AND IF YOU ASK ME

by Grayce Pitera

A few friends and I were talking at a backyard gathering recently. It’s a good group, no gossip, just everyday talk from recipes, clothes to a bar of soap in your bed (don’t ask).
Occasionally reminiscing the old days interspersed the conversations. For some of my friends, the “old days” refer to the seventies and eighties. That is usually an eye-opener. Whenever I make a casual reference to Woodstock or John Machise, I draw a blank look. Their “old days” are still current events to me.
It isn’t that way in this group. Our “old days” are mostly the golden fifties. So that beautiful summer evening with strains of Elvis, Neil and Paul in the background, we went off on the differences of today’s society as in our day.
Now, that is my forte. I love the comparisons of the different eras, but I also relish theorizing the reasons for those dissimilarities even more. Soon we moved around to the state of marriage in today’s society. “Till death do we part” isn’t exactly taken to heart any longer.
And I proposed a reason for this. You can owe all my critiquing to my college English professor who never accepted a fact from his students unless it was accompanied by pages of supportive data. Dr. Richard Holub was too tall to enter our classroom. He swooped his long slender body under and through the doorframe in one swift motion simply to make it into the room.
Holub was a former NBL basketball player for the NY Knicks. Knowing nothing about the sports of Northern New Jersey back then, I was totally unaffected by our meeting as opposed to my classmates who swarmed all over him.
The distance I kept bothered him. I am not certain the reason, but he gave me a D/F on my first essay. Everyone was vying for his attention as he walked around the classroom passing out our papers.
I simply sat, waiting for the class to move forward. Finally, he walked over to my desk and craned his neck down at me.
“Got your attention, didn’t I?” he crowed in his soft deep voice. His huge deep-set blue eyes stared down at me, but his expression was a bit mischievous.
“Not really,” I answered, not wanting to give him the pleasure and then nonchalantly added, “I’ll just do better next time,” not realizing the power was in his hands and “doing better” was a matter of opinion: his.
That May my term paper came back with an A/A. I was overcome with delight, which I also kept to myself.
With that, our first jousting for power, we became a classic student-teacher duo. I signed up for all his classes thereafter. I figured him out early on and why lose that edge? So while other students were finding their ground each year, I was off and running.
Last year I received a phone call at my shop. “Is this Miss Lucca?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Depends who’s asking,” I joked, having no idea to whom I was talking. It was Dr. Holub. He was recovering from a stroke and had just read an article I wrote for the FDU alumni bulletin. “You write better than I do,” he said and we both enjoyed a big long laugh. I imagine our passively combative four years together were passing through his thoughts as through mine.
So now as a result of his effect on me, I now question everything. Couple that training with living with a mother who also had a huge gift of curiosity, and I was the product of a double whammy. Whenever Mom experienced a difference of opinion, she’d say, “Just a minute. Let’s call her and find out.” And she would do just that, anything to make her point.
When short-lived marriages came up in our conversation that evening, I offered a thumbnail sketch of my theory. In order for a partner to leave a marriage, there must be a promise of a better life elsewhere. No one leaves a home unless they are being battered, discover unforgivable infidelity, or their nest is feathered elsewhere.
So in order for the feathered nest theory to be a factor, there has to be someone waiting in the wings. That is my theory.
I blame this all on WWII. We sent all our young men abroad to fight a war and then delved into the over-30 stock when the younger men became scarce and the battles raged on. In one clean sweep we threw off the balance of nature. Thousands of our healthiest and fittest men lost their lives on those battlefields. After that one war, there were never enough men to go around.
Women were now in the majority. The gap between the number of males and females has never been balanced again. Korea, Vietnam and all the subsequent wars make that impossible
So when a married man goes out of the house, there is always a woman willing to spend time with him. In the old days, women didn’t do that as a whole. Those women who did fraternize with married men were ostracized.
No one will find comfort outside his home unless there was someone willing to provide that elsewhere. That is my theory.
But I also have another. Marriage is a coupling that needs to be constantly nurtured; each partner must stay continuously tuned into the other to bring harmony to the union. No one has time for that anymore. In today’s world where the woman is outside the home as much as the man, there is no one dedicated to the hearth and home.
The old time marital loyalty is not seeded; the couple spends more time away from each other than together. A single woman and a married man will begin an innocent working relationship at work. Soon it unintentionally blossoms. There you have it.
If the overflow of women didn’t exist, there would be no one to take up that relationship. If she had a husband and family who needed her and her home life was afloat, the male’s extramarital affair wouldn’t stand a chance. But when lonely, she will understandably acquiesce to the circumstances.
It may be naive to keep “‘til death do we part” in our marriage vows, but what is the alternative? We are looking at a problem with no solution.
My hypothesis for short-lived marriages is only one: a deficient number of males. An abundance of females threaten the institution of marriage. Every woman cannot find a mate. Marriages are sitting ducks.
Mr. Holub would shoot holes through my theory until it was extended into a fifteen-page paper. Only then would he be satisfied. Here I only made one point, but it remains clear to me that the old days cannot be brought back.
The conditions of those times simply do not exist today. So it is with the old days.

Grayce Pitera is a weekly columnist for The Gazette.