I just finished watching the 2021 TV series remake of Scenes From A Marriage starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac. They play Mira and Jonathan, two beautiful people locked in relationship agony. They’re an upper middle class couple who in the course of the series have ups and downs in their careers. He’s a professor, she’s a product manager. They have an old house and a child and debate having another (child).
They seem to fight about everything a married couple can fight about except the one thing that all couples fight about at some point––Money. 1
That absence is a disservice. Because I think that couples fight about money regardless of how wealthy they are. Money’s like any other complex marital issue––kids, sex, career choices, mental map of the world––where two people are almost certain to have differences that can lead to friction.
Have Debbie and I ever had a fight revolving around money? Of course! We’ve been married forty years.
In fact, in early 2024 I wrote about a fight Debbie and I had a few decades ago. Although it didn’t occur to me until I re-read it this week, that fight was essentially about the display of wealth and the different ways we were brought up.
Here is the story.
A Fight Reveals A Fault Line In My Marriage
While she was dating and before she became a wife and mother, our daughter Lauren complained that our seemingly perfect marriage was an irritant and burden to her. Debbie and I had met at 22, were married a year later, and as the years went by had fallen deeper and deeper in love. Everything had come easily to us, Lauren claimed, and we had set an impossibly high romantic bar.
Perhaps Lauren had said aloud what many others have thought. As paragons of marital bliss, Debbie and I are annoying.
It’s generally true that we speak to each other with respect and kindness and admiration. We make each other laugh. We’re affectionate. When sequestered separately with our friends, we sing each other’s praises.
However.
I think most people understand that inside even the best of marriages there exist fault lines which a seemingly trivial disturbance can crack wide open. And at the core of every seismic marital collision is a contest of wills, a contest of power. (Somewhere, Nietzsche’s smiling).
In case anyone doubts this, in case anyone thinks that Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds” without “impediments” exists outside his famed sonnet,2 a candid respect for the truth compels me to offer what follows: this selected tale of our marital discord.
A night in late December 2007 at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida
In 2007, we had been married for 22 years, and for 22 years we had spent a week with our children at the Breakers Hotel at year end, prime vacation time. Our three children and I loved the Breakers for its grandeur and the tradition of our visits. I felt at home there and wanted my children to feel the same.
Debbie, however, had grown up as a rebel. She hated country clubs––“No one’s making me wear all white to play tennis.” She was a 1970s NYC cool kid, wearing her fringe jackets to Led Zeppelin concerts, being a groupie of her friend Serge’s band, going to parties every weekend at friends’ townhouses where the parents were absent. 3
So the Breakers triggered her rebel streak. She despised the haughtiness of both the setting and the guests, as well as the pretentiousness of Palm Beach.
If we’ve spent 2% of the year at the Breakers, I’d guess we’ve had half our fights there. Debbie would often make sure I knew just how much she resented her week of Breakers confinement, which in turn angered me because it eroded my enjoyment of a place I loved.
Come Breakers time, Debbie was miserable. It was to her an expensive waste of a week, and she hates waste.
On this one particular evening, she had stayed in our hotel room and skipped dinner with the rest of us––my father, my brothers, our children. Her absence was a protest, and she had successfully leached the pleasure from my evening.
So when I returned to the room after dinner I was tired and feeling surly. I was pre-heated to anger.
What I wanted when I opened the door to our hotel room was to admonish Debbie for her boycott. I had a rant ready to go. My central theme was Debbie’s selfishness:
“If you can’t enjoy your time here, why can’t you at least let me enjoy my time here?”
I entered to find Debbie in bed fiddling with the TV remote control trying to find a movie to watch. Before I could say a word, she requested I find a movie for her, using a tone of ”it’s the least you can do.”
Reflex set in. In our marital division of labor, I have the responsibility of choosing what we watch. I found a new release movie we hadn’t seen: The 3:10 From Yuma.
It was a long movie, it was a Western, it was a terrible choice.
Halfway through the movie, my unspoken rant had faded and all I wanted was to go to sleep. I asked Debbie to stop the movie. We could finish it the next day.
Debbie is a completist. Once she starts something, whether a movie, a book, a project, or a puzzle, to quit in the middle feels like a moral failure to her.
So the TV stayed on. I tried my best to fall asleep, but many factors conspired against me.
