The secret to everything

Honestly, I hate myself for writing that, but stick with it. There’s a point.

It was past midnight, which is late even for Paris. One of our number, a native Parisian and about the most Gallic person imaginable, was heading to the airport very early the next morning. He stoically watched as everyone lingered over their wine and ordered their preferred end-of-the-meal treat, and he stole a few glances at his watch, which only I noticed.

As the waiter disappeared to collect the cheese cart, I leaned over to my Parisian friend and suggested that since half of us wanted dessert and half of us wanted cheese, perhaps the smart thing to do, considering the lateness of the hour and his morning flight, was to get the waiter to serve the cheese course and the dessert course at the same time.

He thought about this for a moment, and then he shrugged.

In his achingly perfect French accent, he said: “It would be nice, yes, but of course, it is impossible.”

It was impossible, you see, as if the cheese and the dessert were matter and anti-matter and their presence on the table at the same time would cause some kind of explosion or tear in the cultural fabric that holds civilization together.

I laughed and tried to explain in my atrocious French how silly that seemed. Why the formality? Why the hidebound attitude? Why not just relax a bit and let the cheese and dessert commingle? “Pourquoi?” I asked. “Pourquoi suivre les regles comme ca? Il faut etre un peu souple, non?”

He looked at me strangely. “But then the meal becomes…” he trailed off, searching for the right word in English. “It becomes just whatever you want, whenever you want it.”

That’s a nightmare for a Frenchman, though, in many ways, it’s the unspoken motto of the United States of America.

Whatever you want, whenever you want it, and in a T-shirt, if at all possible. That’s how a lot of us prefer to eat (and work, and live), but as reflexively patriotic and anti-French as some of us are, there’s something admirable, even heroic, about maintaining standards and refusing to cut corners. That meal in Paris went late. My friend arrived at the airport the next morning groggy and sleep-deprived, but he had something eight hours of sleep couldn’t provide: self-respect and the inflexible dignity of a Frenchman.

Rules, even French ones about dessert and cheese, can be very useful.

An older lawyer once told me that the secret to his long and untroubled marriage lay in a decision he and his wife made early in their marriage.

“My wife and I,” he told me, “decided to live formally.”

What he meant, I guess, is that they used their dining room for weekday meals. He wore his office suit. She dressed up. When the children were little, they were bathed and put to bed, and when they were older, they sat at the table like children do in moves from the 1930s, when it always seems to be dinner time and no one is ever in a T-shirt.

“It must have been a lot of work,” I said. “Was it worth it? Didn’t you ever just want to hang around in your underwear eating Triscuits from the box?”

“Of course,” he said. “But then we both remembered why we did this in the first place. Because it’s impossible to be really thoughtless when you’re all dressed up. You’re just naturally more polite and gracious, no matter how you really feel. And the secret to everything — “

And here he leaned in to me and repeated emphatically, “The secret to everything is politeness.”

“But didn’t you sometimes just want to be casual?”

“Rob,” he said, “there’s nothing casual about a marriage.”

“But don’t you just want to be comfortable?”

“There’s nothing comfortable about it, either.”

They were married for nearly 65 years, so it seems like a winning strategy. Maybe if you’re comfortable and casual — maybe, in other words, if the cheese and the dessert are served at the same time — you’re doing it wrong.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.