“STAY MARRIED AND YOU’LL FIND OUT,” THE ALL-TIME ANSWER

“Stay married and you’ll find out” was the answer to a question about wolves.

It seemed like a normal wolf question, but that one smart aleck answer sounded universal.

How did five words turn into an answer for everything?

First the question:

“Why are people called ‘Lone Wolf” when wolves travel in packs and mate for life?”

Seems like an authentic sort of animal question. Got me wondering.

“Stay married and you’ll find out,” takes it a different turn.

I bought it up with a never married woman who used the idea not as a jump-off to funny recollections, but an explanation of why she’s never swam in the marriage pool.

1

“I told the guy I was living with not to drive through Forest Grove after partying half the night on the other side of town. It’s a gauntlet of cops. I told him I’d stay up and go get him for crissake.”

That statement alone qualifies her as wife-material in many communities.

“But he said he knew how to handle his business and his booze. At two o’clock in the morning he called from jail. I talked to the jailer and asked if he could spend the night. So he did. The next morning he wasn’t happy about it.

Again, wife-worthy moves to show her man the error of his ways.

“We’d been living together, but not after that. He couldn’t understand why I’d take him to the party and pick him up and avoid the whole jail part, which he couldn’t understand either. Why didn’t I rush to him when he called? I had to explain why.”

This part stumps me. She wasn’t invited to the party? Was he going to a sausage-fest with his party bros?

“That was as close as I got to married. I don’t understand the ‘lone wolf’ part.”

Stay married and you’ll find out.

“But I didn’t get married.”

And she didn’t find out.

“Marriage is two people no matter how you count it. Two people. Two different people.”

Two different people in one marriage.

“But, still two people.”

Stay married and you’ll find out.

2

I talked to a friend about her serious boyfriend. If I remember right, he was tall and slim and well-mannered. They made a stylish couple, Portland style.

But he seemed a little out of place, which is how men in serious relationships are supposed to look.

I asked about him years later.

“We were living together and had plans, those plans, but something felt off. I didn’t know what it was until he left me a note on the table one morning. It was the first note he’d ever left.”

Being in love with plans for the future is a blinding experience. And deafening. All you hear is your heart beat.

“It wasn’t what he said in the note, but how it was written. It looked remedial.”

She didn’t say remedial, but in my mind I see letters scrawled with the big pencil, left handed.

“We talked about it and I said I could help him.”

Note to the un-married: when a partner prospect says anything like this, keep listening. But he wasn’t that kind of partner.

“I think he was embarrassed and acted like he didn’t understand what I meant by help. He didn’t need any help, started spending more late nights out, and, you know.”

Stay Married And Find Out What?

It’s nearing Christmas and time to put up the lights.

I’ve done it without supervision or help every time. Decades worth of lights. Why? Because some things are easier going it alone.

As a result some years have looked like the light designer threw balls of lights in the yard and plugged them in, hung half-dead icicles gapped out and drooping under the gutters, all in a neighborhood that rents hydraulic lifts for their lights. Because, Jesus.

This year my wife helped, got into the lights and bought into the process. She stood by the ladder and kept tension on the line, which is the ‘tamborine part’ in the band, the ‘hold the light job’ under the hood.

This next part is a Married Test.

I’m two steps up an eight foot stepper stringing lights across a green-stained white trellis formerly crawling with vine plants.

I’m patiently waiting for my lovely assistant to untangle the mess I threw into the light box last year.

From where I stood I could reach over one more loop to the right which usually accounts for ‘The Fall.’ Or I could step down and move the ladder to a safer place.

I’m standing on the aluminum rung thinking, ‘What are the odds that the moment I step off this ladder she hands me the untangled line of icicle lights and I have to go all the way back up?’

I wait a moment. Then another. I’m waiting her out. Sensing defeat, I slowly step to the bottom rung.

Will she say ‘here are the lights’ before my foot touches the ground? Again, I wait. Finally, with an exaggerated knee bend I begin to step off the ladder.

This whole ladder scene probably took five seconds, but in those five seconds I felt the same vibe I’ve felt watching the Nature channel where apex predators stalk lesser beasts.

Except here, no one is the apex predator, or singles themselves out. It’s more a battle of equals carried out in the silence of shared goals. Like apex predators, we stalk together.

It’s marriage, is what it is, and the biggest shared goal is staying married and finding out.

Leave a ‘stay married’ comment and I’ll pass it along to a newly engaged couple.

“What do you want to do now?”

“Let’s stay married and find out.”