Reflections on Love and Marriage

I've continued to watch HBO's amazing dramatic series Tell Me You Love Me and to be struck by just how true-to-life it appears to be about intimate relationships. It seems to me that many couples, like those depicted in the series, are compelled more by their lustful attraction than by genuine love to rush into marriage, and before they know it, they're pregnant or have screaming kids running around, the thrill is gone, and little else remains to keep them together.

Each may finally see the other not through a hormonal haze but with enough objective clarity to realize that not only do they not really love each other, but they also don't really even like each other. Or perhaps one (or both) of the spouses changes so much over the years, for better or worse, that s/he no longer has the qualities that drew the other to her/him in the first place. And so some of these disenchanted couples simply get a divorce while others go to marriage counselors and try to patch things up and often end up divorcing anyway after all of the "therapeutic" revelations that dissolve what was left of any pretense of physical attraction or romantic love between them.

I'm grateful that I married as late in life as I did, without being heated to feverish folly by the flames of youthful passion that burned and scarred me in my more naive past, and that I didn't enter into my marriage with a rose-colored perception of my wife and with quixotic expectations that our marriage would ensconce us in a Utopian paradise that forever and completely fulfilled all of our personal needs and desires and deliver unflagging security and bliss while the world around us raged on. As silly as this sounds, I think many people do enter into marriage with these conscious or subconscious expectations and place so many demands on their spouses and their marriages that resistance to failure is futile.

I, on the other hand, believe that, rather than initially placing my wife on a pedestal from which she can't help but fall over time, the better I come to know her, the higher she rises in my esteem, the more I appreciate and love her, the more grateful I am to have her in my life, and the more I want to provide for her and please her in every way. It's not always easy, and I suspect that it's harder for her than it is for me, but I don't expect it to be easy, and, paradoxical though it may seem, that probably makes it a lot easier than it would be otherwise.

It may well be true, as has often been observed, that it takes hard work to keep a good marriage going, but it has to be some of the best kind of work there is.

HBO's Remarkable New Series

One young couple is planning their wedding until the woman overhears her fiance confiding to someone that he'll "deal with" the fallout of his inevitable unfaithfulness when it comes. A young man feels turned off by his wife's constantly pressuring him for sex so she can get pregnant. A man approaching middle age loves his family, but he and his wife haven't had sex in over a year, and the thrill of any kind of real intimacy between them has given way to weariness and numbing routine that she can no longer tolerate. An older woman (Jane Alexander), who happens to be a marriage counselor conducting therapy with two of the aforementioned couples, says to her husband of 42 years that they have worked their way through the very problems she's assisting the other couples with.

I'm writing about a startlingly realistic new HBO dramatic series about intimate male-female relationships titled Tell Me You Love Me. This series, with its extremely revealing glimpses of marital accord and discord and its graphic simulations of sexual intercourse, oral sex, and masturbation complete with visible ejaculation, is like nothing I've ever seen on TV or at the movies before, and, judging from the first three episodes that I saw today, after recently subscribing to HBO for a six month discount, may well end up numbering among the small handful of TV shows that have made me genuinely and profoundly wiser about life.

Almost everything about this series--except, perhaps, the invariably fast and furious sex scenes--shines with extraordinary authenticity delivered by exceptional scripts and acting. Virtually every act, gesture, and spoken and unspoken word is ripe with meaning and intensity, so much so that it can often make one squirm in one's chair with the discomfort of self-recognition, and fill one with apprehension over how any marriage or intimate relationship, one's own included, can reasonably be expected to avoid or surmount the obstacles that beset the troubled couples in the series. Indeed, after watching a few episodes, one marvels that the national divorce rate isn't significantly higher than the 50+% that it's reported to be

Yet, if experience can enable one to live more wisely, avoiding the pitfalls one has encountered or seen others encounter before, then watching this HBO series all the way through and reflecting on the issues it raises may be a shortcut to wisdom and an antidote to failed relationships. Because the intimate revelations of these four couples are so powerful that they sear themselves into one's brain and consciousness. The scenes are so effective that one vicariously experiences and is changed by the relationships he observes on the screen. It's almost like they become one's own personal experiences supplementing and complementing one's actual personal experience.

Maybe I'm just swept away by excessive enthusiasm and hyperbole in the wake of today's viewings and will come down to earth or even indifference after I see a few more episodes. But I doubt it. I think this is truly an extraordinary series, and if you get HBO and haven't seen it, you might want to give serious thought to checking it out. Or renting it after it comes out on DVD. Just be prepared to squirm a lot.