Issue/Publication: 3rdActs.com

Web Links

    Louise Marley, former concert and opera singer, now writes science fiction and fantasy. Her website is www.louisemarley.com

I met my husband at the peak of the free love movement, and in the wake of the women’s liberation movement. 

The year was 1973. We had grown up and gone to college with the hum of war in our ears, but it was over at last. The United States had withdrawn from Vietnam. Our draft-weary generation was happy to be alive, giddy with relief, and energized by hope.

Jake Marley was a dashing young Air Force captain, tall and lean, blond hair cut military-short. I was a folksinger with waist-length black hair. He was a recent graduate of the Air Force Academy. I held a conservatory music degree. We met in the Officers’ Club at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where I was singing with my band, and we set about proving the old saw about opposites. We fell in love. 

We liked music, movies, and books. We had friends in common. He taught me to ski and play racquetball. I cooked lavish meals for him. He spent his leave following my band from city to city around the country. I rushed home whenever I could to spend time with him. We married in 1975, in a sunny outdoor ceremony in the mountains of Montana. 

In time, I quit the band. I cut my hair, while he, after leaving the service, let his grow. I went back to school to finish my training as a classical singer. He earned an MBA and began a career as a mechanical engineer. In time, we had a son.

Our musical tastes began to diverge, but we were in accord over most things. We experienced the ups and downs of long relationships. We worked hard, and we shared child-rearing responsibilities. Free of the specter of Vietnam, we paid little attention to politics, taking last-minute crash courses to inform ourselves on the issues when it was time to vote. The artist and the military veteran often voted differently, but amicably, sometimes chuckling about cancelling each other out in the ballot box.

When the United States went to war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a ripple appeared in the waters of our lengthening marriage. My captain had faith in the government’s intent and integrity. I, the mother of a young son and the wife of a man who had narrowly missed flying fighters over Vietnam, began to have doubts.

Not long after the Gulf War, we visited the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. with our teenage son. We found, and traced with wistful fingers, the names of our friends who had fallen in the far-off jungles. Our tall, sensitive son hugged me as I wept over one engraved name, all that remained of a boy I had loved when I was sixteen. I looked at my still-handsome captain with different eyes that day, proud, grateful, sad. And I looked at my son with a renewed maternal protectiveness, a fiercer resentment over the waste of young lives.

On the terrible day of September 11, 2001, my captain was lightning-quick to grasp what had happened, and why. Like so many Americans, we were of one mind that day, and the weeks following. We grieved and raged, prayed, sorrowed. Our son, about to turn eighteen and required to register with Selective Service, was wide-eyed and anxious. And I, his mother, lay wakeful in the small hours, dreading what might come, imagining the worst. I began to read and listen, to become aware of politics and policy in a way I had not been since my college protest days, when news of assassinations and mounting war dead echoed around campuses everywhere.

My husband and I voted differently in the 2000 presidential election, as we had frequently done before. But this time, there was more energy in our differences, a sharper divide in our opinions. I had always considered myself an independent, but in 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq war, the color of my politics shaded to a solid blue for the first time.

I realized, with a certain wonder, that my captain had always been vivid red. I should have understood that before, I suppose, but it was something that had never disturbed me. Now, my own deep convictions shook my acceptance.

I have no doubt that my belated blueness surprised him, too. He’s a student of military history, with a prodigious memory for the political events not only of our youth, but of the past. I’m a latecomer, persuaded into activism by the events of the early twenty-first century. He had always known me as a faintly distracted, liberal-arts sort of woman, immersed in my budding second career as a novelist, a little vague about what was happening with my government. The fiercely partisan woman he now found himself living with, after twenty-five relatively serene years of marriage, must have startled him.

Our son went off to college, leaving the two of us alone for the first time in eighteen years. We had coffee dates. We enjoyed late candlelight dinners. We took weekends together, and consoled each other over our empty nest.

And we argued. Long and bitterly. I shocked him by quoting reporters, columnists, bloggers, books by progressive writers. I was dismayed by his conservatism, and what I perceived as his stubbornness. He was patriotic. I was rebellious. He remembered Reagan. I recalled Vietnam.

As the war began, our dinners a deux began to disintegrate into debates. Too often, one of the other of us stamped away from the table, too angry to go on sitting opposite the other. We had become a red and blue marriage, a reflection of the furious partisanship splitting the country in two. Talking points and slogans flew like arrows between opposing armies.

For a year or more, we fought the same battle at home that was being waged in Washington, D.C., in the blogosphere, over the radio, on television. As casualties mounted in Iraq, we grieved together for every family affected, and as a family we prayed for the children of friends who were serving in harm’s way. But we couldn’t agree on the need for their sacrifice.

Our son, a student at one of the most liberal colleges in the country, kept well clear of the fray, though he had his own strong opinions. He often chided me for inciting fresh arguments. I couldn’t seem to help myself. I was furious, and Jake sometimes gazed at me in a sort of disgusted bemusement, as if a changeling had slipped into his house when he wasn’t looking.

Before I was certain there would be no draft, I spent my sleepless hours planning where to send my son if the worst happened. I didn’t dare speak of this to my captain, though, or even to my son. I spoke to my mother. She and I had laid plans, long years before, to protect my gentle, pacifist brother from being forced to go to Vietnam. Now we laid new ones, half-formed ideas of what we could do.

I had heard that Canada, the refuge for many young men in the sixties, would no longer be open to draft dodgers. I decided New Zealand might work. I went so far as to find out that New Zealand welcomes artists like me, and I soothed my midnight anxieties with thoughts of emigration.

I spoke none of these thoughts aloud. I knew perfectly well my husband would never agree, and I couldn’t imagine going without him, but I told myself I would do it if I had to. I was as divided in my own heart as he and I were in our discourse.

Like the disconnect between Fox News and MSNBC, we could no longer find common ground. Unlike Fox and MSNBC, however, we love each other. We love our family, our home, our life together. We had to find a way to coexist. Unlike the right and left media, we needed a compromise.

Ultimately, we came to an agreement. We decided to refrain from political discussion. As there was no healing of the divide between us, we built a bridge across it. One end of that bridge is on blue ground, and the other is on red. On the bridge itself colors don’t matter, and this is where our marriage rests.

Our arguments have cooled as the years flow on. Our red and blue marriage is steady, a sort of enduring ship of state which we won’t allow to be sunk.

Retrospectively, we found there was something to be learned from our differences, though it was a painful education. Both of us—the soldier and the artist—were forced to view events through a differently-colored lens than our own.

I recently met a couple at a party who were both solidly on one side of the political fence, the same side. Their complacency—in truth, their sense of self-righteousness—shocked me. Without the slightest acknowledgment of any other opinions, they made absolute pronouncements on the very issues my captain and I had vigorously debated. Conversation was impossible with them, and disagreement unthinkable.

My husband and I aren’t capable of such certainty anymore. Though we never surrendered to each other during our own arguments, we became aware of both sides of every question. Because we respect each other, we had to consider opinions opposite our own. I don’t incite arguments anymore. And my husband sometimes shows me an article or a column we can read together and discuss without rancor.

We learned, in our red and blue marriage, that the world isn’t monochrome. We know it would be a dull place if it were. And if we don’t see eye to eye, at least we’re both looking.