Ordinary Time

Katherine Glover

A Cynic Tells Love Stories

Augsburg Main Stage

2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m.., Sat. Aug. 1 @ 1:00 p.m. Sun., Aug. 2 @ 8:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 5:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 7:00 p.m. 

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.  Lily Tomlin.

When the meltdown of my marriage began, I turned first to bibliotherapy.  By this I mean the “Relationships” section of Barnes and Noble. (Actually, with some premonition of my future economic state, I browsed at Barnes and Noble, wrote down the titles, and then surreptitiously took them out of the pubic library.) Phillip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz’s Peer Marriage. John Gottman’s Why Marriages Succeed or Fail.  Peter Kramer’s “Should I Leave?”  I was trying to work out the issues, trying on ideas.  It was all just theoretical. Ashton Applewaite’s Cutting Loose.  Constance Ahron’s The Good Divorce. Isolina Ricci’s Mom’s House, Dad’s House.  My library card knew what was happening before I did. 

“What is more important, passion or compatibility?” Katherine Glover asks in “A Cynic Tells Love Stories.”  I hear the question, coming from a woman whose parents divorced when she was three, and wonder if my own daughter, whose parents divorced when she was seventeen, asks herself the same question. Or if, like me, she sees this as a false dichotomy. 

False dichotomies make wonderful jumping off points, however.  By the end of the hour, Glover’s stories have addressed, in one way or another, all the necessary conditions for love:  Attraction.  Desire.  Trust.  Mutuality.  Respect.  Acceptance.  Commitment.  And a strong enough sense of self in each partner that both intimacy and autonomy are possible.  She does this in a way that is both smart and funny, without being sardonic.   Neither insight nor imagination is sacrificed to the god of Irony.

Gottman claims a lasting marriage is not about compatibility in the matchmaker’s sense at all – compatibility of interests, personality types, values, religious beliefs. If compatibility is necessary in any respect, it is in a couple’s style of handling conflict. Most of us have been trained to believe that a particular style of communication and compromise – validation - is required.  But Gottman’s research demonstrates that volatile couples – the passionate – have every bit as much a chance of achieving stability as those who avoid conflict altogether because they simply don’t see it as worth the trouble. Of course whether a lasting marriage is a healthy marriage is a different question altogether. 

“A good marriage,” someone once told me, “is one in which you are more yourselves together than apart.”  Is it cynicism to wonder how long any one relationship can really bear this burden? Why Marriages Succeed or Fail succeeded in describing my own dilemma precisely. I could see exactly how things had begun to go wrong. But it failed to convince me I could change anything. Like most people, we had waited too long. By the time criticism has turned to contempt, the damage has already been done. 

And yet there are couples who avoid this.  Whose relationships not only last, but stay healthy.  Is it because they manage to remain peers, to have an equal balance of power in the relationship? Equality is a straightforward concept; equity, less so, especially when children enter the picture. Do same sex couples have an advantage over heterosexual couples in this regard, as Blumstein and Schwartz suggest, because they organize their lives, and the roles they play, in ways that are essentially more egalitarian? I used to ask this of my gay friends on occasion.  Eventually I got tired of the uncontrollable laughter.

The story of Glover’s own brief marriage is told beautifully, with candor and compassion, and not a drop of self-pity. It made my heart ache.  In a good way.  In the end it is this story, which convinces me she is not, after all, a cynic.  Anyone who can see with such clarity, who can recreate each detail of a relationship – not without pain, perhaps, but in a conscious effort to move beyond bitterness - is not jaded – or closeminded - enough to qualify.  Nor does my daughter have to be. Stories like this are one of the reasons I see nurturing creativity as a moral imperative.