SUSAN AGER: A year after their wedding, gay couple works hard to stay together

On some days last summer, their marriage felt like a boulder ready to tumble down the mountainside unless they pressed every aching muscle against it, while their feet slipped and slid on the slope. One evening, watching TV on their bed, Joe came out and said it: "Do you think we should even stay together?"

But to split would be humiliating.

On Oct. 29, 2000, at Shir Tikvah in Troy, 100 friends and family members celebrated with them what they promised would be a lifelong commitment. What they did that day looked every bit like a traditional Jewish wedding.

Their sisters walked them down the aisle; Mike's had come all the way from California. They stood with their best men beneath a chuppah, or canopy. They each broke a wine glass with their heel. They kissed and, later, danced together.

Months earlier, they'd argued with the Jewish News in Southfield, which refused to print their engagement announcement because Joe and Mike wouldn't call what they planned a "commitment ceremony."

They called it a wedding because, as Joe said, "it was identical to what my sister had when she married her husband."

I wrote about their impasse with the Jewish News. Then I checked in a year later to see what difference, if any, marriage had made. After all, they had shared a home on metro Detroit's east side for six years before they committed themselves to each other forever. Joe is a psychotherapist and adjunct professor at Wayne State University, an open, gregarious fellow whose feelings are close to the surface. Mike is a computer consultant, quiet and reflective and private. He asked, for example, that I not publish the city where they live. But both agreed to talk, because their troubles had surprised them. And, if not for their best friends, a longtime gay couple, their marriage might not have survived.

"There are so few role models for long-term gay relationships," Joe says.

Experts agree.

Many pressures at work

Psychotherapist Rik Isensee is the author of "Love Between Men: Enhancing Intimacy and Keeping Your Relationship Alive" (Alyson Publications, $12.95.) He says many internal and external pressures work against longevity between men. Society considers gay commitment illegitimate, although that is slowly changing as major corporations grant domestic partner benefits. Parents may consider a son's relationship a passing phase that he'll grow out of.

And, Isensee says, "We don't have the markers heterosexuals have: Dating, engagement, marriage, children. We're all kind of at loose ends to describe what it is we're wanting from each other.

"So we ask ourselves, 'Why am I in this? How can I tell if it's working? And what can I even expect?' "

Plus, men are socialized not to take the emotional temperature of their relationship regularly, as women are, "but to each do their thing, bumping along and hoping things work."

When problems arise, men tend to blame the other, and aim for victory instead of compromise or consensus.

Isensee, who lives in San Francisco, says in his 24 years of practice he has counseled dozens of gay men in troubled relationships longer than 10 years.

But among his friends, he knows of fewer than half a dozen that have survived a decade.

Many supporters

Joe, who is 37, and Mike, who is 45, thought they knew each other well enough when they decided to marry.

Joe moved into Mike's home in 1993 with trepidation. He hated the decor, which seemed formal and stiff to him. "On our first date, I was afraid to put my glass down on a coaster even. I was afraid to use the bathroom, it was so perfect. I wondered where I would relax. And I didn't see anything that appealed to me" -- except Mike.

They agreed, though, to redecorate the basement to Joe's contemporary tastes.

In contrast to wingback chairs and chintz wallpaper upstairs, Joe's space is chrome and glass and beige. His office is decorated with his doll collection: Diana Ross, Cher, Captain and Tennille, Boy George, Farrah Fawcett. Mike's spaces are adorned with crystal paperweights and candlesticks.

They planned the wedding together, and in the days that followed felt more loved than ever before.

"We were surprised," Mike says, "by so many people on both sides of the family who came to support us."

Joe interrupts, laughing. "Except not many people were tinkling their glasses with their forks for us to kiss."

Mike smiles and shrugs. "Those noises really bother me."

Joe plays their 140-minute wedding videotape at least once a week, to see his whole family together, to see his beloved nephew, Jacob, 3 years old then, dancing to the music.

"He stole the show," Joe says. "I could watch him dance at my wedding forever."

Leaving not an option

Their problems didn't begin until months after the big day, after all the gifts were incorporated into their home, after all the thank-you notes were written, when both started putting on a few pounds -- and weighing down their relationship, too.

In retrospect, here's what they say:

Mike: "Before, there was always an option to leave. Once we didn't have that, once we had a commitment, we were working in a more confined space."

Joe: "Yeah, we sort of went, 'I'm not living with that anymore. Things we'd lived with suddenly seemed intolerable. We said to each other, 'You've gotta change that bad habit.' "

For example, Joe stopped initiating emotional intimacy, a role he'd accepted for many years. Now, he figured, they had to share.

