My dear friend Julie wants to marry Louis, our nearly house-trained Yorkie-Poo puppy. A lot of people might think it’s offbeat and even disturbing that Julie imagines matrimony with a small, furry dog, who, charming though he may be, has certain disgusting habits, like snacking on my nephew’s dirty diapers.
Mostly, I’m used to the oddity of Julie’s passion, and I trust that when she says “marry,” she’s exaggerating. Still, I cringed a little when she got super-friendly with Louis in front of the nice, normal neighbor couple. Their laughter at the spectacle of “girl loves dog” bordered on nervous hysteria. But the guy who gets most uptight about Julie’s puppy love is her boyfriend, Tony. Julie says Tony is jealous of Louis. More likely, he’s simply embarrassed about being edged out by a poofy fella with bad breath and an excessively hairy back.
Either way, I’m not about to tell Tony—or Julie, for that matter—that, according to a 2002 study conducted at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an animal friend often provides more comfort than a spouse. Researchers measured signs of stress, such as spikes in blood pressure, while study participants performed mental math or held their hands in ice water. People completed the tasks alone, with a spouse, with a friend, or with a pet, and those with pets fared best. Meanwhile, numerous studies have shown that the mere presence of domesticated animals can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, raise survival chances after a heart attack, and mitigate loneliness and depression.
Spouses, on the other hand, offer no such proven benefits. Sure, married people are consistently healthier and happier than their single counterparts, and are less likely to be smokers, heavy drinkers, or be plagued with headaches or psychological problems. But that, say researchers, is probably because married people started out happier, healthier, and more content than others who don’t marry. A Michigan State University psychologist synthesized fifteen years of interviews conducted with twenty-four thousand Germans and concluded that marriage itself doesn’t make people the slightest bit happier. Well, at least not in the long haul. Their self-reported happiness scores, on a scale of one to ten, rose slightly from 7.28 to 7.56 immediately after the vows, but by the second anniversary, they were right back down to their starting points.
I read all about this research on pets and marriage and the science of happiness in the recent “Mind and Body” special issue of Time. (That’s one of many magazines Jon inexplicably signed up for the last time someone came to the door, which was right after the sixty-pound box of grapefruit arrived, sold by a previous door-knocker. Grapefruit smoothies leave a lot to be desired). I was reading all this about how Julie would probably be better off adopting a dog than marrying a man a mere forty-eight hours after Jon and I finalized reservations on a place for our wedding this summer. Wouldn’t you know. I’m always a beat behind.
Oh, well. I’m marrying him anyway, even if he continues to order grapefruit. Because I’m not sure that marriage is, in the end, supposed to have a whole lot to do with happiness. It’s about the profound comfort of trusting someone to put up with you despite the fact that you are not a dog, that you are unfortunately much more complicated and ornery than a dog, and frequently less adorable. This open-eyed love is in contrast to that of Louis, who quite plainly loves us because he doesn’t know any better.
So we’ll have a homemade ceremony in Duluth, at Brighton Beach on Lake Superior. We went there years ago, when both of us were gasping through the first year of marital break-up. Jon had never been to the North Shore, and I brought him there because it has always been a healing place for me. But that particular early winter day was wickedly cold and windy. Sharp rain pelted our faces, and the lake was dark and roiling. The whole scene matched the landscape of our lives exactly, yet the moody darkness held a strange peace. We ventured out on the rocks together, but the freezing wind and rain drove me back to the shelter of the car. Jon stayed out there on the jagged shore for a long while. I thought maybe he was soaking in the desolation, merging his personal rawness with the brutality of the elements. But I was wrong. Later, much later, Jon told me that what he’d experienced out there in the howling wind and crashing waves was an unbidden moment of grace. He’d looked out at that dark horizon and seen, to his surprise, an open space for possibility. The space filled up with a picture, mottled through the rain, of us spending our lives together, of our enduring. And now we’re returning, not with hopes of unbridled happiness, but of enduring grace, just grace.
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