The Truth About Marriage And Monogamy

My father stood by the door, back against the wall. I remember him tense, like it was a military manoeuvre: get Troy out the house. 

The lights were off. The lights were always off. That was the suburban way. Don’t turn the lights on unless guests come. Save on electricity. Expend mental health instead. Keep it as dark and menacing as possible.

Outside was the half-light of a damp autumnal morning. Storms had come recently. The paving stones shone with rain. There was electrical ominousness in the air.

It’s hard remembering exactly what he said. Memory bends and shapes everything. So do drink and drugs. But it was something like this:

‘I can’t protect you. I can’t help you. She is my wife. Don’t you understand?’ 

He told me I had to go. For a few hours. Get out of the house. Until she calmed down.

She wasn’t my mother, she was my stepmother. My parents had split and divorced when I was seven years old. My father met another woman who had a daughter and so my sister and I had been fused into this new ‘family’.

It’s a nice word, isn’t it, family? Now, when the Christmas ads are on the TV, we know what it is supposed to look like. Mother beaming and ruffling the kid’s hair as she pours gravy over turkey breast.

A lovely idea. But reality doesn’t always match it.

I was fifteen years old. Earlier on I had sat upstairs in my bedroom listening to my stepmother raging. When she was in those moods, everything she did was designed to create the most din possible, to draw attention to her unhappiness. To her terrible predicament: being married and trapped in this suburban home with these children two of whom weren’t even hers.

(There were now four of us, since my youngest step-sister sister had been born).

Never mind that she had willingly entered into this scenario. Never mind that she had been one of its co-authors (along with my father. In fact, I would not be surprised if she had pushed for it prior to its genesis). All that mattered now was her anger, her frustration, and her desire to let all of us know about it.

The house rocked when she was angry. Her anger was wild, unpredictable, terrifying. There was an animalism to it. Plates were thrown, guttural screams were yelled. She would grab me hard by the face, crushing my cheeks into my jaw with her hard fingers, then slam me into cupboards and shelves. Ornaments would smash. Pots and pans would fall and clatter, a dreadful orchestra to accompany the show.

Well, anger is a performance. I realised that later when, unconsciously, I found myself aping her behaviour when drunk. Anger fuels itself—it becomes its own justification.

My stepmother was angry because she felt trapped. Because she had taken on two kids that were someone else’s while she already had her own, and now another had been born.

Of course, logically she knew that the situation had been self-created. No-one had held a gun to her head and forced her to marry my father. But anger doesn’t work like that.

Anger says: yes I created this situation and I don’t care. I’m angry. And my anger is all that matters. 

And so I was the scapegoat, and so was my sister. In fact all of us four children suffered to some extent. As did my dad, and indeed, my stepmother herself.

That’s the problem with families: no one comes out unscathed.

She wanted me out the house.

You know what she said to me one time?

‘You know the thing I really can’t stand? That makes me sick? That you live here in this house.’

I was a frightened kid even at 15 and so I said nothing. I was afraid that if I protested it would only make things worse. Probably I was right.

But when my father told me that he couldn’t protect me, that she was his wife, that I had to get out of the house while he tried to make things right, I saw that this thing was uncontainable, like wildfire, and that it was raging out of all control.

Just last weekend I met up with my sister and her daughter, my niece. My niece is now 16. She seems so young still, so vulnerable. And I was even younger than that when my father informed me that I had to leave the house. That he couldn’t ‘protect me’ from the wife he had married to protect me.

******

You will forgive me if I don’t regard family life as being the ideal that other people do. It is hard to do so, when you are given a front-row seat from which to observe the inner workings of a marriage like that.

Here’s what I think happened. My father and stepmother had got together in a blaze of sexual passion. Even as a kid, when we all moved into that house together, I could sense it. Of course, I couldn’t articulate it then. But looking back it’s clear that my stepmother brought a fiery sexuality into my father’s life. And by extension, into our lives too.

After a while, though, that sexual passion abated and then died. (After I’d left the house to go to university my sisters told me that my father and stepmother ended up sleeping in separate rooms. They eventually split some years later).

Then, the reality of the situation came into sharp focus for my stepmother: four kids to look after (two of them someone else’s). A house and garden to maintain. All the drudgery of domesticity stretching out into the future as far as she could see as payment for what had probably merely been a short-lived infatuation.

No wonder she raged, and tried to tear the house and everyone in it to pieces.

The Notion of Love

And this is where the notion of love becomes problematic. What does it really mean?

It gets stretched out thin over decades.

We tell each other we are in love when sexual passion is at its height and when the bonding hormones are shooting through our bodies like pinballs.

But when those hormones inevitably calm down and return to equilibrium then we are often left with the consequences of the choices we have made in an altered state.

This is basically how it went down for my father and stepmother. It seemed like a good idea to fuse two families together, to build a new family. After all, they were ‘in love’. And love, as we know from the songs and the movies, conquers all.

Except it doesn’t. Not forever, anyway. Because other feelings, equally strong, can rise to the surface to quell it.

This, I believe, was my stepmother’s experience. I have no doubt that she ‘loved’ my father in the early years, and probably for a long time after. But that wasn’t enough to prevent her for reneging on the ‘deal’ which they must have struck early on: to get married and have her assume the role of mother to all of us.

The idea was that she would be the kind, caring mother that children deserve. And at times, to be fair, she was. But these occasions were blighted by her rage, by her flamboyant refusal to accept the long-term consequences of a decision that she herself had made.

Doubtless, my father did not stand up to her as he should have done. And perhaps if he had she would have found a new respect for him. As it was, she met another man some years later and they were divorced.

When people say marriage takes work, or it’s hard, we all nod sagely. But we don’t often pause to think about what these things really mean.

The truth is that marriage and monogamy are hard is because once the sheen of sexual desire has receded what you are left with is obligation. And people, inherently self-serving, can’t help but begin to ask ‘why’ they are still doing whatever it is they had undertaken.

From a woman’s point of view, looking after another man’s kids might be fine at the beginning—in fact, my stepmother probably welcomed it. But later on, when the spark has died it becomes an obligation, then a chore, then a frustration and finally a horror.

The truth is that monogamy, after the sunny years have passed, is a long, hard grind. That is not to say that it never ‘works out’—of course it does.

But to enjoy longevity a couple must be confident that both of them are committed for the long term come what may.

And how can anybody really know that ahead of time, for themselves or for their partner? Decades, after all, go on for a long time.

People can of course do whatever they wish. But two words of caution. Don’t ever assume that monogamy and marriage are a panacea—they’re not. And just because the person you’re committing to tells you what you want to hear about the future, don’t bet your life on it being accurate.

No doubt my father thought things would be a certain way forever when he married my stepmother. Well, he was wrong.

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