Wedding Cake for Breakfast Read Free

shuttled around under custody arrangements; my aunt and uncle arguing about money. I’d witnessed this corrosive unhappiness for years. When my parents finally separated after their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary, I vowed to myself:
That’s it. I’m never getting married.
    But then, the Amazing Bob arrived: a stunningly cerebral, handsome man equally capable of immense kindness and smart-assed wit. What’s more, he was at least as cynical as I was. Neither of us really believed in the institution of marriage. And yet, over time, it became clear that we were far better together than apart. We loved each other profoundly. We wanted all the tools available to take care of each other. And so we decided, finally, to take the plunge.
    Albert Einstein, who was apparently also a very smart man, once observed, “Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”
    But Bob and I were already hip to this. We were in our thirties when we got engaged. Our student loans were paid off. The posters on our walls were framed. We could microwave popcorn without consulting the directions on the side of the package. Hell, we even read
The New York Review of Books.
We didn’t expect an engagement ring or a marriage license to magically transform us. At best, we figured, wedlock would entitle us to better health insurance and maybe a new Cuisinart.
    Yet, to our immense surprise, the evening that we exchanged our vows, Roman candles ignited within us. Standing together beneath our wedding canopy, I felt something akin to bliss.
    The problem was: who in their right mind trusts bliss? During our honeymoon, Bob spooned me and fell asleep every night in a cloud of contentment, secure in the knowledge that we were now fully committed as husband and wife. I, on the other hand, lay blinking awake beside him having a full-blown anxiety attack. Surely, this “happy ending” of ours had to have a catch. Surely it was just a temporary reprieve—the gods teasing, “You want it? Psych!” Surely, tranquility was always just a precursor to some inevitable tragedy. As Bob breathed sweetly against my neck, I cataloged all the potential domestic catastrophes awaiting us.
    Married. Husband. Wife.
How could this possibly last? Never mind life’s bigger traumas and losses: What if our love began to curdle, and all those qualities that once endeared us to each other—his bad puns, my histrionics—started to grate? What if we ended up eating our meals in tedious silence punctuated only by chewing and slurping? What if we became sexually indifferent? What if I became a slovenly, menopausal woman in a tracksuit while Bob started sprouting ear hair and dressing like Mr. Rogers? What if we started calling each other “Maw” and “Paw”? What if we became one of those couples who constantly indict each other, treating everyone else like a jury, saying stuff in public like: “My wife’s idea of a ‘balanced breakfast’ is a donut and a martini—” “Oh really? Well, you’d drink, too, if you had a lover like Harry. Lemme tell you, an ATM transaction lasts longer than he does.”
    What if, every day that we spent together, a little part of us just died?
    Overnight, I became an emotional hypochondriac—on alert for the slightest shifts in my husband’s moods—convinced that it was only a matter of time before some terminal rot set in. IF I WASN’T VIGILANT AND PROACTIVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY, I worried, OUR MARRIAGE WOULD DISINTEGRATE.
    All those self-help books and triple-exclamation-point women’s magazines I’d once mocked; suddenly I was scanning them in the supermarket for advice: Were Bob and I voicing our appreciation for each other daily? Were we having sex well above the national weekly average? How often were we laughing together? We were laughing, weren’t we? Was I