How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

Chapter 1

I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE HEARD

2021

I used to care what people thought of me. I could hide neither my physical nor my most obvious spiritual faults—the spectacular baldness, the heliotropic ears, the hillbilly teeth, my uncharitable spirit, an everlasting hunger for praise, the quiet condescension I project in the presence of men who cannot grow a beard—but I felt that if I could make you laugh, maybe you’d forgive me all this and love me anyway. And it worked.

The world showered me with affection in exchange for the laughter, on stages and podcasts, at parties and TSA screenings, and this genial parlor trick felt good, to know that others envied my life or at least found me hilarious, charming, and slightly mysterious, the mystery being how I could simultaneously look like a distended cadaver in a medical textbook and have such an attractive wife.

I am a needy man. My wit, I hoped, would enchant others, including my wife, and make the world and my home less resistant to my presence. If everyone loved me, good things would manifest. I would become wealthy. I would lose weight. My hair would grow back. The past would unhappen. But I no longer care to be loved. God loves me. That will have to do.

Because some stuff happened, and the stuff changed me. And it changed how others saw me, and how I saw others seeing me, and how I saw God seeing me. I have become the kind of man who sits in his driveway smoking cigarettes in his underwear while waving at moms from the school around the corner as they drive by and pretend not to see. They know. They know what happened. They’ve heard.

Those poor kids, they say.

Our kids are fine. They’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll be fine.

My wife and me, however. That’s what this book is about.

I thought you were going to get divorced is one thing people said when they read my first book. I still get DMs like this. I’m glad you didn’t!

I was pretty sure you were going to cheat on your wife is what people said when they read my second book. I was so relieved you didn’t!

My wife, Lauren, is perhaps my greatest literary creation, this very real woman who served for so long as my foil, the deliverer of wincing punch lines to my foolishness. In most of what I have written about her, in books and essays you are welcome to google, I have chosen only her best lines, her finest comedy, and her choicest virtues: Her cast-iron love for the girls. Her ageless beauty, candor, and patience. Her gift for mothering all those around her. Her sense of humor, which is somehow both more wicked and more endearing than mine. Everybody who has read my work wants to be her friend. Maybe if I hadn’t made her so likable and funny, maybe you wouldn’t have been as surprised as I was by what happened.

What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. Not cool. Her boyfriend, I mean. He has a decorative seashell collection and can’t even grow a beard. I am not making this up.

This is why I smoke in my driveway and the nice moms look away—and why other moms, mostly single ones, now send me decontextualized Bible verses and memes involving sunrises and new beginnings, possibly with them. I am appreciative of the women who would like to spoon with me; really, I am, but I fear they may not wish to cuddle until after they hear the whole story. That is why I wrote this book. I wanted to strip away the façade I have worked so long to cultivate: in reality, in literature, in my imagination. My imagination is the real villain here. I did not write this book for revenge. Books cannot grant you vengeance against your wife’s lover. That’s what baseball bats are for.

No, I wrote this book to confess.

I am no stranger to confession. I’ve made a career of it. In books and stories and even a TEDx talk viewed, at last count, by 150,000 Russian bots, I’ve described my own vanity, ambition, ingratitude, incapacities, insecurities, failures. I’ve besmirched the names of the living and the dead, and I was allowed to do that so long as I made it hilarious and true. But some truths I have kept hidden, which shall remain hidden no more. I knew if I wrote a book about my marriage, I would also be compelled to write about all the garbage unearthed in my own heart by the marriage. If this book is a hit job, my pride is the true target.

Mrs. Pulaski, my high school English teacher, taught me a great lesson about truth. On the first day of school in the tenth grade, when she introduced herself, she said something that stuck with me. After writing her name on the board, she said, On some days, I might look different to you all because I have a condition that causes me to bloat.

