From This Day Forward Read online

  Dedication

  TO OUR PARENTS

  Lindy and Hale Boggs

  Dorothy and Will Roberts

  AND OUR CHILDREN

  Liza and Lee Roberts

  Rebecca Roberts and Dan Hartman

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One Our Lives

  Early Days

  Courtship

  Wedding

  Chapter Two Other Lives

  Early America

  Companionate Marriage

  Slave Marriages

  Chapter Three Our Lives

  Leaving Home

  Newlyweds in New York

  New Parents in California

  Growing Up in Greece

  Chapter Four Other Lives

  New Places, New Roles

  Pioneer Marriages

  Immigrant Marriages

  Chapter Five Our Lives

  Coming Home

  Family House

  Equal Work

  Empty Nest

  Chapter Six Other Lives

  Broken Marriages

  Getting Divorced

  Blended Families

  Chapter Seven Our Lives

  From This Day Forward

  Afterword

  Suggested Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Also by Cokie and Steve Roberts

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  This is a book of stories about marriage, not sermons or sociology. We deliberately focus on American marriages, our own and others’, because marriage in this country is a rather peculiar institution. You might even say it’s un-American. After all, the Founding Fathers made it clear that individuals—not couples or groups or communities—have an “inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But by definition, marriage is a partnership, not an individual enterprise. Married couples have to pursue happiness together, not as separate entities. And the essence of any successful marriage is self-sacrifice, not self-absorption. A friend recently told us about a twenty-fifth-anniversary party where the husband gave a toast and said, “The key to our success is very simple. Within minutes after every fight, one of us says, ‘I’m sorry, Sally.’” Good line, but it’s also true that what you don’t say in a marriage can be as important as what you do say. We often joke that the success of a marriage can be measured by the number of teeth marks in your tongue. Keeping quiet in the first place means you don’t have to say “I’m sorry” quite so often.

  Since America is a nation that constantly reinvents itself, the institution of marriage is always changing and adapting as well. We write about John and Abigail Adams, keeping their union together over long periods of separation and anxiety; slaves who defied the indignity of bondage to dignify their own vows to each other; immigrants and pioneers who had to live by new rules in new places with new partners. In our own lives, we were children of the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, and living through a series of cultural aftershocks, from birth control and the Beatles to the rise of feminism and the decline of civility. As a result, concludes the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, when young couples marry today, “they are entering a union that looks very different from the one that their parents or grandparents entered.” True enough, and here are some of the reasons:

  • Divorce is much more common. If current trends hold steady, almost half of all contemporary marriages will not survive. And the “divorce revolution,” which picked up steam in the early sixties and reached a peak around 1980, is now into its second generation. Young people today are much more likely to be the products of a failed marriage than their parents or grandparents ever were.

  • Marriage is no longer a rite of passage for most Americans, the moment when they leave home and become adults. The mean age at marriage has jumped sharply since 1960—from twenty to twenty-five for women and from twenty-three to twenty-seven for men—so most newlyweds have been out working and supporting themselves for some time. They are also having sex earlier—more than half of all women lose their virginity by age seventeen—so the average bride has been sexually active for seven or eight years before her first marriage. Indeed, notes the National Marriage Project, the term “premarital sex” has lost its meaning, because sexual activity is no longer tied in most cases to the “promise or expectation of marriage.”

  • The sexual revolution has helped fuel a 1,000 percent increase since 1960 in the number of unmarried couples living together. By one estimate, about one out of four single women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine is now living with a partner, and about half have done so at some point. But to call these living arrangements a “trial marriage” strikes us as profoundly wrong. The whole point about marriage is making a permanent commitment to each other, and any relationship lacking that commitment is not a marriage, trial or otherwise. In fact, researchers for the National Marriage Project found some evidence that couples who live together before marriage are slightly more likely to get divorced than those who don’t cohabit.

  • Americans will spend a smaller portion of their adult lives being married. Later marriages, longer life spans, and more common cohabitation all play a part. So does the easy availability of sex outside of marriage. The current college culture has spawned the term “friends with privileges,” which basically means, “we sleep together but aren’t really a couple.” Add in another important trend: more people are remaining single permanently. Going back to the mid-1800s, well over 90 percent of American women married by age forty-five. If current rates continue, that figure could drop below 85 percent.

