When we left, it felt as if we were floating, we were so calm. And on occasion we tried to play tennis together.ĭespite all of this, the marriage continued to flounder, and the time came when we met in our marriage counselor’s office and I said, “I think it’s over.”

We had regular family nights and took family vacations. These great children were the reason we were in counseling, the reason we were trying to keep the family egg whole. This movie moved us to tears because whatever battles raged between us, however ugly the other often appeared to be, we had these two very delicate fledglings that needed to be protected and carried along carefully, so carefully, because is anything more fragile than a preteenage girl or a growing, unsure boy? One of the movies we saw was “March of the Penguins.” Our apathy was such that our date night was our marriage-counseling night. We didn’t bicker often, but when we fought, we raged.Įventually we began to see a marriage counselor, who, among other things, suggested that we have a regular date night. When the children came along, we got caught up in the tallying of efforts, the scorekeeping of who was doing more for the marriage and family and who was being self-serving, unloving and disapproving. Two Leos who love children and animals, and are intensely emotional and highly sensitive and competitive with everybody, but especially with each other. Our basic problem was, and is, that we are almost identical - in looks, attitudes and psychological makeup. We were too young and inexperienced to know that people don’t change who they are, only how they play and work with others. Though we had found tennis late, we had found each other quite early in our adult lives, and now we were going through a rough patch, one that had lasted for years. I’m ashamed to admit that one year we spent several days of a family vacation not speaking to each other after a game of “Denis Tennis” that I had lost “unfairly” (I repeatedly hissed at our children), until finally our son and daughter had to intervene and coerce a truce between us. This caused some heated courtside squabbles. Their game involved no serving and a complicated but curiously malleable set of rules that often appeared, to me, to change midgame and almost always to Denis’s advantage. Instead of learning the rules, he wanted to play a variation of tennis he had invented with another actor while on location in a tropical country. As Denis repeatedly explained to us, playing by the rules placed him at an unfair disadvantage because he didn’t know the rules, and he didn’t know how to serve.

When I took up tennis, my husband was happy to play with our two children and me, as long as we didn’t have to play by the rules.

Rules of the game essay