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| Primates friends groom each other -- because other monkeys' lice matter too. |
Having recently had a party to celebrate turning the big four-o, I am freshly reminded of the delicate issues that sometimes arise when compiling a guest list, and I will first take this opportunity to confess that I did invite my ex-husband, as well as a whole other array of people-- some of whom comprise a similarly questionable cast of characters. Having said that, though, I stand by my decision; I wanted every single one of those people there and wouldn’t have had it any other way.
In fact, it occurred to me just the other day that, among my guests, other than 1) a colleague from work, 2) my ex-husband himself, and 3) an old mutual friend of ours, plus 5) the gay boyfriend of many years who planned the whole event, along with some people I know through him, I had met every single one of these guests after my divorce was underway and, arguably, directly because of the divorce. Basically, these were all people who have helped to make me live -- or who have reminded me in some way, in the years since, that I am, in fact, still living. But perhaps that is a blog post for another time.
What I want to talk about now is the fact that a party I had RSVP’d to attend the very next afternoon unexpectedly became a vivid reminder that there are some sacred boundaries to observe when it comes to whom to invite or not invite to an event. A very obvious rule is as follows: when your guest list includes a married person, unless the event in question is some kind of single-gender event such as a stag party, you either need to explicitly invite the spouse as well or be amenable to the idea that the spouse is of course welcome to join your guest.
Especially if the event to which you are inviting your friend is a ceremony designed to legally join you to a spouse of your very own.
Duh; right?
Well, apparently, no. One would assume that this is sort of common sense, but, as the saying goes, common sense is not always so common.
So here’s the story:
My ex-husband Steven and I were once again both invited to the same party, the afternoon after I’d just seen him at my birthday party the previous night. It was a very family-oriented event where many of the less-jaded and younger members of our wide circle of friends had each arrived bearing not only a potluck item and a mystery gift but also a baby or toddler. For the most part, the people bearing toddlers were a pretty reasonable bunch – both a) so exhausted by all of the years of parenting that they could no longer be bothered with acting like high-strung control freaks and b) finally over themselves and this idea that setting some of their reproductive fluids free into this world to do their thing was somehow the most important achievement in the whole history of humankind.
I was talking to Steven when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that some woman had walked in holding a newborn. Steven said to me, “Oh, did you see Anna’s baby?”
I looked back into his eyes in search of some sign of mild retardation and said, “Uh, yeah – Anna. Not much of a fan. Not so much.”
“Really?” he said. “Why?”
“The wedding,” I said, and there it was – that same moment of embarrassment I’d read on his face all of those years earlier, followed by a rare flash of deep empathy that was registering at the realization that someone had treated me badly (someone other than him, that is, of course).
“Oh,” he said. “Oh my God; I’d forgotten about that.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Me two – but only because I kind of forgot Anna even existed, you know?”
It had been just a few months after Steven and I had started talking divorce, and we were attending marriage counseling. One day, in passing, he said to me, “Did Anna send you you an invitation?”
“To what?” I’d asked him.
“She’s getting married. She sent me an invitation. I got it at the gallery.” Steven had been getting a lot of his mail sent to the gallery even before the separation started.
“Then why would she send one to me?" I said. I mean, it does it have both of our names on it, doesn’t it?”
He looked confused. “No,” he said. “Just mine.”
I was confused too. “Did Jill tell her what was going on with us?”
“No,” he said. “Jill doesn’t even know. No one knows.”
I shrugged. “That’s odd,” I said.
A few weeks passed, and Steven told me he’d gotten a phone call from Anna regarding how he had RSVP’d. Apparently he had just written in that he was bringing one guest (me).
She was calling to tell him that the wedding was already really big, so it wouldn’t be possible for him to bring anyone.
“Well, what did you say to her?” I asked. It did, of course, occur to me that it was both touching and strange that Steven wanted so badly to bring me with him despite everything. But really that was beside the point. We were married. Whether our marriage was on the rocks or not was nobody's business when it comes to sending out wedding invitations. They could leave it for us to decide what to do with the invitation. The fact was simple and was all that mattered on their end: we were still married.
“I – I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t make any sense.”
