The Three-Day Rule

A little while ago, my man and I were invited to a whiskey tasting evening with friends. During the course of the night, when the pleasantries had been exchanged, and some lovely salmon pie served and consumed, the men switched on to the malts, while us ladies remained experimenting with the wine selection.

At some point, as we were discussing relationships and all the idiosyncrasies and quirks everybody has to learn to endure with from their partner, and what about long term relationships and the rules of sleeping and snoring, our host and hostess, Albert and Christiane, got into a mild disagreement over something, the words heating up to a point when our host uttered the mysterious phrase: “Okay that is it! It is down to zero now, my dear, the counting begins from the top again!”

“Wait, the what now?” I asked.

“Well, you see, it’s like this”, Albert started to explain. Seventeen years ago, when they had met and fallen in love, he had proposed to Christiane, who had declined, because it had been early, and there was no rush. Now, parents of a thirteen-year-old just finishing grammar school, they were an old couple by standards of pure time spent together as a romantic unit, and some time ago, Christiane had made a humorous, off-hand remark to her spouse about if maybe he should renew his proposal. “I’ll tell you what”, he responded, “If you can be nice to me for three whole days in a row, uninterrupted, I will ask you.”

That was three years ago, and, as these things go, the Three-Day Rule had evolved into a secret code between the couple, and it was a rule eligible to be invoked by either one, if the other was stepping out of line.

“So, let me get this straight: in order for you two to ever get married, you both have to keep being nice to one other for three days, and so far, you have not succeeded in as many years? Why, that sounds a lot like our relationship! This is so great, I just knew we couldn’t be the only couple on the planet with such incredible skills at fighting constantly, and getting on each other’s nerves!” we both remarked.

When we got home we discussed the matter heartily, and immediately decided to lend the Three-Day Rule of our friends’ partnership into our own life as a couple.

There was a story online last week, by Mandy Len Catron, in The New York Times, concerning this very topic. She was telling us in the article, about how she, once a year, renews the written contract, detailing the terms and conditions of her current relationship, with her spouse, over some beers. It is a four-page agreement, delving into issues such as dog-walking, sex, and house chores, among others, and they both sign the agreement for one year at a time, and revise accordingly to changes. There is, also, always the possibility to terminate the whole agreement in a year’s time.

Len Catron writes about a book she stumbled on some years ago that argued that a marriage perhaps should be tied for shorter periods at a time, and both parties should be given the chance to change their minds, and this work was what inspired her and her man to draw the one year contract.

I went to a funeral a short while ago. It was a great sadness; the deceased was a member of my extended family. He had been married to the same woman for two weeks shy of fifty-two years. “A long time” is an understatement. A fifty-two-year marriage is quickly becoming obsolete among us earthlings, with our constantly changing situations and lives, and deteriorating abilities to remain focused and remember the important stuff. Hell, I myself find it somewhat fantastic that my own parents are celebrating fifty years of marriage, while I am currently in my fourth living-together situation with a man, not to mention my umpteenth relationship. I cannot fathom what my life would be like, had I married my first serious boyfriend, the Yawner, at twenty-two.

Who knows, perhaps I would be exceedingly happy, with kids and a house and a few books under my belt. Then again perhaps there would be a messy divorce, the relationship totally ruined, custody and alimony issues, et cetera, instead of a beautiful friendship that has lasted the pitfall of our, what I consider today, freshman relationship that crumbled into nothing out of sheer adolescence of the participants.

The Yawner has been my touchstone ever since, and one of the few constants in the bleachers of my life, getting eventually married himself and having those kids. I am not sorry for having been together with him once, nor am I sorry for having mutually ended the relationship. Relationship are hard, and we are easily bound to make the same mistakes in every one of them. I am learning finally, the hard way, to make compromises, something that is still very difficult for me, having lived for lengthy periods alone in between my relationships.

I’m thinking the fifty-year marriage milestone will become even more elusive in the future. This is not necessarily always a bad thing. Sometimes mismatches happen, and no matter how hard one wants to remain in love, it just simply isn’t meant to be. But the wanting to remain in love is, surely, something our parents’ generation knows a whole bunch more about than ours. Through thick and thin, in sickness as well in health. Like Emily points out to Lorelai in Gilmore Girls, sometimes marriage isn’t about anything fun at all. This is something everyone who has been in a longer relationship knows. Still, there is a golden lining, a majestic sound to the fifty-year landmark. An untold story, shared by the two of us. A secret history, if you will. A shared live, things seen and experienced, for eyes only.

I’m not saying we, the new divorcers and I’m-outta-heres, are always frivolous, shallow, or wrong. If it isn’t working, why ruin both lives in grinding one’s teeth until there is truly nothing else left but resentment, grudges, and hate? This is the Old Testament type of “In my time, divorce would have been the worst kind of losing face, even worse than death” -ideology behind many an unhappy match, and I for one have never had any tolerance for it.

