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The second time is better.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, eight years after a broken engagement, reunite. Sadder and wiser, they grasp the rarity of their affection, and the awareness intensifies their joy.
Cary Grant’s comedies of remarriage (philosopher Stanley Cavell’s phrase) likewise invoke the nuptial mulligan. The couples in The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story split because the partners are unable to appreciate qualities that traditional romantic love excludes, such as skepticism and intelligence. But the separation vouchsafes clarity. Old insults transmute to wit.
My facts crack these fictions. During my first marriage, my wife and I separated and reunited twice. Instead of revealing virtues overlooked, these breaks crushed us with loneliness, and so we slunk back to matrimony, not because we wanted each other but because we feared we wouldn’t be wanted by anybody else.
If we’d stayed apart a year, say, we would have accrued enough history outside the marriage to build new identities. That’s the problem: a marriage locks each partner, for better or worse, into a role, and that role over time seems real. Even if I feel small around my wife, at least I’m defined, and that’s better than nebulousness.
If my “remarriages” were tragically repetitive, my second marriage, occurring four years after my first ended, has been exhilaratingly different. My new wife (her name is Fielding, I am besotted) appears the glorious opposite of my ex. Where the old clenched, the new relaxes. The praise of the new replaces the old’s contempt. Stop, the old said. Do it, coos the new.
My new wife evokes my neglected parts—flexibility, humor, sensualism—and there is ecstasy: of feeling like I am myself only enough to know that I have become someone else, hopped-up Hyde popped out of the tired Doctor.
Hyde was his all along, the Doctor realizes. The new becomes familiar. But not complacent. The energies my second wife catalyzes reveal my deficiencies in my first marriage. I understand, for instance, how my depression sucked, as a stale mouth an orange’s pulp, life from the love.
That darkness, though, conjured contemplations that roused my best writing. My current giddiness, I know, needs tempering. The seriousness of old, and the regularity and the asceticism, I welcome back, austere smelters of ore-rich words.
This is the sweet irony a second marriage activates: the ability to place your life’s oppositions into a free-form conversation in which each side challenges and intensifies the other.
I am melancholy. But your sadness looks ridiculous. Yes, but silliness is impotent; to feel the gap between “is” and “ought” vitalizes. True, but attune to the “now” if you want wit; hard to joke about what’s not yet happened.
Existence as continuous two-step—yes, no; no, yes. Not an easy dance to master, since the temptation to take a side breaks the rhythm.
You want to be like Cary Grant. Even Cary Grant wants to be like Cary Grant. His best movie moments are internal “backs-and-forths” between Archie Leach, the impoverished sorrowful Bristolian he left in England, and his Hollywood persona, urbane, blithe, badinage-brilliant.
Grant’s best director, Hitchcock, put these two sides in play, perpetually darkening the debonair and leavening the grimness. Just watch the actor in Suspicion, his paranoid glances threatening his suave seduction of Bergman.
Grant married five times, so it’s unlikely he blessed his wives with this expansive irony. The worst thing you can do in a marriage is to stiffen into a stable “I”: I am the man who does this; if you cross me, I will quarrel, regular as a robot. Better to be myriad, messy, un-entrenched, comprehending that this current persona is only one among many, and not necessarily your best.
Hitchcock once asked Grant to play Hamlet. The film fell through. (Though North by Northwest is Shakespeare’s tragedy in modern idiom.) If Grant had played the Dark Prince, he would have relished the line, “the readiness is all.” We don’t know anything finally; ultimately be prepared for everything.
If my second marriage is a state of being as much as a (joyful) fact, it is this aporetic, yet alert openheartedness.
You don’t need to remarry (obviously) to relish this liberating double vision. If you have endured a crisis, then you are torn between past failure and present hope. Don’t purge the habits of the past or armor up your current endeavors. Salvage the past’s value, in whose light the chinks of the present show; and shore up the present, to discern what from the past still fortifies.
This is crude. This idea that only two sides divide us. Within our hearts, foes are legion. It’s a bruhaha.
But out of this cacophony, we generally struggle, at any given time, with the two voices whose blood is most up. The combatants constantly change, but whoever they are, if we play referee instead of attaching to a team, we’ll hold the old and the new in a frisky skirmish, and so catch the conjugal spirit at its most merciful: I will keep, my love, the second chances coming.
You might live on mercy alone, until the second becomes the last.
