After returning from our honeymoon, we were both careful to avoid the letdown that could so easily have come following the brilliant party and weeks on a peaceful, sunny beach. The first night, back in our small house in San Francisco, ten blocks from the edge of the continent and the least sunny beach anywhere, I pulled out the china from my grandmother and prepared a four-course meal, setting the table with cloth napkins and candles. We’d already been living together for more than two years, and I wanted marriage to feel different.
I cooked a recipe that I’d found online for a roast and potatoes. It was terrible—a thick brown meaty disaster. To her credit, Alice cleaned her plate and declared it delicious. Despite her small size—she’s just five foot five in her tallest heels—she can really dig into a plate of comfort food. I’ve always liked that about her. Fortunately, the yellow cake with chocolate frosting saved the meal. The following night, I tried another family dinner. I did better this time.
“Am I trying too hard?” I asked.
“Trying too hard to fatten me up, maybe,” Alice said, swirling a drumstick in the mashed potatoes.
After that, we drifted back into our old habits. We’d order sausage pizza or takeout and eat in front of the television. It was sometime during our binge-watching of an entire season of Life After Kindergarten that Alice’s cell pinged with an email.
Alice picked up the phone. “It’s from Finnegan,” she said.
“What did he say?”
She read aloud. “Thank you so much for welcoming Fiona and me to celebrate your nuptials. There is nothing we love more than a beautiful wedding and a rousing party. We were honored to be part of your special day.”
“Nice.”
“Fiona says that you and Jake remind her of us from twenty years ago,” she read. “She insists you come stay with us next summer at our place in the North.”
“Wow,” I said. “It sounds like they actually want to be friends.”
“Lastly, the gift,” Alice continued reading. “The Pact is something that Fiona and I received for our own wedding. It was left on our doorstep on a rainy Monday morning. It wasn’t until two weeks later that we learned it was from my childhood guitar teacher, an old man from Belfast.”
“Regift?” I asked, perplexed.
“No,” Alice replied, “I don’t think so.”
She looked down at the phone and continued. “It turned out to be the best gift Fiona and I received, and frankly the only one I actually remember. Over the years, we’ve given The Pact to a few young couples. It is not for everyone, I should begin with that, but in the short time I’ve come to know you and Jake, I sense it may be right for you. So, may I ask you a few questions?”
Alice quickly typed, Yes.
She stared at her phone.
Ping.
She read aloud again. “Pardon my boldness, but would you like your marriage to last forever—yes or no? This only works if you are honest.”
Alice glanced at me, a little puzzled, hesitated for maybe a second too long, and then she typed, Yes.
Ping.
She was looking increasingly intrigued, as if Finnegan were leading her down a darkened street.
“Do you believe that a long marriage will go through periods of happiness AND sadness, lightness AND darkness?”
Of course.
Ping.
“Are both of you willing to work to make your marriage last forever?”
“That goes without saying,” I said. Alice typed.
Ping.
“Do either of you give up easily?”
Nope.
“Are both of you open to new things? And are you willing to accept help from friends if they have your success and happiness in mind?”
Puzzling. Alice looked at me. “What do you think?”
“Yes, for me at least,” I said.
“Okay, me too,” she said, typing.
Ping.
“Splendid. Are you available on Saturday morning?”
She looked up. “Are we available?”
“Sure,” I said.
Yes, she typed. Are you in town?
“Sadly, I am in a studio outside Dublin. But my friend Vivian will visit your house to explain The Pact. If you are so inclined, I would be honored if you and Jake chose to join our very special group. Will ten a.m. work?”
Alice fiddled with her phone calendar before answering, once again, yes.
Ping.
“Brilliant. I’m certain you and Vivian will hit it off.”
After that, we waited, but no more emails came. Alice and I stared at the phone, waiting for it to ping again.
“Does any of this strike you as—complicated?” I asked finally.
Alice smiled. “How bad can it be?”
6
A little about me. I work as a therapist and counselor. Although I had loving parents and, from the outside, what appeared to be an idyllic childhood, growing up was sometimes difficult. In hindsight, I didn’t choose my career so much as it chose me.
I arrived at UCLA as a biology major, though it didn’t last long. At the beginning of my second year, I took a job as a peer counselor for the College of Letters and Science. I enjoyed the training, and after that, the work. I liked talking to people, listening to their problems, helping them find a solution. When I graduated, I didn’t want my “career” in counseling to end, so I entered the graduate program in applied psychology at UC Santa Barbara. My postdoc internship brought me home to San Francisco, where I worked with at-risk teens.
Today I run a small counseling practice with two friends from that internship. When we started the group eighteen months ago in the remnants of an old vacuum repair shop in the Outer Richmond district, we worried we wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. At one point, we even considered selling coffee and my secretly famous chocolate chip cookies as a side business to help pay the rent.
In the end, however, the practice did seem to be surviving without any desperate intervention. My two partners, Evelyn (thirty-eight, single, super-smart, an only child from Oregon) and Ian (British, forty-one, also single, gay, the eldest of three), are both engaging, likable, and generally happy people, and I think this happiness just somehow willed the business to survive.
We each handle our own areas. Evelyn deals primarily with addiction, Ian specializes in adult anger management and OCD, and I take the kids and young adults. Patients who fit clearly into one of those categories are assigned to the appropriate partner, while everything else is divided evenly. Recently, though, we decided to branch out, or at least Evelyn did. I returned from the honeymoon to discover that she had arranged for me to lead our expansion into marriage counseling.
“Because I have so much experience with marriage?”
“Exactly.”
Evelyn, being the marketing genius, had already secured three new clients for me. When I protested, she showed me the emails in which she made it clear to the clients that I had a number of years of experience in counseling and precisely two weeks’ personal experience with marriage.
I have a fear of being unprepared. So when Evelyn dropped the news, I immediately went into panic mode and started studying up. I researched the evolution of marriage and was surprised to discover that monogomous marriage was only established in Western societies about eight hundred years ago.
I also discovered that married people live longer than single people. I’d heard that factoid before, but I never examined the actual studies. They’re quite convincing.