Hugo Schwyzer

This post originally appeared on September 12, 2006.

In yesterday’s New York Post (a paper I’ve never actually held in my hands, despite many visits to Manhattan), conservative commentator John Podhoretz wrote a personal commentary on 9/11: The antidote to horror is love.

Podhoretz tells the story of his rapid engagement to his wife, Ayala, in the aftermath of 9/11:

Within two months of 9/11 I was engaged to be married, within 13 months I was married, had a baby 19 months after that and another one due to be born in a months’ time.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for me. I had only met Ayala in June, and I was determined not to think about marriage for at least a year in any relationship. I had nearly ruined my life getting married precipitously after a 10-day romance in 1997, and I simply could not trust myself.

But I couldn’t be bothered with learning to trust myself. Getting married was an urgent, all-consuming need.

I took Ayala aback with the ferocity of my determination. At every turn I brought up what it would mean to be married. I was so determined that I proposed to her at 9 in the morning sitting in the living room of my Brooklyn Heights apartment, through whose window we had seen the black gash of the sky above Ground Zero every night since 9/11. She accepted - and then informed me we had to come up with a more romantic engagement story to tell her family and friends.

I’m telling the story now for the first time because I think it is romantic. I fell in love more deeply with Ayala and had to marry her because I had witnessed the worst and needed the best. Something deep and elemental within me needed to supersede the evil of 9/11 with the purest affirmation of existence - unconditional hope for the future and new life in the form of children whose presence on this earth would be the most crushing blow a middle-aged man like me could deliver to the cult of death that sought to tear out America’s heart.

I’m inclined to be charitable towards Podhoretz, even if his final sentence seems a bit over-wrought and self-congratulatory.  Too often, the "traditional family" crowd, in their desperation to affirm what they see as an institution under attack, paint the exceedingly common acts of marrying and reproducing as heroically counter-cultural deeds.  It certainly flatters the sensibilities of those who do choose to marry, stay married, and make wee ones.  But it reminds me of those who suggested, five years ago, that the best response to 9/11 was to go shopping.  I mean, I get the principle of the heroism of everyday life, but it still makes me wince to read about how a middle-aged man’s decision to reproduce was a "crushing blow" to Al Qaeda.  ("Honey, let’s make a baby!  That’ll show Osama!")

Anyhow, Podhoretz’s post resonated with me for another, more painful reason.  In September 2001, I was newly married to the woman who would become my third ex-wife.   This was my first "post-conversion, post-recovery" marriage.   She and I had met on the Internet (Matchmaker.com), each of us browsing for available Christian singles.  She was nearing thirty, an evangelical from an Asssemblies of God background, and a graduate student eager to get married.  (Ask any single woman in conservative Christian culture about the pressure to wed.)  I was a new convert, equally eager for marriage, kids, and domestic tranquility after my years of instability and chaos.

We decided to marry about three weeks after we first met.  Though there were some significant red flags, our mutual excitement about "getting it all over with" trumped our reservations.  We were married in May 2001, less then four months before 9/11.

There’s no question that 9/11 impacted folks in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways.  And it’s only now, in hindsight, that I realize that 9/11 played a vital role in bringing this brief and poorly planned union to an end.  Podhoretz is right: the events of that day five years ago made many of us think about our lives in new ways. It brought a sense of immediacy and fragility to countless Americans.   And it sent what ended up becoming a clear signal to she who was my third wife.  Thinking about her own life, my ex began to come to one, unmistakable conclusion: Hugo Schwyzer was not the man she wanted to spend the rest of her days being married to.

I won’t blog the details of that third marriage.  It was a kind marriage, characterized by civility and thoughtfulness on my part and on hers.  It was also a marriage nearly devoid of excitement, passion, and chemistry.  While chemistry fluctuates, it’s not as if my third wife and I ever lost it — we’d never had it to begin with.  In my post-conversion state, I was still relatively suspicious of intense sexual desire (having been misled by it so often in my younger days).  Thus it seemed to make sense to marry a woman who seemed attractive, but with whom I experienced no "heat."  At least initially, she felt the same way.

I know quite a few couples who had a lot of especially passionate lovemaking in the aftermath of 9/11.  I know many, who like John and Ayala Podhoretz, decided to get married and have kids soon after the terrorist attacks.  Podhoretz is right, I think, that on an instinctive level, one response to overwhelming images of death is the desire to commit, to marry, to reproduce, to make new life.  (That’s one explanation for the post-war baby boom.)  But another result of 9/11 was that it made some folks think long and hard about the marriages they were already in — and in our case, it made my ex-wife think long and hard about whether or not she wanted to spend the rest of her life married to man whom she "liked a lot", with whom things were "comfortable", but for whom she felt none of the intensity she realized she wanted and deserved.

It’ s only recently that I’ve begun to come to the conclusion that 9/11 may have hastened the end of my very brief third marriage.  My ex never explicitly connected the two, but in hindsight it seems clearer and clearer that the shattering events of that unforgettable day marked a beginning of the end for both of us. If life is short, and can be taken from us at any moment, then we have no business marking time in a kind, friendly, but ultimately lukewarm relationship that leaves both parties unchallenged and unfulfilled. 

As if often the case in marriages, it was the woman who was the first to grasp this essential emotional truth.  Having been divorced twice before, and newly "come to Christ", I abhorred divorce.  Had I had my way, that marriage would have lasted.  Not because it brought out the best in either of us, but because I wanted to prove to myself that I could make something last no matter what, no matter what, no matter what.  After years of irresponsibility, I had swung to the opposite extreme and turned "white-knuckle, grit-your-teeth and hang on no matter what" tenacity into an idol.  My ex-wife, bless her heart, had enough sense and self-respect to realize that we each deserved better than what we were capable of giving each other.  Though she initiated the divorce over my objections, I came to see the wisdom of our separation.  She freed me to find a relationship that would be infinitely more fulfilling and exciting, and for that I will always be grateful.

I am sure my third wife and I would have ended up divorcing, 9/11 or no 9/11.  But reading Podhoretz last night, it really hit home to me how significant a role the events of that extraordinary day played in hastening the end of an unwise union. 9/11 brought clarity; it brought a hunger for life and for joy and for fulfillment.  And for my last ex-wife and me, it accelerated the process of recognizing that we would both be happier and more capable of growth outside of our marriage.