The Unclad Soul

Writer and producer David E. Kelley’s HBO series, “Big Little Lies,” is a powerhouse revelation of modern-day marriage. Though the series is often outrageous and extreme in the happenings between people, it does provide a slice of life today experienced by many couples. Set along the gorgeous beachfront town of Monterey, California, it shows how complex relationships can be, and how wounded, damaged people wade through their pain often with incredible courage and sometimes with self-defeating denial. The cast is a brilliant group of actors, including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgard, Jeffrey Nordling, Adam Scott, Zoe Kravitz, Meryl Streep, and others. I don’t think as a society, we have ever come to grips with the reality of just how strenuous and effortful marriage almost always is. Or, as far as that goes, any serious couple relationship. But marriage poses its own unique set of challenges. Perhaps Einstein said it best, ...

The Oscar-winning  film, Roma (Best Foreign Language Film), tells the story of an upper-middle-class  Mexican family in Mexico City in the 1970s. There is chaos everywhere. In the streets. In political unrest. And in this family. The father, a businessman who is often away on trips and who eventually leaves, apparently for another woman, causes profound crises within his struggling family. The wife and mother, Sophia, tries to carry on, hiding the truth from her boisterous four children. But as times goes on she craters under the reality of her failing marriage and enveloping loneliness and she tells the children their father is not coming home. Teresa, Sophia’s mother who lives with them, is a matronly sympathetic and caring older woman, but she is helpless in corralling the rowdy children. It is Cleo, played by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, who as nanny and housemaid, successfully manages this disordered family. The character is based on a tru...

Parenting is one of the fantastic experiences of life. Of course, it comes with some of the most exasperating experiences as well. Jerry Seinfeld has said, “Having a two-year-old is like owning a blender you don’t have the top for.” So true. Not everyone can be a parent, and some people simply choose not to have children. I have friends like that and they are perfectly wonderful people and have fulfilling lives. Most of them do have pets, though! I always wanted children. Maybe it had something to do with how I was loved as a child. I’m not sure. But thankfully, I have two beautiful sons, both grown now with their own families. I adore all of them—my sons, their wives, and their children. They also have pets, too, which I also love. I suppose like many people, when my wife and I divorced, our home was deeply disrupted. My divorce affected my career, my friends, but worst of all, it caused a lot of sorrow and confusion for my sons. My oldest was 15. My youngest 13. Crit...

The Sundance Now, BBC series, The Split, brilliantly captures the emotions, heartache, messiness, and collapse of relationships both in marriage and divorce. I recently subscribed to Sundance Now and while browsing the program selections found this gem. Marriage has got to be one of the most complicated of human relationships we will ever enter. Society, Church, and Hollywood, have too often created an illusion surrounding marriage that simply does not exist in reality. Marriage is hard work. Most relationships are. But marriage requires a stubborn love, a willingness to change and grow, an unconditional acceptance of the other in all of their character flaws, irritating habits, stubbornness, sensitivity to criticism, and well, just being a human being. The idea that we can be married a lifetime is a lovely concept, but life has a way of interrupting things, and staying together to the end is not for everyone. I have often suggested to friends there ought to be ter...

I visited my brother, Jim, in Oklahoma City this week. I have mentioned here that he has myotonic dystrophy, a slow degenerative disease of the muscles. He fell a few months ago and has been recovering. He is now in a nursing center and will not be able to return to his home where he lived alone. Because the lungs are muscles too, his are weak and failing. So he is on oxygen now around the clock. He wears one of those small tubes inserted in his nostrils that wrap around his ears. You don’t notice it after a while. I hope he doesn’t either, though at times, his breathing is labored. He does notice that, as I do, and my heart wilts momentarily for him until the air returns smoothly again. We had a good visit. We of course talked politics, how does anyone avoid that after the national shame we’ve all endured? He did not vote. He was struggling with his injury and simply was not able to absentee vote. But we talked about how he would have voted and how I voted. It was a good disc...

I am reading Judith Guest’s monumental classic, “Ordinary People.”  It was written 30 years ago and was made into an Academy Award winning movie directed by Robert Redford.  It remains an extraordinary novel with life lessons still fresh and relevant today. Here is a journey into deeply wounding grief, into the dark shadows of shattering loss. The Jarrets are a suburban family of affluence and refinement.  Calvin, or Cal, the father, is a successful tax attorney.  He appears confident and polished but underneath the suits he wears is a broken man coming apart from sadness and crippling self doubts.  He longs for his family and himself to heal from a terrible event but he does not know how to guide the process.  He is stuck in bewildering passivity.  His wife Beth is a sophisticated, attractive woman, neatly put together in color coordinated outfits.  But she is coldly indifferent to her family, more than high maintenance, she is touchy an...

I am not an expert on marriage or divorce; although I have been married, and I am divorced. I am simply an observer of both now. I have officiated at hundreds of weddings over the years. And I have to tell you, even though I am not too crazy about the idea of marriage anymore, I still love weddings. I’m really kind of shallow about all of that, I guess. I like all of the ritual and symbols and happy celebration that weddings create. Obviously, the hard work begins after everyone has left the dance floor and had their last glass of champagne. The institution of marriage has been in trouble for a long time. Statistics indicate more couples are getting married these days. But nearly half of all marriages still don’t survive. I have advocated for a long time the idea of term limits on marriage. Three years sounds about right to me. Maybe five. You get married for the first term, whatever it is, and at the end of that term if you want to keep going you just sign up for a...