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I wrote this favorite column after realizing, after several painful interludes, and an inner struggle against the vanity of "winning" such a remarkable and beautiful and wise woman, that this second marriage had to be stored in my heart and not go to my head.  We had really helped each other, in long talks, deep revelations, for about a year after our prior marriages had dissolved.  There were four children, of widely different ages, involved and not without anger.  It just took time to realize that our friendship-grounded marriage was like good leather--fine but flawed and therefore real.

--Ben

You are stuck in a place that you are determined to hold at exactly the same time you wish desperately to flee.  You don’t know why your pride has completely vanquished any trace of common sense and how you can possibly be saying the most hideous things to exactly the one person who represents the opposite of the words that are coming out of your mouth.  And these words are flying with more convincing velocity (and perilous disbelief on your part) than anything you remember.  Meanwhile, she is blurting out declarations, flaring, some really hitting home, others painfully gratuitous.  Her product is convincing--you know this but at the moment are in no mood to tenderly forgive.  What she says smacks of cultural or personal baggage that on other days are actually part of her charm and vulnerabilities.

Then comes the worst part—the Sitzkrieg.  You both retreat to separate, edgy spaces, though no one really has a place to alight.

Two people, desperately in love, having perhaps fought hard to build a life together, both cognitively aware that a few misplaced words triggered by economic stress and/or petty resentments (none of which should go unexamined ultimately) withdraw to emotional and geographic sanctuaries for what amount to synthetic and decidedly unfulfilling and opaque intervals.   The movie you share may have been interesting, but the adjacent seat was unequivocally empty.  The ocean you walked was particularly vast during the trek to clear the head and the horizon, lonely.   Anger is quite insipid, even as words blasted in anger can wound like verbal bullets.

It’s not funny nor is it cute, this business of fighting between lovers—though it is a hallmark, if sickening experience of real human life.  Good people suddenly reach for old dark histories and scatter them, like contaminants, about a marriage already seasoned and refreshed by maturity and atonement and the harvest of partnership.  It is so easy to trample a garden in just a moment of pollutant carelessness after several solar turns of experience.  Strong relationships, like leather, survive the marks, and retain their character.  But will what was said this time be the ugly collateral for the next time?

Postscript:  I have twice been married, (now successfully) and have been a central part of the failure and success of the enterprise of love throughout my adult life.  Moreover, my work happens to revolve around the business of human life.  So this much I know for sure:  When folks tell me they don’t ever fight, that’s when I really worry. 

Ben Kamin is one of America's best known rabbis, a multicultural spiritualist, NYT Op-ed contributor and author of seven books, including his latest, "NOTHING LIKE SUNSHINE: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination."  He is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist.

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