Chris Knutsen - Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment, and Marriage

Praise forCommitted

"A book of insightful, entertaining, and true stories about happiness. Committed is a deeply satisfying anthology."MatthewSharpe, author ofThe Sleeping Father

"For women frustrated by their husbands or boyfriends, or by the plethora of guides that claim to decipher the male psyche, this anthology offers a fresh perspective... The essayswhether creative stories, candid glimpses into these men's personal lives of merely ruminations on human relationships-expose the complicated, intriguing and sometimes harsh attitudes men have toward commitment, but their honesty is remarkable and illuminating." Publishers Weekly

"Here are men who have scrutinized the effect that love, commitment and marriage have had on their lives, and they offer their conclusions with an honesty that is both ruthless and sweet." Arizona Republic

"In this unsentimental, but soulful anthology, Kuhn and Knutsen have snookered 18 men into committing that passion to words and the results are sometimes sour, but more often sweet."HartfordCourant

"Funny, sometimes even profound, these authors offer an amusing road map to that strange and winding road from bachelorhood to marriage." Tampa Tribune

"Although the book arrives so redolent with manliness you practically expect the pages to smell like cologne ads, what's on the pages turns out smelling like roses and chocolates. Men, those freedom-loving buggers, want romance after all."Denver Post

"What's interesting, and sweet, about the Committed essayists is their explorations of the aspects of partnership not simply pertaining to monogamy."Salon.com

"Humorous."Santa Cruz Sentinel

"A literary ode to blissful male monogamy."New York Post

"Extraordinarily revealing."Journal News(Westchester County, NY)

COMMITTED

Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment, and Marriage

Edited by Chris Knutsen

and David Kuhn

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2005 by Chris Knutsen and David Kuhn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Committed: men tell stories of love, commitment, and marriage edited by Chris Knutsen and David Kuhn.1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-836-8

1. American prose literatureMale authors. 2. Male authors, AmericanBiography.

3. Man-woman relationships. 4. Commitment (Psychology).

5. Marriage. I. Knutsen, Chris. II. Kuhn, David.

PS648.M28C66 2005

818'.5080803543dc22

2004016183

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2005

This paperback edition published in 2006

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the United States of America

by Quebecor World Fairfield

CONTENTS

JAY MCINERNEY

Let me put my credentials right up front: I have been married three times, which would seem to qualify me to introduce and pass preliminary judgment on a book about commitment from the male point of view, even as it would seem to make me a prime candidate for the kind of instruction and inspiration presumably enshrined herein. Samuel Johnson famously remarked that marriage is the triumph of hope over experiencean observation more appropriate to second and third marriages. I prefer to think of myself as an incurable romantic rather than a three-time loser.

This past month, I was supposed to get married for the fourth time. Jeanine and I have been together off and on for some five years now. We had booked the church overlooking the harbor of Gustavia in St. Barth's, bought the plane tickets, invited the guests, talked to the minister, and engaged the services of a caterer. The projected wedding was to have taken place more than a year after the proposal, in part to accommodate the demands of my work, and in part, perhaps, to give my feet a chance to get warmer. I was in the middle of writing a novel and it seemed important to me to have it finished before I embarked on another matrimonial voyage. I can admit now that I was not unhappy at the prospect of a long engagement, comforted to have an excuse to put the date off into a somewhat distant future. (I actually considered following up the current novel with a comic novella about a writer who finds himself unable to finish a book after telling his girlfriend that he'll marry her as soon as he finishes his book.)

Last Thanksgiving, with the novel and the relationship bogging down more than somewhat, my fiancee called the wedding off. Or rather, she postponed it indefinitely. Our relationship improved almost immediately. We are, I would say, deeply committed to each other, living together, going on vacations with my third ex-wife and my two kids, walking our French bulldog and boldly planning a future together. And we have both been trying to figure out what it all means for the past few months.

There are, it always seemed to me, two frames of mind in which one should approach marriage: either to be compelled beyond reason, or to be fully cognizant of one's motives. Or so I thought until I read the essays in this book. "There's a lot to be said for acting impetuously when you're young," David Owen proposes, in defense of becoming a groom at the tender age of twenty-three. "Clueless people are more likely to be smart by accident than on purpose, so why not roll the dice." Owen's gamble seems to have paid off nicely over the ensuing decades. In his essay "Companion Species," Rick Moody describes how he gradually and grudgingly realized, over the course of a decade, that he was for all intents and purposes in a marriagethat in learning not to hate his girlfriend's cats he had unwittingly overcome his fear of commitment. Chip Brown, on the other hand, seems to have precipitously proposed for the first time at the ripe age of forty-three and then to have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why he waited so longonly to conclude that his destiny finally called him to the altar when it was ready.

The reaction to the postponement of our nuptials was largely bifurcated along gender lines. Despite her protestations that it was her own idea and that she stood by it, Jeanine's girlfriends treated her like a victim, or possibly a fool. "The first reaction was, I'm so sorry, you poor thing. When I told them it was my decision they thought I was mad. It was like I set my trap, I lured and caught my prey and then inexplicably let him get away. It was like I bought a vineyard and then suddenly decided to stop drinking." Jeanine's girlfriends are, almost without exception, sophisticated Manhattan professional women in their thirties and forties. They have, presumably imbibed the tenets of feminism with their mother's milk, or baby formula. They've watched Sex and the City. In fact, one of them, Candace Bushnell, is the author of the bookthat smart, cynical bible of feisty urban single girldom. Candace, who got married a couple of years ago, was among those who seemed to feel that Jeanine's catch-and-release strategy was incredibly misguided.