Beyond Marriage, by Erica Jong, Talk Magazine: June/July 2000

Beyond Marriage
BY ERICA JONG

from Talk Magazine, June/July 2000

Since marriage isn't forever anymore, real commitment comes after the fact: when you burn the prenup. Introducing a 21st-century ritual.

Ten years after we were married, my husband and I burned our prenup. We burned it in a wok at the end of a dinner party to which we had invited our dearest friends--and our lawyers. Either that's the most romantic gesture ever made, or the stupidest. I prefer to see it as romantic.

Marriage is about trust, and trust takes you quickly to the matter of money. It is very hard to trust someone and share all your worldly goods with that person, but the alternative is worse. During the better part of a decade when I was single and recovering from the bitterest of divorces, I usually felt fine until I saw the term "next of kin" on a form. These three little words shook me up more than "I love you." Leaving the space blank meant there was no one to look after my daughter if something happened to me, no one for doctors to consult in case of emergency, no one to bury me if I dropped dead, no one to decide which manuscripts to burn and which to sell. Leaving it blank meant I was an orphan from the human family.

Marriage fills the blank and does more. A good marriage replaces monologue with dialogue, enhances your life expectancy, and gives you somebody to blame for whatever is wrong with your life. If you want to stay married, you don't hold the grudge. You realize that whatever you gave up in order to join your life with this other person's was more than compensated for by the things you got. But that doesn't mean you lose the right to complain. Healthy complaining--even the occasional unhealthy rage--also keeps marriages together. It's the endless silences that torpedo them .

When Ken and I met, each of us had been married before--twice in his case, three times in mine. We stamped the phrase "A Triumph of Hope Over Experience" in red on our wedding announcements right over the line "Erica and Ken are astonished to announce their marriage." We joked a lot because we were terrified. We both thought we had come to our last chance. We didn't want to blow it.

My own marital history made great copy but was hell to live through. My first husband went crazy and thought he was Jesus Christ. My second was the psychiatrist I married to protect myself against madness. The third was my dearest soul mate until he became my bitterest enemy. No wonder I never wanted to marry again. By the time I met Ken I had figured out how to have men in my life without making a commitment: Either they were terminally commitment-phobic or otherwise committed. I tried to have two or three at once so as never to have to depend on one, but I quickly learned that three men add up to less than one. I thought the system worked just fine for me. Until I met Ken.

On our first date I insisted on bringing a car and driver so he wouldn't he able to drive me home. (It was spring break, and my daughter and I were ensconced in the country house.) After our second date I devised a business trip to Los Angeles to get away from him (But then I called him as soon as I arrived, and left my number.) After our third date I escaped to Europe, supposedly to attend a cooking school in Italy-though I never cook. There was also a boyfriend in Italy-one of those otherwise-committed charmers who liked to drop in unannounced and then flee back to home and hearth. While I'd be waiting by the phone for him to call, Ken would call instead. He was on his way to Paris and sending me a ticket to join him. Meanwhile the Italian hadn't been heard from. By the time he slithered into the dining room of the cooking school I had made other plans.

I am reporting the events but leaving out all the anguish. Unless you are a cold-blooded psychopath, its not easy to juggle partners. And at times the effort of keeping these multiple fires burning turned my life into a French farce.

Ken had lived his own version of this comedy--through two marriages and one long-term cohabitation that was much like a marriage. Instead of feeling free as a result of his escapades, he often felt trapped. Instead of feeling sated, he often felt lonely.

During that first weekend in Paris, we talked so much we never slept. We also fought, but our fights never ended the conversation; we discovered we always had more to say. When sex entered the equation, I became so scared of intimacy that I went home early. Left to my own devices I would have sabotaged the relationship, but even at our darkest moment Ken was optimistic. After our first fight, he went for a walk and brought me back a first edition of Colette's La Fin de Chéri as a farewell present. I was so touched by his knowing it was one of my favorite books that it became a hello rather than a goodbye. It was his generosity and risk-taking that constantly won my heart.

