The Golden Condom (27 page)

Wendy's priorities, and what she was looking for and projecting, changed over time. “I finally started getting my act together at forty,” she told me. “I've always been a late bloomer. I worked at dating; I wanted a partner and a companion. What I used to believe was important in a man—the superficials of how he looks and what he does and his finances—has evolved. Now I need compatibility and comfort, generosity and loyalty, someone who keeps me intellectually challenged and entertained. Relationships take more thought when you're older, and you're able to give it.” Why did she focus more on the external attributes of potential mates when she was younger? “When I was insecure in myself, I was looking for qualities I wanted to emulate,” she explained; she could hardly have looked to her father for examples. “Now I know what I value and what I bring to the table.” Ever the realist, she also accepted that marriage might not be in the cards at her age, even though that was what she really wanted.

By the time Wendy was forty-five and a longtime therapy veteran, her father's grip on her psyche had loosened. She finally found what she was looking for on Match.com. Mark was a fifty-two-year-old lawyer—“funny as hell, smart as a whip, loyal, and handsome,” and she became his wife when she was forty-seven. “It took a year before I moved in with him—I needed a large closet of my own; a girl has shoes,” she announced, making a joke of her anxiety. Then she added quietly, “I'm still surprised I'm actually married. I had given up the dream of ever doing it.”

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Wendy had to give up one of her dreams in order to fulfill the most important one, however: she had also wanted to have a family. “We talked about it,” she told me, “but I don't think it's fair to be an older parent.” She also sees the advantages, emotionally and financially, of being just a couple, because it involves one less adjustment to make at a time in life when flexibility does not come easily. “Children would have brought different wonders, but it would be a big change,” she admitted. Echoing Lisa Deutsch, she said, “If we had met ten years earlier, we would have done it, but we couldn't have met then. I needed to go through a lot to find him.”

Her husband, whom she talks about with unabashed delight, gives her what neither her mother nor her father ever did. “He respects me, appreciates me, puts me on top—I never had that before,” she said. And marriage brings out the best in her. “It makes me generous and genuine. I didn't use to compromise, but now I don't get as picky about things, like losing my cool over emptying the dishwasher. When you're single for a long time, it's all about yourself.” Now she is part of “we.”

When you finally find happiness, you are loath to lose it, and the older a spouse is, the more likely the loss. What if Mark died first? She answered with a wisecrack. “He can't. I don't know how to use the remote control or open the safe.” Then she said seriously, “We've had the practical conversations; you have to talk about these things realistically. We made sure we have the financials in order.” Even though she has told him “I've lost too many people, and I'm going to go first,” she is prepared for the alternative; she bought “a Cadillac premium long-term care policy in case I'm alone.”

Determined not to repeat her mother's mistakes, Wendy approached marriage with clear-eyed practicality as well as passion. “Mark is the first man I've known who was as practical as I am,” she said appreciatively. “I'm a romantic, but I also believe that a marriage has to be a business. My HR experience makes me view it as two companies doing a merger; I've been around.”

Wendy's commitment to Mark led her to make radical changes in the way she lived, which she did willingly. “I used to travel every weekday for my job—I used my house as a hotel. It was an excellent distraction; I did very well in airport lounges, where I met lots of men. I took a demotion and made a conscious choice to be home so we could live together, so I could build a relationship with him. And I wanted to be there.”

She believes that a marriage between two mature people tends to be more civilized and less tumultuous. “We don't fight as much as younger couples do,” she said. “We talk things out more, and we don't have children to fight over. We have just the two of us and a nice lifestyle with no money problems.” This is a very different scenario from the family she grew up in.

Despite her love and belief in Mark, it took time for Wendy to trust him completely. “Is he going to do what he says he is going to do? I used to worry about this, and he was afraid about the same thing with me. I've had so much tragedy and so much betrayal, but I've been able to free myself. I have no more chains around my neck.”

Paradoxically, Mark's two previous failed marriages turned out to be one of the most compelling proofs that he was the right mate for her, the key that unlocked the chains that bound her. “His first wife cheated on him, and he caught them; it was ugly. His second marriage lasted only three weeks, and he left because he realized it would never work,” she said. Wendy's husband suffered because of his wife's infidelity, while Wendy's father's behavior showed that he had cared nothing for his wife. It is a curious coincidence that three weeks figured in both men's second relationships, but her father's hasty hookup was cold and selfish, while her husband's hasty divorce was thoughtful and moral. Wendy could make the comparison: this is what a crappy man does, and this is how a good man acts.

BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

Anna Schneider, Lisa Deutsch, and Wendy Myers all faced emotional obstacles stemming from their family relationships, some almost insurmountably severe, before they were able to seek and find lasting love. But Ted Thomas was a foundling who started life cast adrift in the world with no family relationships at all—no parents, no siblings, no known relatives—and who lived in various foster homes for the first three years of his life. However difficult it was for them to find intimacy with a beloved, he had never experienced a full, authentic connection with another living soul and, by his own admission, had none with the deepest parts of himself well into adulthood. His passionate pursuit of therapy and music finally opened his inner reservoirs and taught him how to give and receive love. The ability to trust others and to express himself, which he nurtured through relentless commitment to these twin pursuits, allowed him to marry for the first time at age fifty-two. He was a sixty-one-year-old father of two children, with dual careers as a violin maker / string orchestra leader and a psychotherapist, when we spoke.

Ted talked about his life with quiet intensity, frankness, and a sense of wonder. “I've always wanted to have real relationships,” he said, “but I had to work out parts of my own story and defuse my emotional land mines before I could do it.”

