My wife and I have been married anywhere from seven to 150 years (I’m not good with dates). During those years we have moved six times, and each move was like an exotic gift that happened to be covered in shit. We have each had multiple jobs, and multiple uniforms with name tags. We’ve been broke, we’ve been well off, we’ve been broke again. We’ve bought our first house together, and it has a giant hole in the kitchen ceiling and sparks come out of the third-floor outlets if you hold anything metal too close to them. We have fought, raged, nearly cheated, and been totally out of sync with each other during chunks of our time together. We’ve also produced two enormous redheaded babies who are as terrifying to us as Mothra and Godzilla were to Japan in the ’60s. We have been depressed, we have wanted more, we have wanted different, we have wanted out. The years since we got married have been the most challenging and at times most frustrating years of my life.

They have also been the most productive, happiest and most hilarious.

When I met my wife she was a tough and self-sufficient 25-year-old bartender working in lower Manhattan. When she looked in the mirror she saw a beautiful young woman with a rock-solid personal-trainer sculpted body and a collection of lingerie that would make Fredrick of Hollywood himself go cross-eyed.

I was a 22-year-old slow-getter navigating the medium-paced world of entry-level positions at failing entertainment companies. When I looked in the mirror I saw someone who looked like a cross between Wallace Shawn and Koko the sign language gorilla. (Yes, I know Koko is a lady ape, but the resemblance is uncanny.) I saw someone who hadn’t quite gotten comfortable with the fact that he wasn’t 14 anymore, but who had endless amounts of time and energy for being as selfish as possible and enjoying every possible instant life had to offer.

The world was our oyster, and we slurped it. We slurped it often. We slurped it hard.

We had so much fun slurping with each other that we thought we should make a life of it.

Nowadays when my wife looks in the mirror all she sees are stretch marks and soft spots. I don’t see these things with the clarity or critical eye she does; if I do notice changes in her I chalk them up to a life full of laughter, good food and fat babies. In my mind, my wife wears those marks with as much style and beauty as she wears everything else. In her mind it is a different story.

When I look in the mirror I see pretty much the same thing I’ve seen for the past 17 years: I still see a big hairy monkey smiling back at me and grunting, and I still feel like I’m 14, even if the energy and time aren’t necessarily there anymore. Sure, I notice the effects of ape pattern baldness slowly ravaging my once glorious mane, and perhaps I’ve eaten one too many bananas and slurped one too many oysters.

But these maladies that my wife and I face when we look in the mirror are not symptoms of a crappy marriage. They are a symptom of getting older, and I have a sneaking suspicion that they would not be worn as gracefully if we were not a part of each other’s lives.

And while I have many daydreams regarding me and Tina, the 20-year-old soccer-playing sophomore who serves me my ice cream and indulges me in my forced attempts at conversations about her school and career goals, I know that ship has long since sailed. I had my time with the Tinas of the world. I married one. I don’t want to think about getting hair plugs and a Camaro in order to keep up with the new batch.

My lack of hot Tina action doesn’t eat away at me, nor does it act as some sort of wedge issue in my life or marriage, because I know a secret.

As hard as marriage can be, it only really sucks if you don’t love the person you’re married to. If you don’t love the person you’re married to all the other crap seems insurmountable — the scary large children, the lack of money, the fantasy sexual partners (who I like to imagine was wearing a particularly low-cut top today in my honor but, in reality, was not), the falling-apart house, the weeks where you just don’t click, the ridiculous arguments about nothing, and most important, the fact that you’re getting older and still haven’t magically achieved your life goal of becoming Randall Cunningham or Patti Smith or whatever.

If you love the person you are married to then all the stuff that’s your problem and not actually a problem with the relationship, stays your problem (for the most part), and you can focus on what’s great about marriage.

At 8 p.m. on the 4th of July my wife and I found ourselves with two sleeping children and an unusual amount of energy for that time of night. We capitalized on the opportunity by having sex on the couch (we are usually relegated to quickies in our pantry/coat closet during episodes of “Dora”). We were enjoying this moment of sexual liberation from the tangling tentacles of the jackets we still haven’t put away for the summer when we realized that the music coming from the TV had changed, and we were suddenly working in time to a particularly jaunty instrumental rendition of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (not exactly Marvin Gaye). In my compromised state, the song crossed with “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and I found myself singing that line about “a duck being somebody’s mother.” It’s hard to overstate the absurdity of the moment, as I whispered poultry origins from the wrong patriotic anthem to my incredibly sexy wife during intercourse.

Everyone has laughed so hard their stomach hurt, but I don’t know how many people have had that opportunity while they are inside someone else who is laughing that hard too. It is sort of like riding on the teacups at Disneyland during an earthquake. It’s an unusual sensation and one that I’m not quite sure I’d describe as sexy. It certainly shares little in common with the urgent and dramatic gymnastics of our youthful physical relationship, but it was fun, it was intimate, it was something that I’m glad I had the chance to do, and it was something I would only feel comfortable sharing with my wife of 150 years.

I’m sacrificing our privacy on the altar of public opinion for a simple reason: We talk about our marriages so seriously and with such reverence; we talk about our sex or lack thereof in the same way. Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we shouldn’t treat the institution and its dirty little companion as some sort of precious Fabergé egg that is either shattered and worthless or pristine, untouchable and priceless. Maybe it’s more like Silly Putty and the plastic egg it comes in. Sometimes the egg is open, allowing for hours of stretchy, flexible fun; sometimes the egg is closed and kind of boring, but as long as the Silly Putty remains inside the egg it’s still full of as much potential as your imagination allows, and the value of the egg is not diminished no matter how often or vigorously the egg or its contents are fingered or played with. (And yes, I was staring at a Silly Putty egg on my dining room table when I came up with that extended metaphor.)

Maybe if we all had a better sense of humor about our relationships, our sex, and most important, getting older, our marriages wouldn’t be in such crisis. As appealing as doing tequila shots with out-of-work strippers sounds sometimes, the reality of it (for more than an evening) would probably not make me any happier than I am curled up on the couch with my wife drinking watered-down Scotch and watching TiVoed episodes of “General Hospital.”

I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t get divorced. I’m all for it. What I’m sick and tired of is divorced people speaking as though they are oracles from the future who know how the rest of our unions will turn out. All the marriage bashing going on out there feels like a way of shedding a certain amount of personal responsibility. By telling the world the institution is flawed, or that we’ve somehow outgrown it, nobody has to own up and admit that it was their interpretation of it that was screwed up.

The decision to stay home was a fairly easy one. My 1-year-old son displayed early warning signs of being part tornado, and our household was beginning to crack like a trailer home under the strain of 175 mph winds. My wife had the degree, the full-time job, the benefits, and most important, desire and ambition. When you compared that to my mishmash of part-time contract work and my unique inability to function around other humans, it was clear who would be the one on the front lines in the constant battle against diaper rash.

So I began my foray into the mildly unusual world of being a stay-at-home father. I expected to take a little time off, get the kid straightened out and then embark on a new and fabulous stage of my professional life where someone would recognize me for the genius I really was, and lavish me with the wealth and fame I so richly deserved.

And for a while, things went well. My son was not necessarily slowing down, but his energy was now directed, our house was cleaner than it had ever been, we had a meal on the table every night, our monthly expenditures were diminishing rapidly, and I had an adult community of parents I hadn’t totally offended at our local park. My wife and I were calm and relaxed.

I was also discovering a side of myself I had never really known before. Being Mr. Mom was turning me into the man I had always aspired to be; I was becoming dependable. If I was at all concerned about how other people saw me, or if I experienced a vague sense of unease as I watched my male contemporaries cultivate careers, as opposed to the professional false starts I had shared with them in our early 20s, those feelings were quickly stifled by the sense that a) I was learning tools I desperately needed, and b) this was only temporary.

But all that calm came to an end, first by another round of seismic activity in my wife’s uterus, and then by the economic tidal wave that swept over everything. With a new baby swimming ever closer to the light at the end of the birth tunnel, and a completely submerged job market, it became clear that my time at home was not a relaxing vacation or pleasure cruise, it was in fact a lifeboat from which there was no escape. The delicate financial balance we’d set up could sustain another mouth but it could not sustain another mouth, a second car and two daycare payments. I could not capsize my family’s budget for the sake of my own masculine vanity. My fate as stay-at-home dude was sealed.