When we got back from Paris we had dinner together every night. We used to look up from the table at one another and be surprised to find restaurants closing around us. Everyone's deepest hunger is to be known, and we were determined to know each other. The more we learned about each other, the more connected we felt.

When we had been together two months or so, we went to Vermont for a weekend. We stopped at the Putney Inn for dinner, and I blurted out my worst fear. "It seems okay now, but pretty soon you'll be telling me what to write--and threatening me if I don't write what you like. And I can't live with that."

Ken grabbed a napkin, scrawled something on it, then handed it to me to read: "I trust you completely. Do whatever! Write whatever you want! I release you! Ken!"

I folded up the napkin and kept it. I still have it. A month later we decided to get married.

Why did we write a prenuptial agreement? Ken, who is a divorce lawyer, wanted to waive it, but I felt I needed the protection of a legal document. I had worked hard for my fuck-you money in a very unstable profession, and I had no intention of jeopardizing it. Also, I had no faith in my own judgment. I had been so wrong about men in the past. I fully expected to be wrong again. So we both prepared net worth statements. And we both agreed to keep our monies separate. If we walked away from this marriage, we'd both take our marbles and go home. I hired a lawyer to put all this in writing.

But here is the strange thing about marriage: Either it gets better and stronger or it withers away. With every year that passes, the matter of money seems less important. Inevitably funds get mixed, you buy things together and write wills protecting each other. Little by little, prenuptial agreements become outdated. Do you sit down and renegotiate after 10 years--or do you quietly agree that the document has served its purpose and let it lapse? Because a prenup does serve a purpose. It says, "I hope I'll be able to trust you, but I'm not sure yet." When we discovered after 10 years that we trusted each other more, not less, we decided the prenup was obsolete.

"Will you still be happy to have revoked it if he runs off with a 25-year-old next year?" my lawyer, Ellie Alter, asked, posing the unanswerable question.

It's in the nature of life that we protect ourselves against things that never happen and utterly fail to contemplate things that do: About a week after we burned the prenup, Ken collapsed with what at first appeared to be a mild heart attack and turned out to be a dissection of the aorta. The first thing I thought was, We should never have burned the prenup. Somehow it had gone from being a legal document that would protect us from each other to an amulet that could protect us from the world. Maybe it had been an amulet all along.

During the hours I sat outside the operating room and the weeks I spent in the hospital, waiting, I realized that my life was irrevocably bound with Ken's--prenup or no prenup. We had crossed that invisible barrier between being two people and being one. And while I had failed to protect my self against grief and loss, I had succeeded in building the real marriage I had always wanted.

If you join your life with someone else's you become a hostage to fortune in such a way that no legal document can protect you. Marriage is primal stuff--two people confronting their own mortality. It is not for the faint of heart. It is not for beginners.

"I didn't see a long tunnel with a blinding light at the end and my mother and father waving," Ken said when he recovered from his near-death experience. "I didn't see my body on the operating table connected to a heart-lung machine and hear angels choiring in the background." But he is different, and so am I. (And it isn't only because of his new Dacron aorta.) The time we spend together is infinitely more precious. We are arranging our lives to have more of it.

I would not be telling this story honestly if I did not admit that by writing this I feel as though I am tempting the gods. Early in my life I got married without having an inkling what being married meant. I was lucky to have survived three marriages and to have healed enough to write about them. Now I want to protect the marriage I have with silence.

"I hope you're taking notes," my husband always says to me when we go through a hard time. He relies on me to be his chronicler. He was mostly asleep during his crisis, and I was awake. I am supposed to be his Boswell and he my muse. Marriages have been based on worse contracts.

Marriage is, of all human arrangements, the chanciest. We know all the things that can go wrong but are still delighted when they go right. We never tire of hearing how couples met, or of the obstacles they surmounted. We pride ourselves on being hard-boiled and pragmatic, but deep down we long to be gooey and romantic.

As we search for new rituals for the millennium, burning the prenup is probably fated to be come a trend. Vintners will create special wines and bakers will devise special cakes. Priests and rabbis will be asked for new vows. It will become the commitment "I do" was for our grandparents.

"Darling, do you love me enough to burn the prenup?"

Erica Jong, author of
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life