Ten Years, Five Wives

In 1985, while working at the Movado Watch Company, I met my first wife. What immediately caught my attention was that she was not only very pretty, but also incredibly hardworking—almost as driven as I was. I was twenty-six; she was nineteen. We became good friends first, long before either of us thought about turning it into a relationship.

Before one long weekend, she called me at home. She said the upcoming Fourth of July weekend was five days long and suggested we go somewhere. She wanted to see if we could find cheap tickets to Los Angeles. I found a $178 round-trip flight to Las Vegas instead and suggested we rent a car there and drive to L.A. That became the plan.

We rented a car, arrived in L.A., and spent a wonderful time roller-skating on Venice Beach and taking pictures along Hollywood Boulevard. On July 4, we drove back to Las Vegas to catch our early-morning flight to New York the next day. As we drove along the Strip, we noticed the neon lights of the Candlelight Wedding Chapel. Curious, we walked in.

The man behind the reception desk—who reminded me of a clerk at a cheap highway motel—looked at us and asked, “Are you lovebirds here to get married?” We weren’t lovebirds; we were just good friends. We both laughed. Half-joking, I said maybe we should get married. It would certainly be memorable to do it on the Fourth of July. Somehow, we both said yes.

Within minutes, he produced a fake priest and two Mexican witnesses and offered us a full-service package. Just like that, we were married.

When we landed at Newark Airport the next day, we looked at each other and said, well, I guess we’re husband and wife now. Maybe we should live together.

After work, we went back to my studio apartment on Bergenline Avenue in Union City, New Jersey. That’s how my first marriage started—no grand plan, no dramatic proposal, just a small apartment and two people figuring things out. The rent was $500 a month, which felt manageable at the time.

When I finally quit my slave job at the Movado Watch Company in New York City and landed a new one at United Weight Control in Englewood Cliffs, my salary jumped from $20,000 to $50,000 a year. Overnight, I felt rich. Naturally, we decided it was time to buy a place.

After nearly a year of researching mortgages—just enough to make us feel confident and slightly dangerous—we finally bought a townhouse in Jersey City, at 46 Holly Street. When the mortgage payments started, reality wasted no time showing up. After the check went to the bank each month, there wasn’t much left for anything else. Still, we told ourselves this was adulthood. This was what being responsible was supposed to feel like.

Around that same time, my first marriage was quietly coming apart, just as the earliest seeds of SYS-CON Media were beginning to take root.

When I came back from my three-month army boot camp, I found out Marilyn had left. She wanted another child and a different kind of life—the kind where she could take her son and daughter to school every morning and center everything around family. I wasn’t there yet. Between the pressure at work and the constant financial stress, I could barely keep my own head above water. I couldn’t give her what she wanted, and she knew it. So she left. After that, I didn’t hear from her for almost two years.

The very next Monday, I was back at my desk at Rhône-Poulenc, trying to pretend my personal life hadn’t just imploded. Then a striking young woman walked past my cubicle, and for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I chased after her.

“Excuse me—what’s your name?”

“Carmen.”

I didn’t hesitate.

“Carmen, I’m going to marry you.”

That didn’t go over well. She reported me to Human Resources for harassment. I later learned she was married. The end result was three months of mandatory “harassment in the workplace” classes, twice a week after work—a humbling, uncomfortable lesson I earned the hard way.

* * *

I’ll fill in the exact years later, as they relate to my business story, but about ten years after we met, I married her in a lavish ceremony at Cipriani on 42nd Street in Manhattan. It was an unforgettable night—so extravagant, in fact, that I sometimes joke it may have cost more than Jennifer Lopez’s wedding at the same venue.

That was my second marriage, as we know it.

So what came next?

Ten years into our marriage, one morning I woke up, walked into Carmen’s corner office at 135 Chestnut Ridge Road in Montvale, New Jersey, closed the door, sat down, and said:

“I want a baby.”

She looked at me, surprised.

“You want what?”

“I want a baby.”

Carmen leaned back, stared at me for a moment, and then said:

“You’re forty-nine years old. You want to be changing diapers at fifty?”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt. No more diapers for me.”

I left her office feeling like a disappointed kid.

* * *

I walked straight to the production department, where Alex, Louis, Abe, Tammy, and a few other designers were working.

I looked at them and said:

“Guys, I want a baby—but Carmen doesn’t.”

They all stopped and looked at me.

“How am I supposed to have a baby?”

Louis broke the silence.

“Hey, boss,” he said. “You can find a new wife online. Go create a profile on Match.com. You’ll meet someone who actually wants to have a baby.”

The idea stuck.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Carmen I wanted a divorce. She would have killed me—at least emotionally.

So instead, I did the unthinkable.

I created an online dating profile, met someone, and she became pregnant with my baby.

That stretch of my life was complicated in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

Marilyn lived on Rolling Ridge Road in Upper Saddle River. Carmen lived just behind her, on Arrowhead Drive. And the baby’s mother ended up on the same street as Marilyn, just across the way. None of them needed to know exactly where the others lived. At the time, I told myself that keeping those boundaries was simply practical.

I remember stopping at the A&P—what’s now a Whole Foods—and buying groceries for three different households in a single trip. It felt efficient, almost orderly, even though my life was anything but.

I took Marilyn’s daughter to school in the mornings. I stayed close to my newborn baby. And I was still married to, and living with, Carmen.

From the outside, it probably made no sense. From the inside, I convinced myself it did—until I got caught.

Carmen found out. She filed for divorce. And just like that, my daughter’s mother became wife number three.

So, in a nutshell, those were my first three marriages.

My fourth and fifth were borderline annulments—nothing to see there.