Is there no end to the stream of wisdom I’ve gained from watching “A Chef’s Life“? This is now the third post I’ve written inspired by that TV show on PBS. (Read the other posts here and here.) We’re now into the third season, and as I watched Episode 8, “Honey, I’m Home,” I picked up another little nugget from Vivian Howard, the “chef” in the title. (Jim got seriously freaked out by the chicken-liver segment.) She and her husband Ben Knight run the restaurant “Chef and the Farmer” together, and it doesn’t always go smoothly. In this episode dear Ben, who’s often labeled, somewhat unfairly, as “grumpy,” is having his first art show in a decade. He’s been busy acting as general manager, emergency fill-in, and beverage artiste, which has left him very little time to pursue his painting. But now he has a show in Durham NC, and he and Vivian are cramming in visits to as many restaurants in town as they can before it starts. At some point Ben bails out, his nerves (and probably stomach) getting the best of him, but Vivian presses on, undeterred. That woman must have the capacity of an anaconda!Anyway, if you’re wondering when I’m going to get to the point, here it is: Not every marriage is cut out for the stresses of running a business together. So, as Vivian enters the restaurant Toast, she says of the proprietors, Kelli and Billy Cotter, “I notice that, unlike me and Ben, they seem to really love working together. That’s a good thing.” Just a throwaway line, right? I have this theory that truth is most often spoken in little asides, little off-the-cuff remarks. Actually, though, the dynamic of the Howard/Knight marriage has been on display from the very first season. I’m not going to do my usual thing of wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to find an obscure quotation and just give the short version of how Vivian described working with Ben back then: “It sucks.” She said that when you get under pressure and tension builds, sometimes (ha) you snap, and all you can do is to say you’re sorry and try to do better the next day. But–surprise, surprise!–they’re still snapping at each other in season 3. It probably doesn’t help that Ben gets sucked (sorry) into answering Vivian’s fan mail as part of his duties.
But does all of the foregoing mean that they don’t have a good marriage? I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. It’s more a function of the personalities involved than it necessarily is about the marriage itself, if that makes sense. For instance, I have a rather unfortunate tendency to, on the one hand, be extremely opinionated about what I want but, on the other hand, not always be able to articulate those extreme opinions very clearly. In other words, I’m bossy but unclear. So there can be (sometimes, not always) a certain amount of tension when I’m trying to get across to Jim how I want something to look on this website, or how I want the newsletter to work, or whatever. Heaven only knows how these interactions would come across on film. (I probably don’t have to worry about the TV crews showing up anytime soon.)
It’s been a rather illuminating exercise to think about the couples with good marriages I know, or know about, and how great of a range there is in how much they work together. So, for instance, Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom over at Pinch of Yum run this insanely successful food blog together. (The link is to the page whereon they talk about how that works.) On the other hand, Gretchen Rubin‘s husband has nothing to do with her blog except to appear periodically in a story; her sister Elizabeth Craft says that Adam, her husband, doesn’t even listen to their insanely successful podcast. And yet it’s very clear that all three couples are happy. I should count the number of times each podcast that Gretchen and Elizabeth each mentions her husband. (I think that sentence works grammatically.) So thinking about these various flavors of relationships makes me appreciate my own marriage more; just because Jim and I aren’t like our friends who started their own accounting business at least partly so that they could work together doesn’t mean that we don’t have as good of a marriage as they do. We just have a different one. (And it’s fair to point out that a couple can work together seemingly 24/7, with passion and purpose, build a great business, and still have a disaster of a relationship. Nora Pouillon‘s business and romantic partner carried on an affair with the kids’ piano teacher for years, even as they built a restaurant empire together. As she says, “When people say ‘it broke my heart,’ I now understand what they mean.”)
You wouldn’t think that I could reach almost 24 years of marriage without realizing these rather obvious truths, would you? But somehow I’ve felt a great sense of relief as they’ve sunk in. The yardstick for measuring the success of a marriage, or indeed of any other relationship, has nothing to do with how many hours you clock in together and everything to do with mutual respect. That’s a subject I’m exploring right now as I ponder a second book, Intentional Love. Just when I think I’m ready to start writing it I run into a whole new set of ideas. I’m happy to be gaining new insights and hope to share them with you, well, not soon–but sometime.