The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack Narrated by Cindy Chupack, Ian Wallach

Overview

After having endured enough emotional wreckage in her search for true love to fill a book (the New York Times bestseller The Between Boyfriends Book), two magazine columns, and five seasons of scripts for Sex and the City, Cindy Chupack finally, mercifully, at the age of thirty-nine, met the Perfect Man.

He did not seem to Cindy like the Perfect Man. Ian, with his bad-boy ways, struck her as someone whom she absolutely did not want as a husband, but he soon proved his worth with wit, warmth, a series of spectacularly cooked meals, and a marriage proposal made on a beautiful beach, the prospective groom perched heroically on a white stallion.

Unable to resist the romance, Cindy married him and settled in contentedly for the long and gratifying happily ever after...or so she thought. Being a wife, Cindy discovers soon enough, is not so different from being a girlfriend, only now you have a permanent houseguest. Ian's endearing quirks became impossible-to-ignore and slightly irksome habits; what was once charming adventurousness now seems like recklessness (just why was he rappelling down the side of a building on a garden hose?); and his impossibly big heart has space enough for an impossibly big dog, a St. Bernard that looks, as Cindy realizes once it has taken possession of her home, “like a person in a dog suit.” And then there's all his stuff.

The Longest Date is the wonderfully funny, and ultimately, deeply moving story of a marriage, of the daily negotiations and accommodations about matters like cooking, holidays, space, money, and sex that every (newly or otherwise) wedded couple faces in the course of figuring out exactly who they are together and where they are headed. Cindy and Ian's own ongoing courtship takes a surprising turn when they decide to have a baby-a plan that turns out to be far more complicated than they ever could have anticipated and that tests and strengthens their love for each other.

The perfect companion for anyone navigating a marriage (or even just contemplating one), The Longest Date marks the welcome return of one of our most gifted and captivating comic writers.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

10/14/2013
Chupack (The Between Boyfriends Book) chronicles the ups and downs of marriage in this amusing collection of short, real-life stories. The comedy writer leaves no stone unturned, from how she met her eventual husband to his marriage proposal (on horseback), to their furniture arrangements and fertility issues. Some of the pieces are enlightening and funny—including vignettes of the two creating holiday traditions together and learning to cook—while others are vaguely crude, like the one about visiting a sex show in Thailand. All of them showcase what happens after “happily ever after,” revealing that marriage requires a lot of work. The collection is a nice read for a general audience—and especially for those who enjoyed Chupack’s work on TV shows such as Sex in the City, Everyone Loves Raymond, and Coach, and magazines such as Glamour and O, the Oprah Magazine. The pieces that touch on fertility issues deserve their own category: Chupack and her husband, who contributes one of his own essays to the collection, detail this often painful subject with both sorrow and hope—hope that is later rewarded as they become parents. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"Laugh-out-funny and surprisingly poignant."
~Booklist
 
"A straight-talking, funny and poignant memoir."
~Kirkus Reviews
 
“The characters on ‘Sex and the City’ (for which Cindy Chupack wrote) could never wait to get together and share the most scintillating details of their romantic triumphs and tribulations. Opening Cindy's book is like getting invited to lunch with those women—the details are keenly observed, laugh-out-loud funny and you never want the meal to end.”
~Cynthia Nixon
 
“If you need a new best friend—look no further! Cindy Chupack’s wonderful book will make you laugh, cry, and feel less alone.”
~Winnie Holzman
 
“Cindy's essays are dizzyingly good.  They're funny, they're meticulously crafted, and you hardly notice she's doing a comedic equivalent of a ballerina's masterful pirouette. I laughed, I commiserated, I wanted more and more.  Marriage is laid bare, negotiations, passion, uncertain leveraging, children, dogs and even boob-jobs are all covered with affection and brutal honesty.”
~Julia Sweeney

DECEMBER 2014 - AudioFile

Sex and the City” writer and producer Cindy Chupack delivers her memoir quickly with a matter-of-fact tone that makes the performance sound slightly mechanical. Her background as a creative force with the iconic singles-oriented TV series makes her writing jump with incisive observations and snappy language—her perspective is that of someone firmly entrenched in the short-term dating scene who awakens to the aggravations and joys of a committed relationship (and eventually parenthood). Her performance doesn’t keep her humor and urban sensibilities from coming through, but the book would have been better served if delivered by someone whose speech is more natural and entertaining. Her husband, an attorney, reads his part of the book with a low-key authenticity that is perfect for his segments—and his place in the author's life. T.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2013-12-04
An award-winning TV writer and magazine sex columnist gives the scoop on the "honest, horrible, hysterical truth about the early years of marriage." Nearing 40, Chupack had racked up "enough relationship wreckage to fill a book" and one failed marriage to a gay man. Then she met Ian, the player who unexpectedly became a prince--and her second husband. Despite years of relationship experience, however, the author came to this second marriage with no real insight into the endless compromises "forever" entailed and immediately began discovering truths about love she hadn't counted on. Colds made her otherwise handsome husband seem weak and unattractive, while negative feelings she had about her body made Ian upset, especially when they kept them "from having fun." Sharing space with another person--especially someone like Ian, who "left evidence of life all around the house"--could be difficult for a "neat freak" like her. Although she adored her husband, she could not love his belongings, which inevitably displaced the ordered, elegant world she had created for herself. The one exception was Ian's dog, whose drooling and hair shedding became two more lessons in acceptance. Chupack also chronicles the heartbreaking struggles with infertility that left her and her husband teetering on the edge of despair. Only after the two of them decided to adopt did things change. Suddenly, they were caretakers of a life beyond themselves, and the formerly self-centered author was now a "citizen of the world," actively seeking, and celebrating, connection with others. Marriage and motherhood, Chupack concludes, are not the happy endings everyone dreams they will be. Rather, they are beginnings that, for all the pain and loss they may entail, offer the chance to "see higher highs than you ever imagined." A straight-talking, funny and poignant memoir.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173809322
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	01/02/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introduction


I’ve always been a romantic. When I was single, I slept only with men I believed I could marry.

