Stephen Zanichkowsky and Selby Frame on their wedding day
Long Road to the Altar
“I walked away thinking that’s the kind of gal I want. She walked away making clear she never wanted to see me again. “
By Stephen Zanichkowsky
Why is it that some of us don’t marry until so much later in life? We are frequently dismissed as playboys, spinsters, floozies, or rakes, but there are good reasons some folk take longer than others.
Mostly it’s because we human beings run on neurons and chemicals, not logic. Driven to some extent by needs and desires, it’s often difficult for us to identify our own best interests and to act accordingly. We absorb from our culture airbrushed pictures of perfect mates and lifestyles, setting hurdles no one could clear. Just look at the magazines: succulent babes draped over everything from cars to malt liquor; men with tractor-tread abs doing push-ups on their… well, you know. Each gender is left with a set of miraculous and short-lived expectations about the other.
Many of those who marry young become disillusioned contributors to our society’s 50 percent divorce rate. Some of those who wait, myself included, live in lost and semi-anxious anticipation of the day when all the pieces will fall into place: mate, career, paycheck, second home. This is a practiced art: We have busy schedules, plenty of dates, tidy little apartments, favorite nightspots in town. Not much discussion about why we are alone though.
That’s over for me now, but I didn’t tie the knot until my fiftieth year. Why did I wait so long? For starters, my twenties were a wash, because I grew up with 13 siblings sleeping five to a room. I left home in search of solitude, not a wife, and the joy of not being accountable to anybody took a full ten years to wear off. I reached 30 having given wedlock some thought but little serious consideration.
Meanwhile half my friends and siblings had married. What were they getting in exchange? I couldn’t tell, because marriage took them off my radar. Marriage was for those who couldn’t figure out anything more interesting to do with their lives. Why trade for what I already had in hand: spontaneous romance, few liabilities, and no responsibilities? This… indirection… entailed a certain amount of anxiety, but I accepted that as the price one had to pay for living in the fast lane. Was I afraid of commitment? You bet; The only thing I feared more than being tied down with a wife was being tied down with a wife and kids.
But the fast lane worried me too. The rapid exchange of partners left me feeling hollow and disoriented; too many road-forks and not enough stability. I attached quickly, and found the repetitive separations difficult. I didn’t want a family or the permanence of marriage, but there was some seriousness or durability missing; some sense of… mattering.
My life consisted of sleeping around, working, and listening to bands. With each new woman I felt like a transient, a tourist watching slides of my own vacation. I underwent periods of celibacy; the romances no longer seemed worth the price of the wreckage. Maybe what bothered me was that, since we all swam like minnows in the same pond, no one woman stood out as particularly interesting or worthy of further investigation. I was waiting for the one they promised me in the ads, the one who’d sweep me off my feet. But what would such a woman find in me?
I’m not sure how the women were seeing things, but most of those in my constellations weren’t rushing down any aisle either. Most of us were living marginal artist-type lives, with no money and seemingly little influence over our futures. When talk of children arose, even women in their mid-thirties would say with a sigh: “I’d like a family, but…” Nobody seemed anxious to hurry into Plan B simply because Plan A wasn’t working out.
Forty was only a few years off, but that was a long way if you took it one day at a time. We were still anxious to write that book, sign that record deal, land that bit part … Marriage and children meant moving out of the city, securing a genuine source of revenue, and relinquishing those dreams. From a creative standpoint, this reeked of failure.
Then, at 37, I met Lisa on the subway. A completely random event, yet I knew right away I wanted to be with her. Neurons and chemicals. I tracked her down and we started dating. But I’d been living on my own for 17 years; I was settled in my ways, accustomed to that room of my own. I’d had no experience with compromise, or even sharing. With the exception of my need for romance and occasional companionship, I had little understanding of what a relationship was for. I wanted Lisa, but how? Why? Even my childhood with nine sisters had taught me little about women.
Lisa and I lasted three years, and the termination of my first serious relationship doesn’t bother me now because I learned some important lessons. The first was how not to limit “interesting” to mean persons like myself. Lisa showed me things in the world I never would have discovered, especially in the arts. That is, she taught me how to pay attention in a broader sense. What, besides earning a living, did I really want to do with my time? She also taught me to apply myself to my own work. The downside was that I felt her trying to shape me into the person she really wanted me to be. But you can’t take a man of 35 or 40 and tweak him until you get the guy you want. I learned from Lisa, but too late of course, that it’s best to take others as they come. Couples therapy informed me that we were each looking down the barrel of years of solo work. It’s no coincidence that neither of us married for another decade.
My forties were spent perfecting the art of living alone, and dating women 15 years younger than myself. My peers, meanwhile, had begun to sense that there was no talking me into starting a family. There was an army of us singles milling around, most of us unable to recognize mating as a primary drive. Once you’re too old to consider having children, a bit of the struggle falls away and you can start thinking about what you want the rest of your life to look like. A few of my friends chose a path of adoptive single motherhood; some couples moved to rural areas.
I became better at living alone. I seldom felt desperate or lonely and – feeling less inclination to mate – I began to like myself more. I had simplified the idea of a relationship; it didn’t involve partnering, sharing goals, creating a new life together. I wasn’t cut out to make or meet the demands and expectations of others. A relationship could be stripped down to a single word: companionship. Couldn’t I just find someone I enjoyed spending time with?
Selby and I met on an island off the coast of Maine. I was working on a schooner, taking a breather from the urban myth. I walked away from our first encounter thinking that’s the kind of gal I want: Funny, intelligent, sharp, voluptuous. She walked away making it perfectly clear she never wanted to see me again. At first I thought: “Okay, somebody has worked her over, but that’s not my fault. Besides, she has a kid.” I was still extremely reluctant to embrace family, but I also realized that any woman my age was either going to have kids already or be as emotionally twisted as I was.
I returned to the city, broke things off with my younger girlfriend, and gave up on women altogether. “If you find another one like Selby,” I reasoned with the universe, “you know where to find me.” I didn’t see her or anyone else for two years. Instead I wrote, read, and played chess.
Selby and I met again when I returned to Maine to write about the guys who’d built that schooner. It’s hard to say why it took that much time. Her divorce was a few years deeper in the past, and her son was a little older. At the same time, my needs and temper were a little more in hand, and I’d started to sell some writing. Also, I was facing aorta-replacement surgery; perhaps there weren’t going to be endless more years to squander alone. Finally, though, Selby was still the edgy, funny, live-wire babe I’d fallen for a few years back. I hadn’t met anyone like her, not even in New York. I rationalized the son away, figuring I’d show him how to use tools, do science, collect LP’s, and shoot baskets.
We were married on Valentine’s Day 2003. I brought few romantic notions to the altar, which disappointed her. Our marriage, for me, wasn’t about shared goals, raising her son together, joining our families. I married her for her sense of humor, her bawdiness, her complete lack of artifice. I married her because she wanted me to, and because I didn’t want to lose her company.
I think Selby worried about how I would accept her son, a worry I shared with her. But that, I reasoned, would have to take care of itself. I was old enough now to realize there was no such thing as a perfect marriage, and I wasn’t going to give her up without at least trying to overcome my doubts and apprehensions.
We could afford one night at the Algonquin in New York City. Walking west on 44th Street toward the hotel, I felt strangely like my father from pictures I’d seen of his wedding. I wore a long herringbone overcoat, a fancy hat; I was 50. It was overcast, and the buildings had that black-and-white feel of film noir. Not that I felt like an adult finally; I just felt like a New Yorker getting married around 1943, walking the streets on a bitterly cold afternoon with my wife on my arm.