The Breakers had installed two speakers in the ceiling above the head of the bed so guests could hear the TV with great clarity.
The movie was long; it seemed like 3:10 was the movie’s length instead of a train schedule time.
Worst, the movie’s soundtrack alternated between dialogue and sudden, long bursts of extremely loud gunfire. Thanks to the ceiling speaker, the bullets seemed to be flying directly over my head.
Maybe it was the gunfire that re-ignited my fury. When you’re angry and tired, it can be easy to convince yourself that your spouse’s point of view is not just different, it’s evil.
In the moment, I forgot how much Debbie is affected by her physical surroundings and how her aesthetic is offended by the Breakers aesthetic: big, heavy furniture, overwrought chandeliers, tapestries, a clash of colors, no surface left untouched by some embellishment. The guest rooms were floral-themed a la Lily Pulitzer.
And then there were the people. Debbie hated the sight of the overdressed and over-coiffed women wearing too much jewelry, too much makeup, too much gold. And everywhere were men in plain sight committing what Debbie considered a great sartorial sin: loafers without socks.
These thoughts were far away from me as I told Debbie with the full force of my fury how awful she was to torture me with the noise of this movie. Her response was “too bad.”
In my desperation, I went to Defcon 4. A number of years earlier, I had taken (stolen, to be technical) a very powerful, handheld reading light from the Berkely Hotel in London. In a dark room the light was intensely brilliant, and I happened to have it next to me on the seashell-themed night table. 4
I switched on this flashbang device, shined its weaponized brightness toward Debbie, and made this threat:
“If you don’t turn off the TV right now, I will wake you up in the middle of the night and shine this light directly into your eyes.”
The tone I succeeded in achieving was unhinged Jack Nicolson in The Shining.
Debbie turned off the TV, got dressed, and left the room. When I woke the next morning, she was dressed and crying. She told me she’d wandered for a while along the sea wall, had considered a flight back to New York, but had returned to a sleepless night, scared and on guard against her unrecognizable husband.
When we fight, she will say I hate this David, I want my old David back. That gets to me hard, and she knows it.
I forget how Debbie and I made up. I believe our daughter Lauren, 19 at the time, performed some adept shuttle diplomacy, telling us we were both behaving like children.
The two of us on the portico at the Breakers Hotel, December 2007 after the fight.
We’ve stopped going to the Breakers (for now), but we still quarrel over TV. Both are issues of who gets to choose, who has the power.
Debbie and I have different views about the power balance in our relationship. I believe she has always possessed the upper hand.
She believes we’re equal, placing emphasis on giving me power over the remote control.
Which I’ve come to understand is a little like telling an infant they can shake their rattle whenever they please.
Question for the comments: Do you have any memorable couples fights you care to share, whether yours, that of others, or ones in movies, TV, or books?
It’s true that in Scenes, Mira is on the corporate fast track while Jonathan spends more time at home with their daughter because he has a flexible academic schedule. But other than a reference to Mira’s expensive separation apartment and whether to pay $2,500 or $5,000 for their daughter’s dance class, money in this five hour show seems to me the “dog that didn’t bark.”
Karen Swallow Prior had a great recent post on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Here are its famous opening lines:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
Just as true would be “love is not love which alters when it altercation finds.”
In the 1970s on Saturday nights, while Debbie was at her cool kids parties, I was at home alone watching the Love Boat and Fantasy Island on ABC. We moved in different circles.
I still have my infernal device.
Uh, sorry, but that was not a fight about money. That was a fight about ostentation. Real fights about money are based on scarcity, not excess. People who need to carefully watch what they spend are forced to make choices you are not, and conflict over those choices can become extreme and damaging. Our daughter's babysitter from when she was little asked me what the secret of a successful marriage--ours--was and I told her that you have to learn how to fight. Fights between spouses are inevitable but they need to be kept within limits--there are things you simply cannot say not matter how angry you get because they cannot be taken back. That is much harder to do when the fight is about making hard choices about how to spend a very limited amount of money. You and Debbie had...and have...none of those issues, which many (most) other people do. My apologies, David, but you're a little tone deaf here.
I don't want to brag, but the fights I've had with my husband are WAY worse than what you described. You and Debbie need to step up your game! 😆