That would be admirable except for one detail: I slept with a lot of men.

A lot a lot.

I’m not going to tell you the exact number because my parents might read this book, and they certainly don’t need to know the tally.

And also, I don’t know it. Don’t judge me.

I was single for a long time. Alcohol was often involved.

I didn’t keep a guest book by my bed, so, yes, some names were lost along the way.

The point is not my incomplete sexual history, okay? It’s the more troublesome issue that every time there was a man inside of me, there was also a voice inside of me saying This might be the man I marry!


Clearly, I knew nothing about the reality of marriage. Or hormones.

I’m not sure which was more dangerous—my casual atti- tude toward sex or my delusions of love—but one led to the other in a decade-long binge of salty and sweet, horny and hopeful.

Finally, after enough relationship wreckage to fill a book (The Between Boyfriends Book), two magazine columns, and five seasons of Sex and the City, at the age of thirty-eight I found a guy I absolutely did not want to marry, and, of course, he’s the guy I wound up marrying.

I’m not saying I settled. I’m saying I met a wildly attrac- tive, interesting, smart, funny guy who had so many red flags—many of which he voluntarily and repeatedly waved in my face—that I told my coworkers at Sex and the City, “Do not let me fall for this one,” and that’s when, they say, they knew that I would do precisely that.

We’d all seen the romantic comedies; we drank the Kool- Aid. Hell, we were making the Kool-Aid. So it was hilariously predicatable that, like every other rom-com heroine, I found my happy ending when I least expected it, music up, wedding montage, cue credits!

Or not.

Turns out “happily ever after” is the epitome of lazy writing. Maybe fictional characters live happily ever after, but for the nonfictional rest of us, the story continues with a lot more complexity, and in a way, marriage winds up being the longest date ever.


And however much we think we know how to do dating, on this date, you can’t decide not to see him again because you’re tired of hearing him talk about cheese. For example.

You have to try to work things out, or at least appear to try, and as it turns out, I was completely unprepared for this job.

I got married at forty (despite my lobbying efforts to move the wedding up a month so I would still be thirty-nine). I re- member complaining to friends that, because of my age, my husband and I would have to start trying to have kids right away. I sincerely wished we were younger—that we had five years to be just a couple.

And I got my wish. We didn’t become magically younger, but we did get five years to ourselves, thanks to the myriad problems we encountered trying to have a child.

So what did I learn in those five years? And how can I help you prepare for that thing about your spouse that you must somehow embrace because he’s your spouse? (Wanna hear about cheese?) The fertility problems you might face because it took two decades to find a guy to face them with? Disagree- ments about pets, space, houseguests (I think I’m adverse to them because I still secretly feel my husband is one), couples therapy, entertaining together, cleanliness, vows (every anni- versary we rewrite ours and have the option to sign up for another year— so far so good), and sex? W hat about married sex?

Oh yes, I am an authority on sex. In fact, I was a sex col- umnist for O, The Oprah Magazine while we were going through IVF treatments, and I finally gave up my column because sex had become so fraught for me, so synonymous with failure, that I could no longer in good conscience advise women on how to “spice up their sex lives” with porn and lingerie. I felt like a fucking fraud, literally and figuratively.

So, in this book, I wanted to tell the honest, horrible, hys- terical truth about the early years of marriage. I certainly could have used some preparation, or at least some commis- eration.

I also noticed a lack of humor and hope in most of what’s been written about infertility. Women I know— and even women I don’t know—encouraged me to fill this void when they responded so enthusiastically to the first piece I ever pub- lished about the trying nature of trying: “We’re Having a Maybe!” (which is now a chapter of this book).

The one thing my husband, Ian, and I learned from this experience is, never say never. In fact, as I began writing this book, we found ourselves in a craft store buying construction paper for the scrapbook we’d been advised to make for pro- spective birth mothers. Yes, we now had to market ourselves as parents.

I never thought I would be in that position—not the adopt- ing part (we’d always been open to adoption) but construction paper? Really? But our adoption lawyer said our scrapbook should look homemade, so we spent a weekend gluing photos of ourselves (with friends, with family, on holidays, on vaca- tion) onto Easter egg–colored construction paper, which we hole punched and bound with ribbons.


And as we were doing this, as we were making this little Book of Us, I realized we had, somehow, amid the chaos and confusion of cohabitation, built a lovely life together. There we were, page after pastel page, two people (and one St. Ber- nard I didn’t think I wanted) who had shared five years of adventures (good and bad, large and small) that had strength- ened our bond as a couple.

So I’m grateful for those five years, hard earned as they were, and although “happily ever after” still strikes me as the romantic equivalent of the Rapture (sure, it might happen, but let’s not spend our lives waiting for it), I am writing this book for every woman who ever was or will be blindsided by the reality of marriage: to validate and celebrate life as a wife.

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