The idea of Lady Gaga…

…the idea of marriage

In an interview with Lady Gaga by David Marchese in the 3/16/25 issue of the NYT Sunday Magazine (“Lady Gaga Feels Like Herself Again”), Marchese asked Lady Gaga if, when she met a new man, she wondered if he really wanted to be with her or just liked the idea of her.

She answered that her fiancé, Michael Polanski, seemed genuine from the start, and touched her deeply by asking about her family. But I, as a reader of the interview, was more interested in the question Marchese had posed to her: did she wonder, when she met someone new, if people just liked the idea of her?

In my memoir, I talk a lot about the idea of marriage, but in a different way than Marchese is using the word.

Or maybe it’s not so different.

When he asked Lady Gaga if she worried that someone just liked the idea of her, he meant, of course, that being the outrageously notable public performer that she had been for so long , the musical “shape-shifter,” as he described her — from her early dance pop days to American songs standards with Tony Bennett — to singing on those steep steps in Paris along the River Seine at the 2024 Summer Olympics in her outrageously high heels — that people would have preconceived notions about her.

Most of us don’t have to worry too much about somebody having a idea of us before they meet us. Although even I did find that phenomenon to be true in the years when I was a columnist for The Ann Arbor News. People who read my work were sure they “knew” me, and approached me in person as a close friend, which was always a bit surprising to me.

But it’s the idea of an idea that caught me in Marchese’s interview.

In my memoir when I talk about the idea of marriage, I mean something close to what David Marchese is talking about: having a pre-formed idea of what or who something or somebody is.

My idea is that everyone does have an idea about what marriage is from an early age and that that idea is based on experience. It could be an idea based on real people in real marriages, like one’s parents or aunts and uncles and neighbors or teachers, or it could be an idea based on books or movies or some other fictional notion. It could be a fantasy.

If you are willing to buy into this concept — that we all have ideas about what marriage is — then you can maybe see where that idea could take us — that how your idea of what a marriage is and what your prospective partner’s idea of a marriage is should maybe not be too far apart if it’s all going to work out.

The high divorce numbers around the world do suggest, perhaps, that many people assume the person they think they want to live with for the rest of their life does not, unbeknownst to them, have the same idea of what a marriage is. This seems to be true across cultures and national identities and social classes and religions, whether those cultures and identities and classes and religions are shared or not.

Marriage is such a complex concept, such a complex idea, such a complex reality, that having two people think the same things about it is in no way guaranteed. The more I’ve thought about the idea of marriage as I’ve remembered my three marriages — especially the things I could have done differently to honor my own self and the selfness of my intimate life partners — the more mysterious both the idea and the living reality of those partnerships have become to me.

The mysteriousness provides a bit of inherent forgiveness in it: if marriage is that complex, of course mistakes will be made. Omissions will occur, omissions of love, of caring, of awareness. Of remembering that the idea that you started with, like the idea of being Lady Gaga, may be moving toward some greater truth that will always be bigger than you can imagine and, on the other hand, so delicate and light that it will always elude you.