When our senior softball season wrapped up this fall, an email went out to the whole league announcing that winter bowling was about to start.
Apparently, the guys like to keep a few activities on the calendar all year. Maybe it’s because they have families they care about and take seriously. And, well, sometimes even people who love their families need a little time away from them.
They can only spend so many hours in the shed or at home. At some point, they want to be with their friends. So they organize softball and bowling leagues, or join groups like the Knights of Columbus or the Elks Lodge. They need to get out of the house now and then—for their own sake, and probably for everyone else’s, too.
The last of the old guard
The men in my softball league are between 60 and 85. They’re Boomers, and they may be among the last generation to deliberately build their lives around this kind of routine.
For the generations after them, the answer to feeling restless in a marriage can seem to be divorce, “conscious uncoupling,” or co-parenting. Some people don’t marry at all.
Popular culture and society haven’t exactly encouraged Gen Xers and Millennials to treat marriage as permanent. These days, it can seem more like a temporary arrangement. People even talk about “starter marriages.”
The Boomers get plenty of criticism for being self-absorbed and not understanding the difficulties younger generations face. Still, I think they understood something important about building a family and keeping it together.
Serious business
Many Boomers took marriage seriously. They married young, when they were still figuring out who they were, and when family life was a new part of their experience.
They often chose partners with similar values and backgrounds—people from the same town, schools, or churches. When children came along, grandparents, friends, and relatives helped care for them.
And they committed fully. A wife wasn’t simply someone you were with for a few years. She was family, and a central part of your life.
Acts of love
Last summer, a man on my softball team told the coach he’d miss the following week’s game because he needed to take his wife to her cancer treatments.
Maybe a friend or one of their grown children could have driven her. But he was going to do it himself. He was her husband, and that was what he did.
I imagine they’d lived that way for decades. It wasn’t as if he had to reconsider whether he was loyal. That question had been settled long ago. She was the person closest to him, the one who had shared so much of life with him and would be there to the end.
Trendy condos
“We grew apart” is a familiar explanation for ending a relationship. But I’m not sure that idea makes sense when we’re talking about family.
People change, sometimes dramatically. But does that mean you stop being connected to your parents or siblings? Do you grow apart from your dog? How much would you have to change before your cousin stopped being your cousin?
Maybe it seems plausible that you could drift away from a third wife who decides to study Thai massage in New Mexico. But real family isn’t something you simply outgrow. You remain connected. Your wife is your wife, not your girlfriend.
Gen X and beyond
I sometimes think my generation marked the beginning of the end for this way of looking at marriage.
We were the first generation raised with no-fault divorce. We saw older men leave their wives for women decades younger, and women grow tired of picking up after their husbands and choose a new apartment, a career, and the possibility of meeting someone else—much like the lives they saw on television.
Where’s the sign-up sheet?
I’m not especially keen on bowling, but I might join the winter league. I like spending time with these Boomer men. I respect them, and I admire the way they think about commitment and duty.
I wonder how often younger men think about duty. It barely seems to be part of the vocabulary anymore.
That includes me. I’m Gen X, and I grew up hearing that marriage was a trap, a burden, something that would keep me from following my dreams. I believed it.
I’m not proud of that. But I can spend time with men who chose a more selfless path and, in the end, found something worthwhile in it.
When it’s my turn to need medical treatment later in life, I’ll probably be calling an Uber. I doubt I’ll be the only one.
