I was recently at a memorial service for my husband’s grandmother, a formidable and brilliant matriarch who died in June. I had the great pleasure of knowing her for the last 20 years of her long life. All five of her children spoke at the memorial, and so did several of her 12 grandchildren.
After the memorial, I looked around the room at the extended family and felt lucky and proud. Lucky because here was what I had always wanted: a warm crowd of people who supported one another over generations and across geography.
They described a woman in full, no sugarcoating. She left college at 19 to marry and returned to university in her 40s, graduating with the highest honors. She never let a single grandchild — or great-grandchild — beat her in a card game. She attended protests and swam competitively well into her 80s, long after her husband of over 50 years died in 2008.
As a child in a small immediate family with few other relatives, I read “Cheaper by the Dozen” until the paperback cover disintegrated. It’s a memoir by two of the 12 Gilbreth offspring, about the joys of growing up in a gaggle. I definitely did not want 12 children of my own. What I admired was the easy camaraderie of having so many close kin, which I acquired as an adult.
My husband and I have nurtured this shared value of family together. I’m proud of that. I didn’t marry him just for his big family, but a crucial part of our bond has always been about building and maintaining the relationships in that room. And doing that starts with our own union. A new book, “A Marriage at Sea” by Sophie Elmhirst, is a portrait of the way a united dream, even a countercultural one that sounds crazy to most people, can be marital cement.
“A Marriage at Sea” is the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple who were stranded on a raft and a dinghy in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for 118 days in 1973. Their original boat was gored by a sperm whale, and they managed to bail out with enough supplies and moxie to just barely stay alive for months adrift. As Olga Khazan put it in The Atlantic, “Their mission almost killed them, corporeally, but it also seems to have helped their marriage survive.”
While I read about the Baileys’ journey and its aftermath, I felt that their unusual experience was, in its way, rather romantic — or as romantic as a journey that involved eating raw turtle meat can be. The Baileys achieved a symbiosis on that boat that forced them to appreciate their differences: Maralyn’s sunny, almost delusional resolve complemented Maurice’s realism that bordered on melancholy. Talking about the future and, shockingly, fantasizing about living on another boat someday kept them going.
“A Marriage at Sea” provides a kind of rebuke to the current extreme cultural narratives about heterosexual romance. You have religious conservatives in one corner, obsessing about people marrying earlier and celebrating when mothers leave the work force. At the other extreme, you have some women embracing heteropessimism, including an economist who wrote that she “crunched the numbers and stopped dating men” because she determined, based on her own experience of marriage and data from the American Time Use Survey, that they may never hold up their end of the domestic bargain.
Sometimes people misunderstand me when I write about the imbalance between men and women in household chores and child care. I don’t bring attention to it because I revile or have given up on the opposite sex or because I think that all women are permanent victims of men’s rapacious self-absorption. I write about these issues because I prefer to take the long view and I am optimistic that cultural norms can change; they have been changing already, faster than most people anticipated.
The Baileys showed that even 50 years ago, a long-term union between a man and a woman didn’t have to rely on strict gender roles or religion, that it didn’t need to involve children and that even a person born in 1933, as Maurice was, could become more egalitarian as his marriage progressed.
They knew they did not want kids from the start. When the Baileys got together in the early ’60s, childlessness by choice in postwar Britain was rare and controversial. So was their rejection of a church wedding. Elmhirst writes, “The assumed aspirations for a young couple were security and prosperity, a brace of cheerful children in a tidy home.” The Baileys chose differently. They sought adventure, outside what Maurice described in his diary as the “mechanical slavery of everyday employment.”
After they were rescued by a Korean ship and became an international sensation, Maurice repeatedly credited Maralyn with their survival. He started the journey as the captain of the ship and the driving force behind their trip. But by the end, he wrote, “I saw that she was stronger and more capable than I was, and I sat back and was prepared to let her take over. And she did.” Elmhirst writes, “As a consequence, their marriage was more equal.”
Many reviewers of the book didn’t see Maurice’s appeal because he’s a downer, and they found more to love in the irrepressible Maralyn. But I have a soft spot for Maurice because I’m the introvert in my marriage, and I’m certainly more prickly than my husband. (Though hopefully I bring a spark to the proceedings that energizes his more even temper.) I don’t identify with the recent spate of commentary on mankeeping — the idea that a straight woman takes on all her mate’s social and emotional needs. My husband has close friends from every stage of his life, and that loyalty is one of the things I admire most about him. And he’s not the only man who has such sustaining relationships.
My husband’s grandmother had sharp edges, as I do. Apparently she told one of her sons before she died that if her memorial service had any kind of religious aspect to it, she would haunt him for the rest of his life.
I think neither she nor I would last 24 hours on a dinghy with our beloveds, but we have both weathered emotional storms nonetheless. And reading about the Baileys and the extraordinary trial they endured makes me believe that we can navigate what comes, even if it is not nearly as dramatic or life-threatening as four months lost at sea.
The central lesson of the Baileys’ journey? There’s no way to be with somebody else without fate buffeting your ship.
End Notes
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I’m late to the party on “Couples Therapy,” a documentary series on Showtime that has been airing since 2019, but I finally binged several episodes of Season 4 on a long flight. The show is as advertised: A clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Orna Guralnik, sees a handful of real New York couples each season and invites the viewer into their conflicts and breakthroughs. Guralnik (who has written for Times Opinion) is so soothing and insightful. The producers do a remarkable job of choosing a diverse array of participants; there’s even a polyamorous trio this season, expanding the definition of “couples” therapy. I especially appreciate the scenes in which Guralnik discusses her patients with other therapists, because they help her talk through the dynamics she sees and help us understand the thinking behind her counsel.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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