Mrs. Pulaski was a fantastic teacher, especially cherished in the small public school in Star, Mississippi, where many of the students could hardly read and those who could often refused to on religious grounds. With authority and feeling she taught us how to pull apart a sentence and name its parts and instantiate its meaning. I remember Mrs. Pulaski’s lessons well, and you know what else I remember? That thing she said about bloating. Why did she tell us that? Because all through high school, that’s all we thought about.

Is she bloating today? we wondered.

No, she looks the same.

No, she’s totally bloating.

Why was she bloating? Was she dying? You don’t just go telling a roomful of hormone-ravaged clods that you have a condition that causes transmutation: they will eat you alive. But we did not. Why did we love her? She was sparing with praise, spent most of her time explaining how terrible our writing was, how pitifully bereft our minds were of original thoughts, and how these facts, in the aggregate, represented the imminent decline of world civilization and thus caused further bloating. No, we loved her not because she came in with threats or swagger or charm, but because she presented us with the thing that would set us free.

So I confess it to you now, the Truth.

My wife had this affair with a man who had been my friend. I want to tell you all about it: all the secret befores, all the dreadful afters, including the part where I cried so hard at work they sent me home with a frozen chicken pot pie.

Men never talk about being betrayed. I want to. I feel I must. I have many deep convictions, and one of them is that suffering can and should be monetized. But before I can walk you through my hilarious nightmare, I have to confess something else, which is that I, like my dear wife, am a Christian. It will be important to understand this bewildering fact about me because my weirdo religious faith shapes everything in this story: what I believed and no longer believe and sometimes still do believe about marriage, family, truth, community, home, evil, love, forgiveness, miracles, and all the rest. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that no matter what you believe about organized religion, your concepts of love and marriage have been shaped by monotheism, and I cannot reckon the facts of this story without also reckoning with the faith that has warped me into the hideous, broken, beloved creature that I am.

What do I believe, exactly? I believe there is a thing called God. I believe happy endings are real. I believe the Bible is both a comic novel and the oddest and most accurate accounting of human psychology ever assembled. For some of you, I know this is weird stuff. And it is. It is very weird to subject yourself to an ancient religion that dares you to live according to a collection of primitive writings featuring more murder and foreskin content than is perhaps advisable for young children, the central theme of its stories being that everyone should imitate the strange behaviors of a divine hayseed born in a Palestinian cowshed to an eighth grader who just woke up one day pregnant.

You probably believe some crazy things, too. I know a respected scholar who believes electromagnetic energy can cleanse her breast milk of impurities, but I don’t tell her I think she’s nuts, because Jesus says I have to feel compassion for crazy people. I’m sure she thinks I’m nuts because I believe the Christmas story really happened. I’ve known many teenage mothers who are virgins. They’re called Baptists. So, yeah, I believe the miracles. Miracles are easy to believe when you need one yourself. I’ve needed several, lately.

I’ve needed miracles because my wife’s affair sent me to hell. It sent her to hell, too. Did we come back? I don’t know. The book just started. Let’s see where it goes.

My pagan friends sometimes ask me, Why didn’t I burn my wife’s things in the yard and walk away? Why haven’t I moved on to a religion that seems more fun and relaxing, with fewer restrictions on, for example, ritual murder? Fair questions. Pray for me. It will have to be you who does the praying. I go to God asking for help, and in a second or two I’m wondering why Amazon makes it so difficult to return gifts. Maybe this is why my wife left. I get distracted.

This book is about my marriage, but it’s about far more than that. It’s also about my spiritual journey through the wastelands of being and my seeking, and being alternately sought by, and quite often being urgently embarrassed of and thus running desperately away from, the thing we call God. So, throughout this story, I find myself wandering back to those moments in my past where I wrestled with the reigning Heavyweight Champion of the Universe or those who pretend to speak on his behalf. Why have I shared the details of my spiritual journey in a book about my marriage? Because the wounds and scars I have on my heart from those battles have a lot to do with how this marriage story ends.