  • Mobility has always been a fact of American life and marriage, but it’s getting more pronounced. Steve grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, with one grandfather in the house and two other grandparents a few blocks away. Cokie’s grandmother lived with her family a good part of the time and the Boggs house in New Orleans was next door to a great-aunt. Today our own children live in San Francisco and London, and most of our adult nieces and nephews don’t live anywhere near their parents. Young marrieds are often far from home, and while we know the advantages of that experience, we also know how painful it can be. And when a marriage hits a rough patch, the absence of a supportive community can be devastating. A friend of ours, reflecting on his grandparents’ sixty-five-year marriage said, “When they got married it was a package deal. You bought into the whole family network. Divorce was inconceivable, because you had to divorce all of those people.”

  • Feminism has had an enormous impact on marriage. Women are far less dependent on a husband for financial support or sexual gratification. Moreover, adds the Marriage Project, women have “higher expectations for emotional intimacy in marriage and more exacting standards for a husband’s participation in child rearing and the overall work of the household.” Thus a paradox: women have less need of marriage just as they expect more from the relationship. But just because women need marriage less does not mean they want it less. Many of our single female friends, all accomplished and independent women, would still prefer the support and companionship of a committed mate.

  • Marriage has been devalued and even defamed by the popular culture, according to some scholars in the field. One of them, Professor Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago, argues that most young people today “lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage.” As a result, “for the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory. It’s every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled on it by accident.”

  But we do not despair about the future of marri
age. Our parents were married for a combined total of more than ninety years, and we see strong unions of old friends all around us. Our children seem to attend a wedding every few weeks. We are also heartened by the number of young people who come to us for conversation and counsel, wanting eagerly to make their relationships work. One of them, an Italian-Catholic woman, wrote recently to announce she was marrying her Jewish boyfriend. It took them three years and a lot of heartache. They didn’t “stumble” on the altar “by accident”; they made it there because marriage meant so much to them.

  For all of its many problems, marriage is also showing other signs of health. While the divorce rate is still at historically high levels, it’s leveled off in recent years and even seems to be declining a bit. Moreover, a wide variety of forces are mobilizing to bolster the institution. A group of therapists and counselors has started a movement devoted to teaching couples the practical skills that seem to be present in most enduring matches. One of the founders, Diane Sollee, voices the hope “that in the near future, couples will come to accept that the most romantic thing they can do is walk hand in hand into a course on making marriages work.” A similar effort, Marriage Savers, urges pastors to require several months of counseling for any young couple wanting to get married. And after the ceremony, older couples in the congregation are assigned as sort of marriage mentors to the newlyweds. In one widely watched experiment, Florida has become the first state to mandate marriage education courses as a high-school graduation requirement. Louisiana has passed a law enabling couples to enter a “covenant” marriage, which makes divorce a lot harder.

  We do have a prejudice. We’re big fans of marriage and don’t apologize for that. We have always agreed with the author Judith Viorst, who once wrote a book called Married Is Better. Not better for everyone, to be sure, but for most people. And we believe strongly that a devoted marriage can be reconciled with individual growth and development. Marriage has enlarged our lives, not encircled them; it has opened new doors, not closed them. We are better people together than we are separately.

  But let’s be honest. We quote a young woman in this book as saying marriage “just scares me,” and she has a right to feel that way. Marriage is serious business and hard work. It’s not just becoming roommates, it’s becoming soul mates; it’s not just signing a license, it’s sharing a life. That explains our title. The words in the marriage ceremony “from this day forward” are scary. At the moment a couple exchange those vows, they can never know what they really mean, what hills and valleys stretch out in front of them in the years ahead. But if you take the words seriously, there’s no going back. There’s only the future, unlimited and unknowable, and the promise to make the journey together.

  Chapter One

  OUR LIVES

  EARLY DAYS

  COURTSHIP

  We are often asked how we met, usually by young people who are still wondering about this marriage thing. When do you know you’ve found the right person? How can you tell? The problem is summed up by Steve’s twin brother, Marc, who likes to put it this way: Choosing a mate is like being told to walk through a forest and pick up the biggest stick you can find. But you only get to pick up one stick and you never know when the forest will end. In our case it was even more complicated. Since Cokie is Catholic and Steve is Jewish, the kind of stick each of us chose was also an issue—to ourselves and to our families. But in another sense we were following a familiar pattern, meeting and marrying young. We both have brothers who married at twenty. Like us, Cokie’s parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs, met in college, where they worked on the student newspaper together. Steve’s father, Will, met his bride, Dorothy, on her seventeenth birthday. And he used to look around at gatherings of his children and grandchildren, when the tribe had reached eighteen, and say with considerable pride, “See what happens when you walk a girl home from a birthday party?” Our story is not quite so romantic, but typical of our life—public and private threads woven together. Steve was nineteen, Cokie eighteen. It was the summer of 1962, between our sophomore and junior years in college, and we both were attending a student political conference at Ohio State.

