Reflections: The "Happily Ever After" Quiz

A cartoon in a recent edition of The New Yorker magazine made my wife and me laugh. Copyright law stops me from reproducing the cartoon here so I’ll try to describe it instead. A knight in shining armor stands in front of a castle looking up at a damsel, who is leaning out of a tower window. Around the base of the tower peers a large dragon. The knight is saying, “Before I fight this dragon and rescue you, can I ask a few questions? Like, do you want kids? What’s your passion? Do you have a financial philosophy? Where is ‘home’ to you?” The damsel looks distressed, although whether this is on account of the dragon or the unsatisfactory state of her love life isn’t clear. As a couple do they have enough in common to make it to Happily Ever After? They certainly seem unlikely to see eye-to-eye on the subject of pets.

It was 9 am on a Sunday morning and my wife and I were lounging around in bed, drinking tea and reading magazines, when I found this cartoon. At the end of a busy week, spending our Sunday mornings this way is a bit of a ritual for us: a chance to slow down, read, laugh, and talk about something … anything … that isn’t work. When your spouse is also your business partner, this can be a challenge. Our strategy is to designate Sunday mornings a work-discussion-free zone. This year marks twenty-five years of our running this magazine together, and also our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, so I suppose we must be doing something right. But while the knight’s “happily ever after” questionnaire made us laugh, it also made us wonder whether he’s onto something. So at this momentous milestone, let’s take stock …

“Do you want kids?” 

I was on the fence about this. Actually I was totally on the other side of the fence until my wife dragged me over the ramparts and around to her way of thinking. I’m glad about this, especially now that the teenaged children sleep in on Sunday mornings, allowing us to loll around drinking tea.

“What’s your passion?” 

In Ashley’s case it’s a trip to a new destination. More accurately she loves planning a trip to a new destination, then reading everything that’s ever been written about it. Her ideal trip is a journey to some foreign country with a thousand years of recorded history that she can spend nine months learning about, then bombard me with obscure historical facts when we arrive. For me it’s ideas—the more esoteric the better. One (maybe the only) benefit of an hour-long commute is listening to podcasts in which clever people discuss things that I know nothing about. In ten years I haven’t missed an episode of In Our Time, a long-running BBC radio show on which a crusty old English intellectual named Melvin Bragg assembles a panel of academics to discuss topics as random as kinetic theory, Frankenstein, the evolution of teeth, President Ulysses S. Grant, pheromones, papal infallibility, the Great Irish Famine, or the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I mostly don’t understand what they’re talking about, but the programs arm me with lots of strange facts with which to bombard my wife on our next trip.

“What’s your financial philosophy?” 

Any money we had during the first eight years of marriage was spent on travel (see “Passion,” above). Then we had kids, so this had to change. As noted previously, my wife is the planner so she gets all credit for the fact that we have a roof over our heads. Which begs the question: who rescued who?

“Where is ‘home’ to you?” 

That’s is a hard one. I miss Australia, particularly as we read about the fires ravaging New South Wales; and Victoria, where I grew up. Then again, after twenty-five years in Louisiana, I’ve lived here longer than I ever did in Australia. And married a woman whose family has lived on the same land for four generations. Roots that deep don’t export easily, but Ashley loves Australia—so much so that she reads the Melbourne Age online every day. Weird, huh? Again, see “Passion,” above. So you never know. Maybe one day we’ll get a chance to call both places “home.”

So here we are. Twenty-five years into this journey we seem somehow to have stumbled on at least a few of the right answers … for us at least. Of course it takes awhile to realize that. The knight’s problem—and the damsel’s—is that no one starts out knowing what the right answers are. All you can do is to give it a go. And that is bad news for the dragon.