Verified by 
“ I never feel more married than I do on a Sunday, and I never like it less,” says my friend Mark. A high-school teacher in his early forties, Mark has been what I would call “happily married” for a little over ten years.
But on Sundays, he says, he is often overwhelmed by a sense of life’s having passed him by. He is antsy, unsettled, and uneasy.
He reports becoming wistful, sentimental, and prone to bouts of regrets. “I love my wife,” he explains, “But sometimes I wonder whether there’s another woman out there whom I would have loved even more. Living my kind of ordinary life, I guess I’d never meet this Mythical Woman-- I picture her living in Bangkok or Rio--but maybe she would have been so fabulous that she would have made me into somebody extraordinary.”
“Maybe Sundays are still the days of reckoning, whether you’re a churchgoer or not," he continues. "Maybe it’s the time when you reflect on your life and are bound to think it comes up short, and one easy target for blame is your marriage.” In the habit of many men, Mark believes himself to be representative in his response to the world, and was the first to suggest to me that I should “Ask most men who have been married more than five years. Husbands hate Sundays.”
What kind of day is Sunday? Some people think, “Ah, perfect, the day is stretched out in front of me like a cat in the sun, relaxed and calm,” while others think some version of “Escape, how can I escape? How can I make the day go faster?” How we feel about Sundays is a pretty good barometer of how we feel about our personal lives in general. If you love Sundays, terrific, you feel comfortable in your own home and inside your own head.
Sundays are a time when many married men long for the their bachelor days. Single men can do what they please without anyone looking askance. They can get up and properly nurse a hangover so that they are ready to each nachos out of the bag while watching the football game. Or they can get up at six, run ten miles, meet friends for brunch, and work on their novel all afternoon without being disturbed. Both these scenarios depend heavily on one thing: not being disturbed. As one pal put it “I have tremendous memories of generally reckless, ill-advised, unproductive but vastly entertaining adventures from my pre-marriage days.”
The early days of a relationship are also roped off from the usual Sunday pattern. “When we were lovers,” explained one thirty-year doctor, “Sundays meant spending the day in bed. That even lasted into the first couple of years of marriage."
“I can’t remember when it happened, but at some point it seemed like spending the day in bed--drinking coffee, reading the paper, and making love all afternoon-- was a waste of time. Now,” he said, “It seems like we talk about our relationship instead of enjoying our relationship.” Another thirty-something friend agrees, adding that “It’s no surprise to me that ‘Sixty Minutes’ remains a popular program on television. You want a diversion by the end of the evening, something else to focus on besides your relationship. Even stories of fraud, dishonesty and corruption are preferable to always having to talk about ‘us’.”
For many husbands, marriage offers merely a mirage of intimacy, an intimacy which, like a mirage, gradually disappeared just when they thought they were saved. They retreat behind the newspapers, silently questioning how they ended up where they are, sitting like their fathers once sat, feeling not quite as if they are in their own homes.
to be continued...
adapted from Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales
