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The over and under on a relationship’s longevity
“You married way too young, kid.” said one coworker to me.
“How long you give it?” asked another of the first fellow.
“Ten years, tops.”
This was a breakroom conversation/teasing session at Sonoco Paper Products Company where I had worked my way to a supervisory role at the untender age of 19. The event occurred shortly after June 7, 1980, when the girl and I married.
I say untender about my age because by 19, I had done more work and carried more responsibility than half of the 30-year-olds I know today, and I had preached more sermons than half of the 30-year-old preachers. I was a seasoned 19-year-old.
I was also a 19-year-old. And married. So how grizzled could I have been? how prepared was I for the coming storms?
Because, listen, storms were a-coming, some I conjured up. They were my fierce little tempests boiled in my teapot. Other storms, much larger in scope and more devastating, which I had nothing to do with and no way to prepare for, also brewed on distant shores.
Hilariously, the way to beat the over/under set by a forgotten friend and half-remembered face from a lifetime ago, that Sonoco Paper Products coworker, was by using over and under.
Overtures
Musically, an overture is the instrumental introduction to a dramatic piece.
If you are old enough to remember the old Lone Ranger TV series, then you have repeatedly heard one of the greatest overtures of them all, The William Tell Overture by Rossini. Here is an old clip of the incomparable Glen Campbell playing it on acoustic guitar, backed by an orchestra. (No extra charge.)
“Wait, Gene! What on God’s good earth does Glenn Campbell and the Lone Ranger have to do with the survival of your marriage, of your beating the odds?”
“Plenty,” I says. “Things get broken in relationships and someone has to make an overture to get them healed.”
Euphemistically, “overture” is used to mean “reaching out” or “offering a plan.” Webster’s says it is “an initiative towards an agreement.”
Someone has to say it.
“I am sorry.”
“I was wrong.”
“Let’s go get an ice cream.”
“Please forgive me.”
“I love you more than my feelings were hurt. Let’s reboot.”
Undertones
An overture is impossible to miss. It is in your face, right up front. Boom! Here I come. An undertone in music is the opposite. It is the lower sound, the “Subdued or accompanying sound or utterance,” as Webster puts it. You hear it but it is hard to put your finger on. It may be difficult to describe but you know it when you hear it, or feel it.
It is in the tone of the voice. It is in the flicker of the eyes. It is in the way the words are said as much as the words themselves.
Undertones can support and sustain a relationship or just as easily undermine and destroy it.
Your kid tells his brother or sister, “Stop touching me!!!”
Then you get on to the kid for being so sensitive.
“He’s not hurting you,” you say.
But he is. It is not what he is doing; it is the sneaky little, snide, mocking way he does it.
How you joke about your lover in the company of others, the way you make little, almost invisible verbal paper cuts…these cause a relationship to bleed and may cause it to bleed out.
Or, the way you praise them, and the way you jump to their defense will sustain and strengthen a relationship. I have seen the hurt in my wife’s eye when I have offended her with subtle undertones and I have felt the joy swell in her when I have built her up instead.
Those fellows underestimated us. They thought we were too green (we were). They doubted our stamina and our stride. They didn’t know they were betting against Seabiscuit. We ran them into the ground and we aren’t done yet.
The right overtures and undertones will always beat the odds and the oddsmakers.
Happy Valentine’s Day to you! May you destroy the odds and shut the mouths of fools with your enduring love.