  CR: I saw Steven across the yard and he looked familiar to me because I knew his twin brother. And I kept thinking, Is that Marc Roberts? He doesn’t quite look like Marc Roberts, but he looks a whole lot like Marc Roberts. And then I got up close to him and he had a name tag, so I said, “Are you Marc Roberts’s brother?” And he said, “Yes, are you Barbara Boggs’s sister?” And that’s how we met.

  SR: I had actually heard of Cokie all that summer. I had been recruited by one of my Harvard professors, Paul Sigmund, who was looking for student journalists to put out a newspaper at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland. I didn’t know that our trip was financed by the CIA, or that Paul would later marry Cokie’s sister, making us brothers-inlaw as well as co-conspirators. Another recruit was Bob Kaiser, then at Yale, an old friend of the Boggs family, and in Helsinki he kept telling me about this girl he knew at Wellesley, Cokie Boggs. But Bob made a critical mistake: he stayed in Europe. I went home early for the political meeting, and since I’d heard about her from Bob, I knew who she was when I met her.

  CR: But he has this picture in his mind that I was wearing a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts and I have never in my life owned a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts. It was 1962. It might have been 1932 in terms of men and women. The fact that I actually spoke at this meeting was highly unusual.

  SR: But I also found that intriguing. I think from the very beginning, the fact that Cokie was so independent-minded and so forceful appealed to me. I mean, she was not the secretary sitting at the back of the room taking notes.

  CR: Although really, I took quite a few.

  SR: We started flirting, writing notes to each other during these endless meetings, and Cokie has actually saved some of them all these years. On a long list of people who had been nominated for national office, I scribbled on the side, “You’re so efficient it hurts.” She wrote back, “I’m the youngest child of an insane family—somebody had to be efficient, otherwise we’d starve!” I answered, “Be efficient, but Jeezus—don’t ever get comfortable. It’s such a deadly disease!” That statement probably defines the word “sophomoric,” but it also shows how little I knew about myself. I was actually looking for comfort and I think she might have known that. Her final word on the “deadly disease” question was, “Would that I could ever have the opportunity to catch it!”

  CR: And then we went back to school. Our dorms were only twelve and a half miles apart, we later learned, but at first he didn’t call me. So I think I called him and invited him to the Junior Show. Is that what happened?

  SR: That would be typical. I remember sitting in the audience, watching her sing—a symbolic way to spend our first date. I remember afterward she was wearing a bright green dress, and we went to the Howard Johnson’s down in the village for something to eat.

  CR: And then I came home and I’d had such a good time, such a good time, I went dancing up the stairs singing “I Feel Pretty.” And then he never called.

  SR: I didn’t call because I was petrified. I had this rule that I didn’t call a girl more than twice. I really liked her and I enjoyed the show, but I was unnerved. I was a typical guy. I was nineteen. But there were other guys from Harvard who went out to Wellesley regularly and I would hear from them, “Cokie Boggs asked after you.” So we had this long-distance communication. I knew where she was. I knew where to find her.

  CR: And then in March of ’63 my sister was putting on a big conference in Washington on creating a domestic peace corps. Most of the schools paid for their students to stay in hotels, but Harvard didn’t, so Barbara had arranged for people to stay at our parents’ house if they wanted to. We were expecting a whole crowd, but in the end, it was just me and Steven.

  SR: We drove down to Washington together. I remember walking up to the car in Cambridge and seeing Cokie in the backseat of the car a
nd saying to myself, “You made a mistake by not calling her.” Even before I got in the car, I knew there was something there. And the whole way down to Washington, we talked even though others were in the car.

  CR: When we arrived at the house late that night, Steve had a terrible cold; he was coughing and hacking all through the night.

  SR: I was staying in Cokie’s girlhood room—later our daughter’s room—and at some point I heard a knock on the door. Since this was 1963, I pretty much figured it wasn’t Cokie. The door opened and there stood my future mother-in-law dressed in this flowing peach negligee—clouds of peach. I sat up in bed and my mouth just dropped to the floor. I had never met a woman like this in Bayonne, New Jersey. And she whispered, “Now, darling, you sound terrible, drink this.” She didn’t have to say “Open your mouth” because my mouth was already open! And it was some home brew, probably three-quarters bourbon, but it did the trick. The family joke is that I fell in love with my mother-in-law first and then got around to Cokie! And there’s some truth to that.

  We went to the conference the next day and a party that night. Bob Kaiser was there, and he was angling to take Cokie home, but since I was staying there, I had the inside track. We stayed up half the night talking in the den, and at some point Cokie made us scrambled eggs. In many ways we’ve been together since that night. It was clearly a turning point in terms of starting to feel connected to each other.