"Gotta stop everything and read this Modern Romance......"The e-mail from my co-worker, Mary Kitch, arrived Friday afternoon with a link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/fashion/13love.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print
Like everyone else who received it in the Editorial/Op-Ed Department at The Oregonian, I was pushing hard to finish my work on another weekend edition of commentary and analysis.
But I did stop and, boy, am I glad I did. What follows is one of most insightful takes and beautifully written pieces on the institution of marriage that I've ever read. That it came from our colleague, David Sarasohn, made it even more meaningful.
Before you read it -- and I really hope you will -- a few words about the author, a history professor turned journalist who is one of the most gifted writers at the paper. Best known for his left-leaning political column, David also is a first-rate restaurant reviewer and a baseball nut, with an affection for the New York Mets and a deep knowledge of baseball trivia.
*****
A Joint Account That Underwrites Our MarriageI HAVE been married forever.
Well, not since the Big Bang but since the Nixon administration — 35 years — a stretch long enough to startle new acquaintances or make talk-show audiences applaud. Recently one of my wife’s college students kept pressing us, with baffled curiosity, for our secret, as if there had to be some trick to it, like wearing each other’s clothes on Tuesdays.
Back when we became engaged, our news was also greeted with baffled curiosity. It was the ’70s, after all, when the freedom to be able to hop from one relationship to the next was as essential as anything in the Bill of Rights. Our friends were profoundly perplexed; nobody, they thought, could want a fondue set that badly.
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Illustration: Christopher Silas Neal
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