I Do, I Will, I Have

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
who never forgets them,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,
it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.
-Ogden Nash


What happens when an engineer marries a liberal arts major? Somewhere down the road somebody writes a memoir entitled, “Engineers are from the US; Liberal Arts Majors Might Feel More at Home in Malaysia.” It will never be a best seller; it has little movie potential, but I suspect there may be a niche market out there.

I’ve been considering possible plot outlines for just such a thriller since I caught a glimpse of our marriage in a microcosm. A while ago our entire family, at least what was left of it, was roaming around the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, trying to get our second daughter on a flight to Boston. For several reasons incidental to this account, we still did not have a ticket in hand when we arrived at the airport, though we had, we believed, a confirmed reservation. At the last moment - 40 minutes before her flight was scheduled to leave - we decided some things about her itinerary were too uncertain and we bagged the flight. Which left us in the position of needing to find another available flight with acceptable connections for a 16 year old flying alone, preferably within the next several hours.

We discovered the single available public computer terminal and both of us, engineer and spouse, sat down to hunt for the elusive ticket. It was a recipe for disaster: me at the keyboard and him looking over my shoulder. I don’t need to script this part; you can imagine how things went as Mr. Systematic and Ms Random attacked the problem from within their respective frames of reference. The drama inherent in this clash of worldviews was heightened by the shortness of time and multiplied exponentially by the number of children waiting for us to take them home.

Two hours later over lunch, having eventually purchased a ticket and checked our daughter’s heavy suitcases, we attempted to debrief. However, as happens in so many diplomatic encounters, the tension refused to evaporate. We each, as it turns out, not only had different ideas about how the ticket search should have proceeded, we also had vastly different interpretations of “what happened back there.”

Me: “You know, I would really have preferred it if you had just taken over instead of coaching me from behind.”

Him: “But I didn’t want to take over! I just wanted to help you. I wanted to do this with you.”

Me: “Well I think we approach problem solving so differently that we should NOT try to work on something pressured and last-minute together. One or the other of us should do it alone.”

Him: “It’s true; we do approach problem solving differently. I approach it like an engineer and you.. . . “ something inaudible ending with the word “housewife.” (He was not trying to be patronizing; he was just, once again, at a loss for words to adequately describe me.)

Me: (outwardly calm, but with the last word reverberating in my head), “I do have a Master’s degree in Rhetoric. I know how to think.”

I think that was the end of the conversation; at least it should have been!

Before I take this any farther, there are a few things you should know. First, the real question here is not “Can this marriage be saved?” (The marriage is fine; the conversation, however, had to be scuttled.) ; The real question, it seems to me, is why don’t we do this a little more smoothly after 25 years of practice?! Sometimes, not often, I try to think past the immediate interaction and look for some underlying dynamic.


And, as I reflect on our marriage I have to say that the bane of both of our lives has been the lack of proper “systems” in our house. The engineer feels like whenever he comes in the door each evening he enters Chaos in its truest modern day incarnation, and he may be right, considering that mythical Chaos has three main characteristics: it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly; it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in every direction; it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky parted, Chaos remains between both of them That’s not a bad description of the home in which I have been homeschooling 7 children, 24 hours a day for nearly 15 years.

I, however, never feel the lack of systems except when I read it in his eyes. To his everlasting credit he has spent 23 years biting his tongue, but I do still know. . . . You see, I am the kind of person who has never had a place for everything, so that everything could stay in its place, though I can usually find a utensil when I need one, or improvise with the next best thing. You’d think an engineer could appreciate that kind of resourcefulness and creative thinking, but no. Lately he has even told me (and our children) about a Japanese management tool they are implementing at work to keep things in their places, a simple five step process with an accompanying mnemonic mantra to be repeated as you do the task. I can't remember what the system is called, or even what the five letters are, never mind what they stand for. I'd rather just grab that spatula and use it instead of the tool I was originally looking for. You see what I mean.

He, however, has not been promoted to be Director of Global Engineering for no reason. He is an extremely talented man, and a systematic one, at that. He knows in his heart of hearts that there is nothing wrong in our lives that could not be fixed with a better system, and the only thing standing in the way of a better system is. . . . you guessed it, me. I know that his expertise in making things run smoothly is exactly why we find ourselves here in Malaysia, where nothing is systematic, systematized, streamlined, methodical, orderly, efficient, logical or regular. The entire reason my husband was called in was to make the company’s Malaysian operations work smoothly and profitably. And he’s doing a wonderful job! The factory personnel here appear to be considerably more tractable than his wife, which is a good thing for us all. And while I find a lot of things about Malaysia frustrating, I have to admit that I understand how a country could have ended up like this. .. . all I have to do is look at my kitchen!

Is there a moral here? Not really, unless it's that the real key to a successful marriage must be the ability to laugh at oneself more often and more heartily than one laughs at one's spouse! Or that the real oil that keeps the machinery running is not the right system, so much as the right attitude - esteeming one another better than ourselves. Fortunately, my husband is an expert at that, as well. When we exchanged rings at our wedding we read the words from Ecclesiastes 4:9, "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor." Which is, I guess, the inspired version of, "It takes two to tango." I think I'm going to go put on some dance music right now.