Marriage is a test of many things, but memory might be the biggest

Sydney Morning Herald

09-05-2025

We should all be suspicious of memory. There's endless evidence it's an unreliable witness. Some of the things you can see as if they happened yesterday didn't happen at all, and some of those you've forgotten are captured on film and impossible to refute. Some dreams are remembered as real. Various childhood episodes are recalled as dreams.
Living with your own memory is hard enough – working out what's real, what's wishful, what's denial, and what's flagrantly Quixotic. But living entangled in two … do you double the difficulty of memory when you combine a couple of minds, or do you halve it? Do the glitches and deformities aggregate or diminish?
Consider the conjoined memory of an elderly married couple. That bushfire 30 years ago that they've talked about a thousand times since, each time bending the other's recollection of the event a little towards their own. He resettles her interpretation in his own mind just as she adopts his retentions in hers. They once had separate memories of the fire, but now have a shared story. Have two truths become one myth?
The first steps of their second child … five years later she remembers that toddler was waving a rusk and singing a nursery rhyme … he remembers Geelong was about to beat Carlton and the bloody kid walked in front of the screen while he had to pretend to be delighted.
Twenty years later, after countless retellings, some infected by beer, the kid is waving a Cats flag and singing the club theme song as he walks wobblily towards adulthood. Not only do couples mix their DNA to create new people, they also meld their memories to reinvent the past.
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But it doesn't always work that way. In other cases a wife and husband's memories diverge, like the Koreas, into totally different truths and histories. I was at a cafe recently with a married couple, Ambrose and Penny, on a sunny pier in Sydney, no hint of dissent or rancour in the air – there rarely is before one of Ambrose's mis-memories strikes like a drone. They were discussing postnatal depression and Ambrose said his mother-in-law suffered from it after the birth of every one of her five children and he attributed it to her having caesareans each time. Penny was aghast.
'Ambrose, what are you talking about? Mum gave birth naturally always.'
'No, she didn't,' he insisted. 'Like Rome, she had a succession of Caesars.'