My Ex-Husband Never Became President, Neither Did I
November 12, 2008
The other night, watching Michelle and Barack Obama on the stage in Grant Park I couldn’t help but (yes, think of myself) think of how we choose the man we will marry (and I am assuming in these days of SAHF, the woman we will marry). I am not talking about being a gold digger, but about the selection, both sub-consciously and consciously, that we ponder as we date, especially when we are too young to have a resume to present. Don’t we pick people who we think will succeed? Don’t we go with the guy who we think will go to the White House of his chosen profession?
I think that we are able, to a certain extent, to decide who we will fall in love with. All of the things that you find wrong with a guy in the first five minutes of meeting him, isn’t that just your way of telling yourself that he doesn’t meet your expectations for a husband? Granted some of the rejects are on their way (my first and only set-up blind date seemed to be on his way to being a bigwig in whatever field he was in, but all I could talk about was how I was moving to Israel in a couple of weeks, and he had to go back to the office to finish some things after less than an hour), but we do have to be somewhat selective. And even those who go for the deadbeats, don’t they usually talk about how they think they will turn him around? I worked with a woman who kept referring to the fact that her husband was a diamond in the rough when they first met, and after a few years he had built a successful company.
But going back to the Obamas, I’m sure that they were taken with each other’s physical, intellectual, and emotional compatibility as well as the potential that the other has in making her/his way in the world. I mean do you really want to hitch yourself to someone who has no ambition? Obviously we want success for ourselves, but don’t we also want to be with someone who has stars in his eyes—especially at the beginning of the journey?
When I started dating mr ex he had just become an officer in the Israeli army and he had plans to either be a spy (HA!), lawyer, or businessman, and perhaps politician down the line; and I was determined to be a writer of the intellectual bestseller by the age of 24 type (no comments). But beyond his career goals, this was a man who was at the center of a few groups of people, and they all listened to what he said (which was good, since I couldn’t always figure out what he was saying since my Hebrew was pretty basic, but it set the stage for me, or rather his stage). Not only was he the nuclei of different groups of friends and colleagues, but also of his family—he was the older son who everyone listened to. One of the interesting things about being in the military (this seems to be pretty universal) is that there is an intense selection process that tracks people, and you can really see how someone is valued and judged by the track he is put on. And boy, was he on an impressive track.
It all seemed good. He had been vetted. But the vetting process only works well if who you see is who you get, and the who does not transform in unknown and unexpected ways.
My point here is not that most of us fail to meet our own expectations, never mind how our significant other fails, but we at least begin with a heightened estimation of that person. I believed he could do all of those things (so much so that I even petitioned against the whole spy business) and I think he thought I would be a bestselling author (even though he didn’t “appreciate” what I wrote).
Maybe it’s harder to correctly analyze this when you are young (I was 22 when we started dating and he was 20) and don’t have much to go on. But there’s always something. What did the person do in high school? What college did the person attend? What was his SAT? What did he do during his summers? What did he do when he got out of college? Sure, it’s not quite on a track, but there’s a general direction.
Which leads me to an awfully obvious question: Am I jealous of Michelle Obama? You betch’ya. Even, God help me, Laura Bush. I made my choice, and I thought it was a good one. For goodness sakes, I thought that I had hit the bonanza with him, that we were on our way to tête-à-têtes in important circles with important people. In my own defense I do want to note that both of these women met their men in their 30’s, after the adult formative years and when there was more to see and assess—you know, more to fall in love with (or not).
Reconciling yourself to your own inadequacies and failure to launch are hard, but it’s hard, too, to reconcile yourself to the fact that your spouse didn’t live up to his own expectations—or yours. And it really doesn’t matter if it is because the world is against him or if he just didn’t have it in him.
Or maybe more tellingly, because other people saw in him a flaw that it took me so long to recognize.