Chapter 2

WHAT’S IN THE BOX

2017

Lauren was born a child of the church in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama; her mother a zealous homeschooler of three, no small thing in the 1980s, when homeschoolers were freakish, cave-dwelling cryptids made to hide under the furniture and read The Pilgrim’s Progress by kerosene lantern to evade county truancy officers. To be a homeschooler back then was hardly different from being in a well-read militia.

Lauren’s father, I’ll call him Jeff, was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, until he quit one day—nobody ever said why, though I have a few guesses—and jettisoned himself into the mission field of automotive sales, with occasional forays into restaurant management. Jeff changed jobs a lot, and Lauren’s family lived perpetually on the brink of ruin. Lauren likes to talk about being fed wheat germ and dry oatmeal for dessert. Her mother, Trudy, with a degree in elementary education, might have gotten a teaching job for cash and stability, but her commitment to being a homeschooling mom of three trumped all.

In high school, Lauren participated in a mission trip to the former Soviet Bloc, where she danced for the Kazaks. Ballet for Jesus. I am sure they loved her, with her Ukrainian locks and Estonian skin and Eurasian eyes. When she returned to the United States, she studied at a Christian college called Belhaven—where we would meet—and continued to perform pas de deux for the Lord, dancing, for example, with the Mississippi Mass Choir and a Christian ballet company led by the man who played Little Ricky in I Love Lucy. Christians are everywhere, man. It’s a cult.

We wed when she was twenty-five and I was twenty-seven. Our early days of marriage were as gangly as everybody else’s, though they were sweet days, too. We had so few real obligations, no children, few friends. We watched TV and got fat. We loved to laugh and were considered by many the funniest people they knew. Comedy was our love language. Many a night we’d watch Lost and share a blanket, and I’d lay my head in her lap affectionately, just the two of us, relishing the hope and tranquility of our new marriage while Lauren remarked on the immensity of my skull.

If I was just a head, would you still love me? I’d ask, looking up.

Maybe.

You could carry me around in a bowling ball bag.

That actually sounds nice. She would kiss my forehead and cover my enormous head with the blanket.

It felt so good to have finally found a partner who could insult me and be so sweet about it. Something about the comedy felt almost divine, a check on pride, a way to prevent either of us from taking ourselves too seriously.

For a brief time in our first year of marriage, we tried to jog together, waging warfare against the dark forces of marital obesity. She wanted me to slow down, but I never would. Our workouts ended suddenly one hot afternoon when she fell behind, collapsed, wet her pants, and was scooped into the arms of an attractive man playing tennis nearby who’d seen her fall.

Does anybody know this woman? the hot tennis star asked as I jogged up.

I’ve had sex with her, if that’s what you mean, I said.

Lauren, limp but fine, looked into this other man’s eyes and probably thought, "Hmm, handsome and kind."

I spent mornings trying to write a book, and we spent nights trying to make a baby. We made three people before I made a single book. By the time she was thirty-two and I was thirty-five, we had three girls, whom I’ll call Coco, Pippi, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, because I can if I want. Lauren stayed at home with the children when they were little, something she’d long dreamed of doing. We made it work. When Coco, our oldest, was five, we homeschooled her for a few months, just to say we tried. Lauren continued to teach ballet even when great with child, the shape of her belly always suggesting she might give birth to a large toaster oven. But it was a girl, every time.

She has taught ballet to each of our three daughters. They know all the French words and just enough technique to mock the sad feet of gymnasts, which makes me happy. I have tried to give our children a love for music and stories and just enough wildness to give them joy, and Lauren has given our children a love for form and grace and quiet nights at home. She is a lovely dancer and a patient teacher, in addition to being prodigiously gifted at keeping secrets.

When you hear about one of your friend’s marriages breaking up, it’s always like No way! Really? What happened? I’d find myself going back over all the interactions with the couple in question, to see if I’d missed any clues to the crack-up: a misplaced wedding band, a veiled threat through a pinched smile.

They’re getting divorced, Lauren would say.

Who? And she’d tell me who, and I’d be like, I had no idea.

