Hell in the Hamptons

by Gwen Cooper — June 25, 2007

Once you've more or less officially become part of a couple, eventually you start looking for couple friends. Spending time as a couple with your single friends is usually innocuous enough (assuming your friends have no problems with your significant other and vice versa). But spending time with other couples who've been together longer than you have can provide a series of windows looking into various possible futures of your own.

Robert and I spend most of our designated couple-friends time with Lisa and Adam, one of the happiest couples either of us has ever seen. But this weekend we were in the Hamptons with Doug and Alyssa, a couple Robert has known for years--having gone to high school with Doug.

On the surface, Doug and Alyssa look like the pair we all aspire to be: attractive, successful, and in possession of a beautiful weekend home in the Hamptons. But it was also clear after spending about five minutes in their presence that they genuinely don't like each other, and probably haven't for quite some time. Before we'd gotten two blocks away from their apartment (they were generous enough to offer us a ride out), they were fighting over directions, managing to cram all the tension into five minutes that my own family required at least four or five hours to achieve on the road trips we took when I was a child. The rest of the weekend was equally uncomfortable; when they weren't arguing outright, they seemed to be on the brink of an argument. The slightest thing seemed capable of producing a fight, and it got to the point that I was afraid to say or do anything for fear of provoking even more tension between them. We grilled hot dogs for dinner on Saturday night and I, being one of those freakish people who prefers ketchup to mustard on a hot dog, asked if they had any. This provoked a quietly vicious match between the two of them over whose responsibility condiment procurement had been.

One has to wonder why couples like this stay together. If they had children, I could see room for a "we're together for the sake of the children" rationale. Or if this dissension between them was a new phenomenon, I could see where maybe they hadn't yet gotten to the point where it was time to admit that maybe they needed to reconsider things. And if it sounds like I'm making a pretty rash assessment based on having spent only two days with them, I asked Robert at one point, "Are they always like this?"

Robert looked rather resigned--the resignation of knowing that one of your oldest and dearest friends isn't as happy as you'd like him to be. "They always have been--the entire ten years they've been together."

It was a sobering thought. "Why do they stay together?" I asked him, and he shrugged.

Everybody knows a couple like this--the kind that continually has you asking, "Why are they together?" Maybe it hasn't occurred to either of them that they could be happier with somebody else. Maybe they each have an idea in their mind of the kind of person they're supposed to "end up" with--in this case, maybe Doug always saw himself with a trim blonde and Alyssa always saw herself with a successful Wall Street type. Maybe they're afraid of trying things with somebody new after so much time together. Who's to say?

The question I really wanted to ask Robert was: Do you think you and I will ever end up like them? But even asking the question seemed like a bad omen. It was easier just to put mustard on my hot dog and count the hours till we were headed back to Manhattan.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.