Neither Steven nor I had been huge fans of weddings; after all, we hadn’t bothered having one. And it wasn’t like the bride and I were great friends in this particular case. Very friendly to one another, yes. But friends -- no. When Steven and I would have parties, she would show up at some point and ooh and awe over how toned I was, putting her arm around my waist in this suggestive way, trying to flatter me. But that was about it. Steven said he hardly ever saw her anymore but that he and his brother had literally been the first two people she’d met in New York, and that’s why she wanted them there. “Otherwise I just wouldn’t go,” he said with this pained expression on his face.
After the date of the event came and went, Steven went out of his way to tell me how awful the whole thing was. “My big, fat Russian wedding.” That was how he described it.
“Oppulently tacky?” I asked, trying to play along. This was a descriptor we had coined together during our visit to Moscow.
“Da,” he answered.
He went on to claim that Anna had done something at the wedding that had offended Jill as well, but I don’t remember what that thing was. I just know that he was only telling me these things to make me feel better.
Now, if I were in therapy right now, the relevant comment that my therapist would make would probably be,
“Yes, I can see how that must have hurt. It must have made you feel rejected.”
But then I would be thinking, “Hurt?”
I was upset, sure. I had dreams, during the day, with my eyes open, in which I was making voodoo dolls that looked like Anna. But hurt? Rejected?
Wouldn’t I actually need to consider this person a friend to begin with to be able to feel rejected by her?
What did I really care?
So I would be tempted to say that it was my pride that had been hurt; only that didn’t quite work either, did it? To have my pride hurt implied somehow that she had embarrassed me. The truth is, no one at the wedding would have had any idea why I wasn’t there with Steven -- and when they would eventually find out that we were getting divorced, they would have just put two and two together and assumed that I hadn’t wanted to be there -- or anywhere -- with him those days. Actually, especially not at a wedding.
The only person who knew the real reason was Steven himself, and he certainly wasn’t laughing at me. If anything, he had that same look on his face as he might have had, in a more primordial setting, had an orangutan come up and made threatening gestures in my direction. One could almost speculate that he felt protective toward me about the whole thing and wished he'd done more in my defense.
So what could the real reason have been? If I didn’t want to go to the wedding in the first place, and I certainly didn’t yearn for Anna’s company or friendship? Why was I so offended that I could feel myself shaking with rage?
Well, for one thing, it had been extremely inappropriate of her. One might say rude. But even then, what did that really matter to me? She was the one making an ass of herself.
I recently heard a good definition of “rudeness,” and perhaps this is what really explains everything: we feel like someone is being rude when that person seems to be acting without taking other people into consideration. If Anna had any kind of adult human concept of empathy and really given it any thought, she would have put herself in my place or even Steven’s for just a second and immediately realized how obnoxious it would be to be getting married and yet not allowing the spouse of one of her guests to accompany him at the wedding.
But again -- she was the one making a fool of herself by overlooking something so obvious.
I put myself back into the mindset of my inner cave woman – the one who was about to be slapped in the face by an orangutan – and I thought, why do people have weddings? Why bring a whole community together to witness this thing?
The thing is, us humans, we count on each other for survival. Not all of us are the best buffalo-hunters, so when one of us does luck out, we all get a share of buffalo meatballs. But Anna was carving up the meat without considering the fact that she wasn’t the only person who mattered. I guess I must have somehow perceived, viscerally, that Anna’s behavior toward me represented a threat to my very survival. She might as well have come up and punched an infant in the face – a helpless infant who happened to be strapped to my body at the time. I could feel my killer instinct come alive.
And she had arrived to this party with the fruits of that thoughtless wedding of hers -- her most important accomplishment, she must have felt -- swaddled in her arms. And so now what?
Whether the stress of stopping at nothing to defend and care for that baby of hers will eventually cost her her own marriage -- make her just another divorce statistic too -- who’s to say? I do wonder if the strength of her own arms -- the ones holding and protecting that child, as it is only natural to do -- will be enough to get her through that.
And, if not, how many people would be around for her -- once that started to happen -- to help her in her own survival? This blog post is for my friends -- both the ones who came out to celebrate, with me, four decades of having been alive -- and the ones who wanted to have been able to make it.
