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VISIT MINNESOTA MONTHLY ON THE WEB Online Article Index		A few weeks ago I made a Pop-Tart and nearly burned the house down. I missed the warning on the back of the box that describes the kind of disaster that can occur when you leave something that's frosted unattended in a toaster. What happens is this, in rapid succession: leaping flames, blaring smoke detector alarms, and lots of running. My husband ran out the back door, flaming toaster in hand, and began smothering the fire with handfuls of sand from the sandbox. I ran after him with a pan of water. As I lifted the pan to pour the water, he looked up from the burned-out, sand-filled shell of our toaster and said, in utter seriousness, "Don't. You'll ruin it." The Pop-Tart Fiasco has quickly become one of our stories, the stories married people share with other married people over lunch or at parties. Husbands who start landscaping projects the day before the big party. Wives who mistakenly throw out priceless baseball cards. The collective boo-boos and odd comments, goof-ups, and pratfalls that collect over the years. There's no animosity in sharing them. It's just a way of checking in, of seeing if everyone else who signed up for the Lifetime Together Challenge is having the same strange time. It's said that familiarity breeds contempt, but what familiarity actually breeds is understanding. In exchange for boundless love and devotion, you make a deal: You'll put up with a reasonable amount of his quirks and buffoonery if he'll put up with yours. It seems like a small exchange, at first, when you're so mad for each other and eager to get started. Truthfully, you'll have some adjusting to do, and you've got plenty of time in which to do it. At weddings now, I think of friends who are divorcing—those who picked wrong, or turned wrong, or got wronged—and wonder how it went so far astray from all this satin and champagne. How the stories stopped being funny and started being part of an unspoken tally, a list of wrongs that added up to ammunition and, ultimately, testimony and evidence. Is that what happens if the humor between you wears thin? If my throwing the lunch in the lake no longer cancels out you dripping paint in my hair? On some isolated afternoons, being married can be a pain in the neck. Sure, you promised to love, honor, and cherish, but why is your spouse always standing in your way? You'll be there through sickness and health, but can't he stop leaving his socks everywhere? It's enough to make you wonder about how easy it would be to go it alone. And then you see an old couple out somewhere. They say about 15 words to each other during dinner. She straightens his hair when it's windblown. He holds her purse when she asks him. And you think, "I want that. I want someone who looks at me when I'm 80 and remembers what I looked like at 25. I want someone who knows I hate lima beans, which family members it's OK to joke with, and which side of the bed is mine." Looking at them, you couldn't know the mistakes they've forgiven each other for, and they wouldn't tell you. Not about the big ones, anyway. Partners know your worst secrets. Not secrets like where you dumped the body or which bank you robbed. Worse things. They know what you look like in your underwear. They know what you look like asleep, with your mouth hanging open and face all scrunched up. And they know that love means understanding when a headache makes you crabby. That honor means not sharing the worst parts of your personality and character with the general public. And that cherish means, when you're holding a flaming toaster, you'll try to remember how funny sharing a life really is. MM Nancy Garner Ebert lives in St. Paul with her daughter and her husband, who still thinks the toaster could have been saved.

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