I have long come to terms with the idea that my life is not going to last forever.  I have not given any thought until today to the idea that my marriage is not going to last forever either.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that I thought it would; I just never thought about it at all.

In my running years, I ran a lot of road races; 10K mostly.  I ran enough of them to notice the point in the run when I stopped thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative) and began to think about using up the resources I still had by the time I crossed the finish line (very radical) [1]  So there have been, active in how I think and how I feel, the conservative maintenance of resources for the early phase and the radical spending of resources in the later phase.

So…for a happy marriage, when is “the later phase?”

I have always imagined without actually thinking about it that my marriage to Bette would end when one or the other of us died.  But that is like thinking that the race is over when you die.  What happened to that later phase where you wonder just why you are saving resources that could be spent to improve your performance in the race? You want to have a time to be proud of, don’t you?

So now I am thinking about it.  Bette and I are old.  Granted, I am a good deal older than she is, but, in all fairness, we are both old.  The marriage—which we count from the first date, not from the exchange of vows—will be 20 years old this coming January.  If I am not in the “later stage of the race” now, when on earth will I be?  And if the behavioral consequences of that category—use it now!—are to be put to any good use, when is that little light going to come on or that little bell ring that will signal that it is time to change tactics?

That is what is at stake in the seemingly innocuous idea that occurred to me this morning.

So imagine that for some reason you need for a visitor to conclude that you have a fantastic marriage.  If you have watched the range of TV shows I have, you will have no trouble coming up with a fantasy episode in which there will be a visitor for…say…a week and you need for the visitor to leave thinking that the two of you have the best marriage ever seen.  That’s the goal.

Now imagine what you would do to create that impression.  After all, it’s only for a week.  And there is no need to create impressions that are false.  You just need to shift over from the cast of mind in which you stop “ thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative)” and change to a cast of mind in which you “began to think about using up the resources [you still have] by the time [you]  cross the finish line (very radical). That change of awareness ought to do the trick.

See how that works.  The marriages I see where I live and the way I see my own marriage most of the time, is under the “save the resources” model.  The investments in the marriage need to be…oh…”sustainable.”  That makes a great deal of sense under the conditions that I called, above, “conservative.”  But this fantasy of trying to impress someone who is here for a week is like the finish line scenario.  Clearly, the things you want to do to impress this someone are not “sustainable.”  Are they?  On the other hand, the finish line is looming—or in the realistic case of our lives the finish line “might always be looming”—then sustainability is the wrong criterion.  “Use it all” and “what were you saving it for?” are much more appropriate.

As I finish this little thought experiment, I have no concrete ideas about what moving to “unsustainable” levels of investment in my marriage would look like.  They would require considerable information about what the marriage was really like.  They would require a clear commitment to honor the self you know yourself to be.  Still, you don’t have to do it forever.  Just until one of you dies.  

Cool, huh?

[1]  There is, of course, no reason why you should want to be exhausted at the finish line.  On the other hand, I never found a reason why I should hoard resources that will replenish themselves almost immediately, given adequate hydration and rest.  Might as well use it all, I thought.