I don’t know how I missed this article in the NYTimes when it came out a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, a writer at Slate cited the article and how, with his wife tied to his hip, they duplicated this couple’s lifestyle for a single day. First, an excerpt from the original article:
TEN years ago, Michael Roach and Christie McNally, Buddhist teachers with a growing following in the United States and abroad, took vows never to separate, night or day.
By “never part,” they did not mean only their hearts or spirits. They meant their bodies as well. And they gave themselves a range of about 15 feet.
If they cannot be seated near each other on a plane, they do not get on. When she uses an airport restroom, he stands outside the door. And when they are here at home in their yurt in the Arizona desert, which has neither running water nor electricity, and he is inspired by an idea in the middle of the night, she rises from their bed and follows him to their office 100 yards down the road, so he can work.
Their partnership, they say, is celibate. [Link]
Admitedly I am terrified by the institution of marriage, even though I do hope to be married some day. I have Siddhartha-esque anxieties about the possibility that I may want to walk off into the woods some day. I emailed this story to four of my married-couple friends and three of the four responded with mild revulsion. “No freakin’ way,” to paraphrase. One of my friends responded that she had, due to circumstances, simulated this type of experience for stretches of days at a time, more than once since she’s been married (they travel a lot together). She also described it as soul-sucking to some degree. Even the Dalai Lama is a bit turned-off by the idea and wouldn’t allow it to be promoted in India:
… their practice — which even they admit is radical by the standards of the religious community whose ideas they aim to further — has sent shock waves through the Tibetan Buddhist community as far as the Dalai Lama himself, whose office indicated its disapproval of the living arrangement by rebuffing Mr. Roach’s attempt to teach at Dharamsala, India, in 2006. (In a letter, the office said his “unconventional behavior does not accord with His Holiness’s teachings and practices.”)… [Link]
The couple in the original article lived a mostly ascetic lifestyle in a yurt in Arizona. The couple in the Slate experiment provide an unintentionally humorous play-by-play of a day in which they lived like Roach and McNally but under circumstances that we are all more familiar with:
David: First thing in the morning, Hanna gets up and goes to the bathroom. As couples go, we’re not big on privacy, but there are limits. You’ll be relieved to hear there is no Love Toilet action at the Rosinplotzes. The rope is plenty long. I pace impatiently outside the door…Hanna: I never thought of myself as a “private” person or someone who keeps secrets from her husband. I do, however, want to put on makeup and fix my hair without David standing outside the bathroom tapping his foot and glaring. I have never much valued my two and a half minutes of morning mirror time. Now I feel like an angry grad student, defending sacred female space from the overbearing male gaze. [Link]
I think the Roach/McNally Arrangement (as I will call it) is an interesting dynamic. If the significantly older Roach was hitting it with her I’d think this was all a dirty ploy on his part. However, they do point out he is celibate. Most people can easily agree that this arrangement would take a supreme amount of patience and self-control to pull off, as well as a partial destruction of the self. These are very much in line with Buddhism and Hinduism and in keeping with the “traditional” path to Nirvana. Then I wondered, would governments work more efficiently if opposition leaders had to simulate this experience for a week? Would Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann put down their swords? Would two democratic nominees grow closer if tied together by a fifteen foot rope for seven days? The possibilities for achieveing world peace are endless if we can just apply the Roach/McNally Agreement to the right pairs.
The experiment was not nearly as disturbing as I expected it to be. I hope that’s partly a tribute to the strength of our marriage—we find it easy to keep company with each other, thank God. I’m sure it’s partly a tribute to the routinized banality of our lives, which ensured no melodrama. On the other hand, I don’t think I could have made it another 24 hours. The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I grabbed the sports section, fled to the downstairs bathroom—one flight of stairs, 50 feet, and a psychological mile from Hanna—and locked myself in. [Link]
I think that married couple SM readers should try this out for one day this weekend and then tell us what happened 