Joe: "I stopped -- but Mike didn't start. The distance grew."

Mike: "I felt it, too, but didn't know what to do about it."

Joe grew angrier as Mike seemed unwilling to make the right moves.

"I need more from you" became Joe's refrain.

Joe: "He wanted me around more, and I wanted more sweet things, a card, or a nice e-mail, or maybe he could even just take me to Mac's Diner and treat me to breakfast. Or a flower on my pillow."

Mike: "A flower on your pillow?"

Joe: "Sure."

Mike had a hard time with that. "Joe functions more emotionally and I function more intellectually. It takes me longer to process my thoughts. I don't have immediate reactions like he does."

Many times, the two ended up in hopeless deadlock as Joe's voice rose and his words raced, while Mike locked down.

Mike: "I didn't feel heard. He was more interested in his needs coming first -- and only after that would he consider mine."

Mike, for example, wanted Joe home more. Evening counseling sessions sometimes kept him out until 11 p.m.

But Joe was afraid to be home, afraid he'd feel engulfed, silenced, as he did as a kid. And sometimes when he got in early, "I'd find Mike at the TV, channel cruising. I'd say, 'If I'm going to be home, at least be with me.'

"I'd say, 'I need you to touch me more and you're not touching me.' And Mike would say, 'You're not touching me, either.'

"It was 'You first,' and neither of us wanted to."

After months of that Joe said, "Maybe we should split up." And both got scared.

Joe: "I thought, 'Oh my God, we've got these rings, we own this house together.' "

Mike: "In me, there was always a consideration of what I think is the point of marriage: Once you get all that support, it makes it difficult to break up, with all those people on your side."

Finally, Joe turned to their best friends, the couple who stood as their best men beneath the chuppah on their wedding day.

Encouraging words

Jeff Green and Brad Graber had been together 12 years. Joe and Mike admired their respect for each other, and the way they negotiated a big change, a move to San Francisco a few months ago.

Via e-mail and phone calls, their analysis of Joe and Mike's troubles was simple: You're normal. You're adjusting. You're learning to really communicate, even though you thought you knew how to before. Hang in there. You can work it out.

Brad summarizes now the simple words of wisdom he offered: "Relationships ebb and flow. The trick is to listen and try to understand your partner's point of view and why they feel as they do. And to recognize that behavior is based on many things, including our upbringing, and all the friends and family we interacted with before we met each other. Listening is key to understanding this."

These conversations energized Mike and Joe.

"We decided," Mike remembers, "that we weren't going to abandon each other, that we could consider all this a conflict -- and not an end."

And Joe realized, sheepishly, he and his partner were stuck in the same classic metaphor he has used for years with other couples.

"We're the turtle and the hailstorm in love," says Joe. "But the more I hail, the more he turtles, to protect himself. And the more he turtles and withdraws, the more I hail to force him out.

"We learned, I think, that not every smell of rain requires him to turtle. And not every retreat requires me to hail."

Joe began lowering his voice when he aired a request. He cut his hours back so he could arrive home by 9 p.m. instead of 11.

Mike, who used to go to bed early, stayed up later to spend time with Joe. One night, when Joe came up cranky and stressed, Mike led him to bed, tucked him in and brought him aspirin -- a little thing that moved Joe deeply.

They negotiated the purchase of a new dining room table that neither might have chosen if they hadn't been together. It's glass, on a pedestal of Corinthian columns. Mike would have preferred mahogany, and worried that a glass table couldn't be kept clean to his standards, that Joe would leave crumbs and stains on it. Joe worried he couldn't live up to Mike's standards.

So they agreed on blue placemats.

Joe is learning to zip up his rambunctious emotions, and Mike is learning to let loose his timid ones.

He sends Joe more e-mails and cards. And last Sunday, it was Mike who suggested they prepared a special dinner, open the last bottle of champagne left from their wedding and drink it from the Baccarat crystal wine glasses from which they sipped during the ceremony.

They dimmed the lights. And for dessert, they cut into the cake they froze after their wedding. It was delicious.

Not everything is perfect. A good marriage is a journey, not a destination. But in their first year, they gained confidence that distance can be closed. They realized that love can survive high winds and short droughts. And they made the first handful of what will become, if they're lucky, one thousand small compromises to will their love alive.

Contact SUSAN AGER at 313-222-6862 or ager@freepress.com