I possess the EQ of a freshwater mollusk and am an easy man to hide things from, if hiding is your thing. I was always far more surprised by these breakups than Lauren. Bad news pinged through Savannah’s cell towers often. This happened again and again, with other couples. We’d see a couple out at a party, and later Lauren would say, They hate each other.

Or They’re about to separate.

Or She’s an alcoholic. They’re probably divorcing.

My question was always Wait. What?

For so long, I was just a giant head in a bowling ball bag. She kept me in there a lot, when she didn’t want me to see things.

The day she unzipped the bag and pulled my head out and told me the truth seems a lifetime ago, in a land only remembered now in dreams. It was a Monday. Early October. Warm. That week, I was reading a book on the history of architecture by Witold Rybczynski, which I would never finish. The old me started dying that day—all of me, even my reading habits.

Three days before, on a Friday, we’d gone out to dinner, the whole family. I’d been thinking a lot about my failures as a father and a husband, how dark the days had been for so long, how they didn’t feel so dark anymore. I was grateful.

Early on in our marriage, Lauren made it clear that she wanted to stay at home with the girls, to swab them with Huggies baby wipes and launder onesies and fill the pantry with bread and eggs and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. I think part of her must’ve wanted to relive her own childhood, before her dad left. My own mother spoke often of her regret at leaving me at home when I was a month old, to go back to her middle school teaching job. I never saw myself as the primary breadwinner with a wife and baby at home. I’d spent my twenties running fast and far from the perils of nuclear domesticity, but suddenly at the dawn of this twenty-first century and the imminence of my thirtieth birthday, the vintage idea of male breadwinning felt almost radical. I wanted to make a book and she wanted to make a home and it felt right. It felt good. It felt highly countercultural. And the arrangement worked, until it no longer worked.

My work evolved. Demands increased. I became the chair of a department. I took on additional assignments to earn more money to pay for more things, while simultaneously devoting myself early in the mornings to the realization of my dream to become an author. My writing shoved a wedge between Lauren and me. I got distracted. No surprises there.

Her work evolved, too. The children grew. They pulverized Goldfish and Oreos and endless bricks of Nature Valley granola bars and flung the powdered garbage into every nook of every cushion. Her cleaning was endless: of babies, bedclothes, bath towels. My work was endless: papers to grade, performance reports to file, sentences to revise. My writing demanded more from me than my wife was prepared to allow me to give, especially when she started working full-time outside the home, as the fine arts director at a local private school.

I got distracted, she got bitter: accused me often of selfishness. Writing, I tried to explain, demands it. The entirety of my second book had, in its way, endeavored to explain this fact, but by the time Lauren dropped the bomb, her bitterness had already done its work, devouring our marriage in secret, though I had no idea. I hoped we were better now, stronger, more aware of each other. That’s why I was grateful that night at the Mexican restaurant three days before she told me of her affair.

We ordered tacos and sat there destroying mounds of tortilla chips, the kids happy. I remember sharing all this with Lauren at the table, casually, how I felt like I’d grown up, the rewards of time and experience. I thanked her for loving me through it all. Our partnership had bought us a fine new home, really a whole new life. The future felt bright as new sun in the trees. But it was not a sun. It was a radiating mushroom cloud.

In retrospect, knowing what she knew, that she had already begun an affair, when she heard me speak all this gratitude, she must have wanted to die.

I feel like I’ve been inside a tunnel for a long, long time, I said. I feel like I’m finally on the other side.

She didn’t say much, naturally, which I was used to. That was Friday. On Monday, around ten o’clock that morning, when I was about to teach a class, she sent me an email:

Tonight, after the girls go to bed, can we talk?

So opaque, so vague, so awful.

Sure, of course, I replied. About what?

Life.