“I was moved around as a kid,” he said, emphasizing the enforced passivity that was part of the trauma he was born into. Given up at birth, he lived in five different foster homes before the age of three; nine months was the longest time he spent in any of them. Then he was adopted and spent the rest of his childhood with new parents and siblings, but he never felt completely secure and withheld a part of himself even from them. When he grew up, he searched for his birth parents but discovered that his mother, who “had a lot of issues,” had died, although he did eventually track down members of her family in England. “I don't know who my father is and never will,” he said starkly.

Ted was fully aware of how profoundly the repeated losses he had endured in his most vulnerable years affected his ability to rely on anyone. “It was a question of risky attachment,” he said, using a psychological term to describe his style of relating.
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He recognized in his adult self the deep-seated and lifelong wariness of a young child who, having been passed through a revolving door of caretakers, shuts down and withdraws out of self-protection against yet another abandonment. This pattern became his fundamental mode of relating to everyone—friends, lovers, and himself. “It was predetermined that I would play it out in relationships. I was terrified of letting my guard down. I remember this strongly; even as a kid, people could feel me holding myself back.”

Of necessity, Ted had taught himself to be friendly and charming, as those who have to live in other people's homes often do. He had developed a cheerful persona but kept his real feelings to himself. Ted felt his own restrictions acutely without having any idea how to change them. He had anesthetized himself to the pain of loss so successfully that it was simply the way he was.

His one emotional outlet was music. After college, he turned his lifelong love of playing the violin—the instrument most like the human voice—into a profession and became a violin maker in New York.

Still feeling “a little bit lost” at age thirty-two and seeking an additional source of the self-expression he so deeply craved yet found elusive, Ted changed direction and went to art school to study painting. He also began psychotherapy with a Jungian
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therapist, “an older guy” who symbolically replaced the unknown father he craved. Just when he won a third-year competition that offered him free tuition, the remark of a fellow student galvanized him to make a decision that changed the course of his life.

“A Japanese friend in my class said, ‘I've known you a couple of years, but I actually don't know you at all.' His comment seemed to come out of left field, but it helped me at a pivotal moment by making it clear to me how hard it was for me to risk giving my heart. You wouldn't know it about me because I'm very social, but there are times I've felt some very intense aloneness—not just loneliness but a profound sense of separation and isolation. My therapist was moving to Vermont, and I decided to turn the scholarship down and follow him. I was in the process of discovering my role in all the things I had to sort out. I had to get to the bottom to go on.”

For the first time, although somebody Ted loved and needed was leaving him, he had the option to follow. Turning passivity into activity, he chose that option. This uprooting, intentional and self-initiated, was actually a replanting. He finally had a secure attachment, and he wanted to keep it; it was the most precious thing to him, his lifeline to being fully human.

“So I came up here to Brattleboro,” he said. “Being able to work at discovering myself was like waking from a dream.” This move was also a symbolic homecoming. “It made sense because I wanted to come back to New England, where I had been raised.”

I had particular empathy for Ted's seemingly radical act, because I had done a similar thing myself. I began my analysis at twenty-one, before I began my analytic training. My analyst, who was a seasoned graduate of the same institute I attended, had not yet reached the exalted rank of “training analyst,” so I was told I had to leave him and begin treatment with someone on the approved list. I decided instead to leave the institute and stay with him because I knew that he was what I needed, my route to a healthy relationship with a man. The only reason I returned to the institute was that he died, suddenly, at age fifty, in our seventh year together. I eventually went into treatment with my supervisor, who was on the officially sanctioned list, and completed my training. She was of great help to me, but I never felt as deeply loved or understood.

Following his analyst was a smart move indeed for Ted. “I worked with him for twelve years and developed a profound trust in him,” he told me. “It really awakened a part of myself. I had an awareness that my dreams were speaking.” Symbolic exploration was only part of what Ted needed and accomplished. “I learned to tolerate the difficult feelings, the deep sadness I'd been carrying around. Being able to feel things in myself allowed me to feel things in the presence of others; it let me make the space for a relationship.”

His relationship with his beloved analyst was the first one in his life that not only lasted but changed the way he related to himself. Being loved and understood in the unique way that analysis provides can heal the past. You internalize the intimacy and feel free to open parts of yourself that were too dangerous to express. Having someone reliable to count on, as Bowlby showed, develops the capacity to count on yourself. As Ted explained it, “My relationship was not just with him but with aspects of myself. I came to recognize that I had the capacity to love; I could trust that. It was a constant. Nobody could take it away.” Ted became free to grow from within. “My ability to feel was evolving, and it still is,” he said. Identifying with his symbolic father, he became a therapist himself, one who is “very tuned in to these issues in my work with patients.” Words joined music as a means of communication.

Ted learned to relate first to his analyst and then to himself, and from the synergy of the two, he turned to the world. Women had not been immune to his charms earlier in his life; he had been immune to forging a lasting bond with any of them. “I had five relationships before I was fifty,” he said. “Several of them wanted to marry me, but I just couldn't risk it. I didn't have the capacity to believe that a relationship could last.”

While Ted was learning to feel, he experienced another traumatic loss, but he handled it very differently. One of his adoptive sisters fought a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer, and he sustained her through it, loving and grieving as he never had done before. “You have to really be open to go on this journey with someone who's dying,” he said. “Maintaining a really real connection in the presence of losing somebody helped me find the courage—I think it was courage—to take the risk of committing myself to another human being.”

Six months after his sister's death, he rekindled a relationship with a woman he had met a year before when she was newly divorced. “We didn't strike it up right away because neither of us was ready, but then another opportunity came when we crossed paths again.” Even so, it took Ted almost two years more to act on his newfound courage and propose. “She was willing long before I was,” he noted. His bride, who is thirteen years younger, happens by chance (or, as the Jungians would say, “synchronicity”
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) to be a violin-playing psychotherapist.