The New Marriage Vow

My bride reaches her 20th Mother’s Day today and I found this lost column I wrote for her about a decade ago - it reminds me that even though our competitions these days — like yesterday’s rather comical pickle ball meets spike ball affair with Jackie — look a bit like Golden Girls playing Grumpy Old Men at Wimbledon, and no matter how often we fall down, awkwardly miss the ball and pull muscles we didn’t know we had…I realize I can’t lose when I’m with her.

***

It’s July 2012 and my bride and I reach our 12th year on the 3rd, a baker’s dozen if you count the courtship. That’s 4,380 times she asked me for a cup of agua (after I had already crawled into bed) and 3,200 times I asked her which tooth brush was mine (in our poorly lit bathroom green and blue do look the same after 9 pm). There’s been at least 7,000 times she’s picked up my clothes from the floor and picked me up when I was down. For all this partnership, Bridget and l have a bit of a hard time competing on the same team, when something other than vows are on the line. On the playing field, she is maniacaly competitive and impatient; she has high expectations for herself, higher for me, and she lets you know it. I’m different. I have grown up with a healthy appreciation for losing, once losing 20 games in a 20 game hoops season. I’m quietly competitive—sometimes more interested in what my winning does to my opponent. Safe to say I can deal with losing; Bridget, not so much.

“In couples competition, it’s really never how we play the game, but whether we win or lose”

She grew up winning auditions while I never ended a season as champion. This diversion in experiences and attitudes is somewhat surprising since I am a Yankee fan and she roots for that other team. Or maybe it makes perfect sense.

This conflict impacts us when we compete together. 

On the tennis court, Bridget brings her A game, which she’ll admit is more like a C game, and I bring my slightly deformed Bancroft wooden racquet, the kind John MacEnroe played with–not the U.S. Open champion with the fowl mouth, but his dad. This racquet epitomizes losing – it’s losing’s logo. It’s old and bent as though the neighbor ran over it four times with his pickup and it probably tells all competitors that I’m either really poor or really awful. I told Bridget that using the Bancroft would “level the playing field” since my usual graphite racquet would be unfair. I brought the Bancroft out of hibernation to a friendly mixed doubles match one time against another husband-wife team. I did this partly to get under her skin, partly to challenge myself. Our competitors were about 10 years older than us and skill-wise seemed about comparable; both looked like champions before hitting a groundstroke: they had silk racquet case covers, brightly colored mesh-like tennis jerseys, matching wrist bands, head bands, arm bands. Each band donned an RL, for Ralph Lauren I assume though writing this years later, maybe RL is Rod Laver.  Let’s just agree that for sweat to reach their face something would have to go seriously wrong. Bridget looked “cute” in her tennis whites and I wore my usual gray t-shirt with the white paint stains, blue shorts and brown socks that I bought white, if you know what I mean…not fancy attire and probably not clean, but sufficient. Bridget peeled back the metal lid to open the can of balls while I tried to fill a sort of uncomfortable air of silence between the two couples. I joked to our competitors that my outfit was “in my rotation”. Bridget shook her head. She knew the real story, that my rotation was a rotation of one, that I had worn that gray t-shirt three times that week.

I was a little late getting into the warm-up because I had to unscrew my racquet cover, since it was the old-style wooden frame that tennis manufacturers used back in the dark ages to protect racquet frames. I almost walked on the court with the wood frame still on, but I suppose that would have been over the top. We won the two set match, barely, and mostly because the balls weren’t popping off my racquet like usual.

I have realized over 12 years that partnering in competition is difficult particularly when you have different ideas about what winning and losing mean, and different experiences that framed this. Our differences rarely affect how we deal with our kids’s wins and losses – since we seem to agree that the kids need to keep trying, take chances and push for greatness, but do it in a respectful way. But in couples competition, it’s really never how we play the game, but whether we win or lose. Gray t-shirts with white paint stains are generally forgotten when you rip a forehand winner down the line, overpowering and outthinking the other husband. But if I wore plaid maddress shorts and a white polo, Bridge would say: “Well, you looked good but next time could you play more like Ted?”

The same rules apply in board game competition. Steve and Holly, two old friends of ours, once pummeled us in Pictionary – we lost every round. I still have nightmares about the diminishing salt inside that plastic hour glass. I can still hear Bridget: “You’re so bad at this – how do you not know that that’s a banana?” At first, the insults were patronizingly helpful hints: “Why don’t you try to draw something besides circles” but then changed to what a shrink might call FSS, or frustrated surrender syndrome: “Try something else, anything. Is it a camel? No? Then what the heck are those two humps. This is awful.” These were not so much insults as honest verbal attacks at my pre-school art teacher who obviously had failed me.

For better or worse, on the court or at the kitchen table, competition ought to be a vow if you think about it. Maybe something like, In winning and losing….I will love you.