It must be hard living with an idiot. You have to spell everything out. I might hold more degrees than your average chemist, but my wife was always the intelligent one in this marriage, three steps ahead. She possesses the intuition of Florence Nightingale and the organizational intelligence of a field general. When it comes to her interior life, she gives nothing away. You want to know how I feel? Just ask. You’ll wish you hadn’t. Ask me how things are going, and thirty minutes later you’re just hoping for an aneurysm so I’ll stop. I have to be funny just so people won’t run away when they see me coming, and many still do. Lauren, though. If she played professional poker, I wouldn’t have to write these books just to pay for the children’s braces. She gives you so few words. I have to study them like a paleobotanist trying to divine an entire ecosystem from a shard of petrified conifer.

After class, I skipped lunch and walked, puzzling through that word: life.

Good God, it could be anything. Had I done something wrong? I’d been drinking a little too much, nothing wild, but I’d grown accustomed to pouring comically deep glasses of red wine and falling asleep in the living room. She might confront me with an indictment of alcoholism. Back at the office, I took an online diagnostic. According to the internet, I was no alcoholic. Perhaps she had emotions to confess: unhappiness, melancholy, depression. Her lower back had been giving her trouble. She had migraines. Maybe she wanted to quit her job and stay at home again, maybe have another baby? Who knew? Not me.

She might suspect me of having an affair. Was I? I was not. I had to think about it for a second. I worked at a university lush with sensual, smart, creative women and traveled the country to sign books and sit in hotel bars with authors and agents and hot freethinking bookstore managers who seemed like they had bedrooms full of witchy candles and fragrant oils. I’d had more than one unpublished poetess hand me her phone number across the signing table. I’ve always enjoyed many friendships with women who were painters, writers, editors, photographers. I had seen none of them naked among the flicker of witchy candles, though I had often imagined it.

Perhaps my wife had some addiction to confess. Pills? No, her migraines were too frequent and unpredictable to add more pills to the mix. Gambling? Not her style. Porn? It could be porn. Women consuming porn, it happens more and more, they say. In the first year or two of our marriage, I’d gotten into the habit of looking at pornographic images at work, like some kind of drooling idiot. I’d look at a naked photograph or two and delete my search history and shut off the machine and feel dirty and sad and worthless, but I kept doing it, for months.

I have something to tell you, I’d said to her one night after dinner, after another guilt episode. We faced each other on the sofa in the tiny living room of our little duplex. She looked wan. I look at pornography on the internet every day, but I’ve stopped.

Okay, she said, relieved.

I feel like telling you will make it easier to stop.

So now maybe that’s what she was about to do? Confess a thing to make it easier to stop? Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe she just wanted to tell me that she’d been offered an amazing new job across the country and could we consider moving? It could be anything. Whatever it was, I knew, even then, before I knew, that the greatest battle of my life was upon me. The dark flaming thing you think you see out of the corner of your eye, I saw it. I knew it was something big, lurking unseen for so long, preparing to be seen, to be revealed, the veil torn, the thing revealed. Fire. Shadow. Apocalypse.

Eventually the workday ended and I went home and we cooked dinner and put the girls to bed and found ourselves in the living room alone.

Well, I said. I turned off the TV.

She sat on the near side of the couch, closest to the big overstuffed chair where I sat. All our laughter, our lifetime of comedy and loving insults, seemed light-years in the past.

I want a divorce, she said.

No prologue, no preamble, no sound check. She opened the show with a killer number. When she said it, all the other possibilities, alcoholism or pills or porn, all seemed so petty, so small. How could this woman—my wife, the superhero mother of three, the mom new moms called when their own babies refused to latch or sleep, the Baby Whisperer, VBS teacher, Children’s Church curriculum coordinator, this sweet homeschooled ballerina for Jesus—commit such profound emotional violence against her family? I felt like a man falling through a deep, wide hole in the earth, untethered, approaching death with terrific speed.

Why?

I’m in love with somebody else.

She said they wanted to marry, that they’d been in love for years. All I could say, the only words my brain could conjure, were the ones it always conjured when my emotional intellect came up wanting.

Wait. What?

My wife presented me with a little box, and in the box was