LBEO: Life Before Each Other
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 4, 2019
- 1028
When my wife and I first started dating, it never occurred to me I should be embarrassed about my apartment.
I mean I thought I was doing pretty good for a guy in his mid-30s: a steady job, a reliable car, a full head of hair and a place to live that didn’t scream, “Get this dude a woman now!”
Turns out I was mistaken.
We were talking the other day about LBEO — that is, Life Before Each Other — and that’s always been a comfort zone for my wife because, usually, it always leads us to the conclusion that had it not been for her, well, I’d have ended up either in prison or dead.
Maybe both.
She was the rescuer, the saint, the one who saw something salvageable in the miscreant, something magnificent in the misfit, something lovable in the loser.
And I get that.
I’ve never said I didn’t get incredibly lucky when she came into my life and stayed.
Early on in our relationship, well before we’d even been to a baseball game or a concert together, my father pulled me aside and gave me The Look, the one that said we were about to have a serious conversation.
Normally The Look didn’t faze me.
I’ve always been pretty quick on my feet, able to talk my way out of almost anything that didn’t involve tangible proof: a smashed-in driver’s side door or a summons to appear in small-claims court.
My father — who had known this woman for an hour, tops — sat me down and said, “If you’re going to do to her what you’ve done to all the others, end this thing now. Tonight. She deserves better.”
Whew.
I didn’t know what to say.
For one thing, how did he know what I’d “done to all the others?”
He made it sound as if I’d had a series of one-offs, that I was some kind of small-town Romeo, a character from a Dire Straits song.
In truth I’d had my heart broken and my soul crushed when my college girlfriend had cheated on me, not once or twice, but many times, a sad fact I was seemingly the last to learn.
So I’d been pretty cautious about opening myself to that kind of misery again, but I’d gotten back in the game again.
Had I stopped seeing a woman or two in the interim? OK, sure, but it wasn’t as if I caused any real pain.
We hadn’t picked out a silverware pattern or bought side-by-side plots in the cemetery.
No, we had some fun, and when it was over, it was over, nice and clean and, well, liable to be resumed if it was in the stars.
Small towns are funny like that.
Everybody knows everybody else.
Just listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” for a reminder.
I was never the best date, anyway.
I was always trying too hard to make a good impression, to separate myself from the herd, to make memories to last a lifetime when I should have just focused on being on time.
That was a very bad habit of mine, showing up late. Again, though, I was facile enough and likeable enough to get away with it, spinning a good yarn that involved a flat tire, an injured puppy and someone’s homemade ice cream that I just had to sample.
“Just one of those things,” I’d say. “Sorry for making you wait.”
Then I present her with a bowl of homemade ice cream, all wrapped up nice and neat, and we’d be good to go.
Well, I made up that last part, but you get the idea.
It was never my intention to be a bad guy.
And yet there was my father, giving me The Look.
He wasn’t a big believer in having serious talks; in fact I know he never laid out the “Facts of Life” for me, leaving that for the “After School Specials” that used to run on ABC. By that time, however, I was in my early teens and had been listening to the Rolling Stones since I was a kid.
So I knew all about “Satisfaction.”
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Dad asked.
“I think so,” I said. “You’re telling me that if it’s meant to be between us that I should be honest and truthful and all that?”
He shook his head, sighing with grave disappointment.
“No,” he said, “this isn’t about you. It’s about her. Try to understand that.”
My wife knows most everything about my LBEO, and yet I didn’t realize until the other day just how hideous she found my apartment the first time she saw it: dirty dishes in the sink, mildew in the shower, a desk littered with typewritten pages, ashtrays overflowing, records unshelved on the carpet, a 10-speed bike in the breezeway, a rusty grill on the deck and lots of unopened mail.
“It’s nice,” she’d said, taking it all in. “Excuse me for a second.”
And she set about the task of putting things in order, starting in the kitchen and ending in the bedroom, which was actually just a small space tucked in a dormer, a mattress on the floor, a radio beside it.
“Now,” she said, all pretty and pleased, “isn’t that better?”
Relationships are complicated, evolving organisms. They rely on subtle variations on common experiences, how the here-and-now is perceived by both, and are as fragile as the membrane holding together the halves of a clam shell washed up on a stormy beach.
If you’re lucky, and I mean Lazarus-rising-from-the-dead fortunate, you’ll get to a place where everything just feels right and there is no bone-on-bone discomfort as you walk through life with the one who makes everything feel better.
This does not, I’m pained to tell you, happen for everyone, at least not at first. But be patient, OK?
You could be picking out cemetery plots sooner than later.