I would get polite prompts every month or two about my next piece. You were friendly enough, though. When you took that trip to maple syrup country, the emails increased in length, content and personal details. That kicked off a long and voluminous email correspondence. As you said, we never talked on the phone, never knew each other’s voices, never texted. Just long emails, written words from one person to another. Years of this went by. You began to mention things about your life - not many, but some - and you were curious about what was going on in my life. I was more than happy to confide in you. After all, you were way out there, far from everyone I knew and a really, really good listener.
When I climbed into my van in 2021 with the hound to visit you two - briefly - we barely spoke, but it was fascinating to meet the person behind the keyboard. It didn’t hurt that Santo liked you a lot. When I drove off with a bag of your sourdough bread and some cookies, I *may* have indulged in a moment of the “what if?” thinking you mention above. That was a Covid year and I didn’t want to stay on the road for long, so I turned around in Las Cruces, and rolled home. I was often the only guy in a truck stop wearing a mask, and feeling self conscious. And, for the first time in a decade, I felt acutely alone. What if, indeed?
I won’t go into the story of how we finally got together. It’s more than a bit magical - a really good creation story - but also more than a bit apocalyptic and filled with landmines. Many things had to happen just as they did or I’d still be wondering “what if?”
When I went to San Antonio in 2018 and picked up Santo from the woman whose uncle had found him - a 4-pound guy wandering the south side of town with a pack of big dogs - I thanked her. The chain of events that led me to him was also magical and against the odds. I told her, “Isabel, you changed my life today.” And she smiled.
Well, T, I thank you. You changed my life.
Tonya:
I remember how it felt to construct an email to you. My emails wrote themselves all day. I would notice how the sky looked in order to tell you about it.
“A thin gray sky today.”
“One of those bleak, cloudless days again.”
I’d tell you how I had baked a loaf of bread. Or how the leaves of the Chinese Elms were all heat-yellow and lacy by late summer, then one day they all fell at once and it was winter. I’d write about the wind when it moaned around the old house.
My life in Kansas was quiet. My world was small. Some days, when my husband and I weren’t speaking, you were the only person I spoke to at all. No, I didn’t ever write to you about my marriage. I didn’t tell anyone about it. But, with you, I often felt that I was almost telling. Because I did write to you about silence. I asked you questions about anger. I began to write to you about my past, and how I felt I’d lost the person I used to be.
You and I both believe in karma. I knew how I felt about you from the beginning. I knew it before I ever started sending you the endless questions in 2017. I knew, each time you responded and my heart perked up, that I was betraying any vows I’d made in Kansas. For years, I punished myself for that betrayal by subsuming myself even further to my husband’s needs. But, because you were only ever kind and listening, and because you never hinted that you might want, or that I might want, anything else from our relationship, we kept growing closer regardless.
Then, yes, in 2021 you came to my little town to see my husband and me. Finally, after a decade, I saw you and heard your voice for the first time. And somehow, without my having to warn you, you understood that you couldn’t really talk to me or look at me that day. I was so grateful to you for understanding. I was grateful I didn’t have to tell you. You knew not to reference anything I had ever written to you. It was like we’d exchanged all those words, over all the years, in another place. Another universe, where we both lived in a state of freedom.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, I could only look at you from an angle, whatever part of you I could catch while looking at something else. And I could only conspire to touch you once. Just for a brief moment, as I took something from a shelf and set it in your hand. It was safe for me to hold Santo and speak to him, so I gave him his own kisses and then more, because I couldn’t give any to you. And when you drove away, I was also acutely, consciously alone. Alone in a different way than I’d been before you came.
We do have a magical story, the story of us finally getting together. It was the most romantic and devastating and profound experience of my life. But yes, we already have a lot of words here, and that story can wait. What matters is that, a few months after you drove away, once I had pulled myself clear of the wreckage of my marriage, you were still there. You were still my most constant and my closest friend. And finally, after a decade, we could begin to say to each other all the things we’d been waiting to say.
Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity,” in 2021, and 2023’s “Exit Culture.”
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
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That is epic. An Iliad of despair and passion and finally redemption. Congratulations to you both. I'll be thinking of you on Wednesday. Via con Dios!
What a moving piece. Brought me to tears -- of happiness! that you two finally came together must feel like a gift. I love the story of how you've breathed a whole new kind of life into being. Congratulations on your wedding --and best wishes for many decades of happiness-- and writing --together!