I HATE MY HUSBAND: (Scenes from an enduring marriage)

I hate my husband. I hate my husband so much that sometimes murder comes to mind. I hate him so much that, struggling to repress those murderous thoughts, I stew. Oh, how I stew.

Or I dream of fleeing—anywhere. Please, please. I want out. Out of this marriage. Out of this relationship. Out of this life with him, this man that I barely recognize 52 years after I fell for him at the (now-I-know-too-well-how-tender) age of 21.

Who is he, this man sitting across the table from me? He doesn't even look like the man I gave my heart to five decades ago. That man has vanished. In his place is a thin, bald man with white whiskers who insists, in a most irritating way, that it is I who has changed, I who can and do annoy the hell out of him.
"Why don't you just listen?" he will demand distressed beyond belief. "Listen for once."
"Why don't you?" I will shout back. I don't know what we are arguing about, but we can't stop.

We never know what will spur an argument. Perhaps something I said about politics. "Didn't you read the Times today?" he'll bark.

Perhaps the tight, bright blue pair of jeans he brought home, from The Gap yet. "I thought you graduated high school," I snarl.

Or perhaps the towel he left on the bathroom floor. The sponge I left at the bottom of the sink. The light I forgot to turn off.

"You leave lights on more than I," I charge. "That's ridiculous," he responds. "Believe me, I am so conscientious about not wasting electricity." "I don't believe you. Why should I? You left the light on in your office twice this week."
He is wrong—it's obvious—and he needs to know that. Why is he so darn obstinate?

I will remind him, and thus remind myself, and feel the anger rising even more in me, that I am still annoyed that he told the electrician, when we renovated our apartment 18 years ago, not to install a light in my closet that would have gone on and off automatically with the opening and closing of the door.

"She'll never close the door," he explained. "The light will always be on.”
How could he? God, he infuriates me. And I apparently infuriate him. Sometimes this reveals itself while we are out with our friends. "It will not surprise you," he announces to a group of them, "that she and I disagree on this point."

Our friends smile knowingly. They have not been spared our bickering.

One friend confided that when her new husband met us for the first time, he was flabbergasted.

  "Those two," he said, “thrive on conflict." She said he believed “it is a sign of serious trouble.”

  And, boy, do I often wish for a less wearing relationship. 

Yet here we are: he and I. Many of our friends have split up; some of them had what certainly looked like picture-perfect marriages. "Look how Andrew holds Hazel's hand (not their real names)," I would point out to my decidedly imperfect husband, after a night out with Andrew and Hazel, longtime friends of ours, college sweethearts who, almost reflexively, would come to each other's defense. Hazel, so protective of her husband, took me aside once to berate me for asking him a question that she feared he may have found to be criticism disguised.

"Don't romanticize what you don't know," my husband tells me, when I note for the umpteenth time how nice Andrew is to Hazel, and Hazel is to Andrew. I don't know what he is talking about.

A few years later, Andrew and Hazel are divorced. We watch from a close distance as each tries to find new love. We feel sad for them both.

We are hosting a dinner party for 10. Everyone around the table seems to be having fun. We have so much in common: We are the same age; we are parents; we are liberal New Yorkers; we are professionals.

But, it dawns on me as we all drink and laugh that, in one surprising way, he and I are different from our dinner guests; he and I are the only ones around our dining room table who are not in a second marriage or a long-term second relationship. We are still in our first marriage.
Oh, there have been times when we sought professional help in improving the marriage's climate and times when we wanted to call it quits.

"Stay there," I told him, when he landed a six-month assignment in a city four hours away. He had it all planned. He would come back weekends or I would join him on weekends. It would be fun, romantic, he said.

How dare he? I thought. “Instead, let's take a break,” I said. "You really want to do this?" he asked. “Yes,” I answered, but I wasn't sure at all. We worked out that he would come back home the first weekend after one week of no contact.
He came back and told me he did a lot of crying. I told him that I could barely breathe with him away. I can still recall how painful those seven days of separation were. I felt like a brokenhearted schoolgirl; my chest ached. Ached.
Sometimes I look at him when he is looking elsewhere, and I feel whole, completely at peace, safe. He is my husband, the man I've shared my life with, the man who has given me more pleasure, more joy, more laughs than anyone. But I don't tell him that. That isn't our style. We banter. We tease. We josh. We act silly. We crack up. 
We have been that way from the moment we met, on a blind date, just before he set off to Europe with a "friend." yet we both knew we'd see each other again. Call it chemistry. Call it magic. Call it love.

But we can't call it that out loud, not us, two debate-loving, schmaltz-hating skeptics. We have no trouble, of course, saying or showing our love to our three terrific children and two amazing grandchildren. Yet, we can't say it to each other. Not really.

"Love ya," he may say at the end of a phone call. "Love ya," I say in response. But it is by rote. It is mechanical. Nearly meaningless. Unless, of course, one of us fails to say it.
The phone rings a few seconds after I hang up. It is he, again. He skips hello. "You didn't say 'Love ya' back." He is calling from far away, and he is feeling insecure. He is worried that I am angry. I am. I am angry that he is gone.

We know each other well. That is not surprising. What is, perhaps, is how much we think alike—and unlike so many others, including close friends. One admitted to asking his wife on the drive to our house, "What outrageous position are they going to hit us with tonight."

I love that we are different. 

We challenge our friends and, more importantly, we challenge each other, incessantly. We both had dated others we found too easy, pushovers.

In some ways after many decades we still find each other "hard to get."
So, no, we're not lovey-dovey. He gets me flowers, sometimes. I buy him a sweater, sometimes. A few years ago, he even got me the diamond ring that I said I didn't want when we got engaged just because of the way he asked me.

  “My mother says I should get you a diamond ring," he said. "You want one?"

  Dismayed and hurt, I said no. "That's what I thought," he said, clearly relieved.

  He is a tightwad. It is one characteristic of his that has not changed over the years. I am a spendthrift, of course.

We are out to dinner at an inexpensive restaurant, celebrating Valentine's Day. To avoid arguments, we have agreed that he will always choose the restaurant for that night. This way he won't be upset by the cost and I won't be upset that we are not going out. Sometime during the first course, he pulls out of his jacket pocket a small jewelry box and slides it across the table. "Oh my God," I shriek, like a schoolgirl. "You got me a diamond ring?"

It is called "the love ring," he says, proudly. He also tells me that it is quite expensive. He knows that I know that that speaks volumes. 

One morning he bolts out of the bathroom holding a tube of toothpaste with the cover not securely fastened. He wants to show me that once again I have been remiss. "Please," he says, "put the cap back on tight. There's toothpaste all over the sink."

"Oh my God," I whisper under my breath. But, even though he now wears hearing aids, he manages to hear me. "Well just don't do it. Close it tight."

I could get angry. I could point out the dirty glass he left on the kitchen table. The list of his slights, his offenses, is so, so long. And, no doubt, his list of mine. But I don't. I begin to laugh.

He laughs, too. Just look at us. Arguing over a toothpaste cap. Clearly, there's more to our marriage than anyone, including he and I, would think by listening to us. It is complicated. It is imperfect. And it is endlessly challenging. 

Esther Davidowitz, a writer living in Manhattan, is a former food writer and critic for The Record newspaper in New Jersey and the former editor of Westchester Magazine.