Having said that, hearing the grief-stricken widow recite a poem at the gathering afterwards, by Eeva Kilpi, about how she had loved her man through anything, did make my heart bleed, and I had trouble stifling my outburst of tears. Love does take practice. It does. And we all know what it is like to go through bad times, be it infidelity, a breach in loyalty in some other way, growing apart, whatever. I guess what I kept thinking, and keep thinking with my own parents, and some other folks I know who have stayed together for a really long time, is that forgiveness, and having mercy on one another, are truly the hardest, and should be the most sought-after qualities, in a relationship.

Anyone can run a tight ship. Being mean and cruel and petty is easy. The lightness and effortlessness of making one’s lover feel guilty about whatever is almost frighteningly inherent and embedded in us humans.

Having the power to overcome the hurt, and really forgive and forget, assuming of course that the person who did the hurting is sincerely sorry, and wants to make amends, without letting oneself be reduced to a vicious circle of getting even, and taking eye for an eye in the finest Hammurabi way, is the single most important and greatest weapon of a lasting love affair there is.

I have been in my new relationship no longer than three years. Basically we are still starting out, and it has been a bumpy road for us, having to learn how to see past old behavior modes and ways of negotiating a disagreement, a theme I wrote about in Friday Night’s Alright for Fighting, as well as simply learning to see what the other person considers the insignia of love; for example, for me, him vacuuming the apartment, or taking out the thrash without being asked, for him, sex, or accompanying him to, say, a work gig, just to be there. 

We are very different, and it has taken me a good while to learn to let go a little of my precious time alone, which I do still need and most likely will always do, more than other people, I think, because of my highly sensitive and head-troubled nature and character. For him, it has been equally hard to learn to see that my need for that solitude doesn’t mean I don’t love him, or that I never want to spend time with him. We come from very different sets of circumstance, and for a while there, it did seem that, paraphrasing Feist, a good man and a good woman only brought out the worst in the other.

Man is not totally without the ability to change, however. No one can be expected to change completely, not this far in the game anyway, and having to totally change everything about oneself to stay in a relationship sounds a lot like horse hooey to me anyway. But the littlest things can go a long way, sometimes. And those little things have gone a long way, for us.

Were we to remain together for fifty years would mean that we would need to live to be a hundred. And I don’t think it is singly about the length of the partnership anyway. One can love quite deeply and with real, gut-wrenching, scary kind of love, even if the fifty-year mark will forever remain out of reach.

And the Three-Day Rule? For Mandy Len Catron, it’s the Together Contract that helps both parties of the relationship to really get involved in the important one-on-one negotiations of What Works for Us. For our friends, the wonderful Nicety Point is a close cousin, perhaps just a more simplified and a tuned-down version of the Together Contract, for us straight-forward Finns.

As for my man and me, we tackle our differences with a variety of codes and ways. Perhaps it is a mixture of all those above mentioned rules, as well as finally easing into The New Us, something that for the longest time eluded us, because we both expected the other person to act like their predecessors in a given situation, and we were acting accordingly, realizing that we both, indeed, had the same tempestuous and manipulative way of conducting an argument, and since we both were used to winning and using our vast vocabularies to our advantages, the emotional damage of our word-fights has been severe, proving once more the old saying that the pen, or in our case, the word, sometimes truly is mightier than the sword.

The key words, however, and ones that for the longest time didn’t even exist in our anger charts, have been forgiveness, and mercy. I don’t think we’ll be drawing a Together Contract per se anytime soon for ourselves, but we have done a portion of the 36 Questions by Arthur Aron et al., and even though it was drawn, as I understand, to be used at the beginning of a relationship, with the attempt to prove that falling in love with anyone is possible, the Questions have opened a little the eternal mystery that is the person with whom we are sharing our lives.

Furthermore, if we are being surprised by the other after already three years together, maybe the Questions, too, can be used as a recurring Getting-to-Know-You tool, say, once a year. Life is about change. What the other person once was doesn’t mean that is the case forever. Could it be that one of the reasons for the dreary divorce statistics is the mere lack of knowing the other person anymore? “You are not the man I married” is true. Changing together, and giving the other person space to grow and evolve while telling them that we are there for them, and that we support them: maybe that, with the ability to forgive and forget, is one of the ingredients of loving someone their whole life, a point so obvious one could describe it being The Rule That Hides in Plain Sight.

In memory of Samuli Määttänen

References:

The New York Times: Daniel Jones, The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, January 9, 2015; Mandy Len Catron, To Stay in Love, Sign on the Dotted Line, June 23, 2017

Feist, Metals, 2011