Ask Me Anything: Love Edition
Nine Keys to a Happy Marriage, How to Argue, and the The Best Relationship Advice I Ever Got
Yes, this is a Substack about writing and publishing. But I thought I’d end the year on a different subject: love.
When I put out a call for questions for Craft Week: Ask Me Anything, a few readers took the “anything” part to heart, which was what I was hoping might happen.
Some of the questions came via email. Here’s one of them.
(You can read my answers on film options, rescuing a muddled manuscript, enlisting a developmental editor, coming up with ideas, and more in Craft Week Part 1 and Craft Week Part 2.)
A Question About Marriage
Hi Michelle,
You said we could ask questions about anything you know about.
What in your opinion are the ingredients of a good marriage, and a good relationship if not in marriage?
After many years of both the above I am still struggling with relationships.
I am now 74 and about to start a new relationship with a woman one year older than me.
Thanks,
Raymond
Dear Raymond,
It is true that I have been married for a long time. My husband and I will soon celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary. We lived together for a few years before we got married, and we dated for a couple of years before we lived together; all told, we have been together for 28 years. I’ve spent more years with my husband than without him.
Several years ago, I wrote a whole novel about marriage, called The Marriage Pact, for which I did a lot of research into the psychology of marriage and the statistical aspects of marriage. (For example, it turns out that people who spend a relatively small amount of money on their wedding tend to stay married longer than people who have a very expensive wedding.)
I tell you all of this simply to say I do believe that I know a few things about marriage. Which is not to say that I necessarily know more about marriage than someone who has had a less “successful” marriage, because marriage and longterm partnerships contain myriad variables, and there are so many ways a marriage can fall apart, beginning with a fundamentally poor match—which is exceedingly difficult to overcome (more on that later).
I know about my marriage, and why it works now, and why it has worked for so long, and what has threatened it, and how we have held it together. I also know that I began with a fundamentally good match—someone with whom I had little in common on paper, but who turned out to be the right match for me nonetheless.
You will notice that the first small image on this post is a wedding cake, and the second small image is a house. That is because a marriage begins with the celebration, but what it comes down to, after the cake and champagne have run out, is the life of the home. For a marriage to work, the life of the home must be intact.