Realizing that I was stuck brought about an ugly change in me. The financial penis envy that I had so assiduously avoided began to creep into my relationship with my wife. I got shitty and sulky when she told people in passing that I was staying home with the kid. I qualified her statements by letting whoever she was speaking to know that this was a temporary thing, and that I had held several very butch jobs up until the last year. For instance, did I mention that I worked in a prison, or that I was a bouncer? Who’s a big tough guy? That’s right, Aaron’s a big tough guy! Yay, Aaron!

My wife was in her third trimester. Every morning I watched her trying to turn herself over to get out of bed in order to go to work to put food on our table. She looked like a turtle on its back trying to right itself. I knew better than to take out my sense of inadequacy on my wife. Giant breadwinning turtle woman had enough to worry about without my being mean to her.

So instead I became sullen and lethargic. Where I had once spent my weekdays taking my son on winter nature hikes or walks to the park, I now allowed him to veg in front of Dora and Boots for hours on end. Where I had been determined to have food ready for a sit-down family dinner, we were forced to order in (which we couldn’t afford) or do it every-man-for-himself style. Everyone suffers when the answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?” turns out to be a choice of sauerkraut, peanut butter, Cheerios or ground pork.

My proudest accomplishments of the previous year crumbled. My son’s bedtime routine, his behavior, his activity level and even his language skills were all following my mood straight into the sewer.

As Rome burned, I solidified my role as stay-at-home dick-face by developing a computer habit. Before then, I had only used the computer to check e-mail and read the papers. I suddenly found myself meandering aimlessly around the Internet for hours at a time while sitting in front of the TV. You’d be amazed how often YouPorn and Stuffonmycat are updated during a single day.

Laundry piled up, dust bunnies blew past my feet like so many shameful tumbleweeds. I gained back 10 of the 20 pounds I had lost over the previous year while trying to keep up with our son. I was drinking too much. I sucked, and so did my life, and I made sure everyone knew it.

My amazing daughter was born, and while she brought a great deal of happiness with her, she was unable to banish the crushing sense of emasculated loserdom that had settled over me.

It was about a month after her arrival that the keg of self-pity I had been sucking from was finally drained.

On an icy Philadelphia morning in early February, I woke up to discover that it had snowed almost a foot. I did what I always do when it snows; I went out and shoveled the sidewalks and front steps of some of my neighbors who, for various reasons, can’t do it themselves.

My son was trying to help me by dumping the snow I had just removed back onto the freshly cleared sidewalk. He believed he was providing a vital service to me. More to the point, he believed he was helping his neighbors.

This wasn’t the fun stuff. It wasn’t sledding or making snowmen. In fact this work postponed sledding and snowmen, but my son was out there with me, like some Bizarro Yoda, with his bright red face crusted with snow, and saying things like, “Daddy, help you I am.” He was delighted by the idea that he was doing something for his neighbors, that he was being a very useful toddler.

It was at that moment that it occurred to me how much I like being a man, and how little it had to do with any of the stuff I had been letting get to me. It’s not about the money I’m able to make (or not able to make) and it’s not about a job title, or what I can tell people I do when they ask me.

I’m big and I’m strong and I can shovel snow and install air-conditioners for people who can’t shovel snow or install air-conditioners for themselves. I can do this, and my son wants to help. He wants to help without getting anything in return, except some octogenarian neighbor’s promise to say a rosary for him. He doesn’t know what a rosary is.

I may be a flake and a schmuck, but my kids don’t have to be, and oddly, it may just be this schmuck’s guidance that makes the difference.

We keep hearing that women will surpass men in the workforce during this recession. As many of us (for whatever reason) find ourselves in a fiduciary timeout, we should not only think about how to repower the American worker but how to reimagine the American man. The moment our mothers entered the workforce and shattered expectations, the rules about gender roles in this country changed completely, even if our perceptions didn’t. Trying to live like our grandfathers is no longer an option.

As we step, or are forced, into the new roles that are presented to us, perhaps we should not lament, or vainly grasp at the responsibilities we feel we should have, but instead sack up and embrace the ones that are right in front of us.

At least that’s what I try to remind myself before I clean the bathroom and change the diaper genie.