Anyone In His Spouse and children Is Divorced. In A New Podcast, He Tries To Stay clear of Their Fate

Ian Coss is the only person I know who writes his very own Christmas audio. Maybe it started off out as a lark. But Coss has caught to the little bit for 15 a long time, producing and recording a new batch of holiday break tunes that he sends to household and buddies, unfailingly, each and every December.

That is to say: Ian Coss is the variety of person who commits. Even when the venture would seem quixotic. Like seeking to determine out the magic formula to a content marriage by interviewing absolutely everyone in your spouse and children who’s at any time been divorced.

That is precisely what Coss sets out to do in his new podcast, “Permanently Is A Long Time.”

“My moms and dads experienced divorced and all of my parents siblings experienced divorced and some of my grandparents had divorced,” Coss claims, by way of clarification. “Some of my great-grandparents had divorced.”

Coss is a musician, podcast producer and audio designer from Medford. (Whole disclosure: I’ve acknowledged Coss for almost a 10 years — we worked together on a podcast a long time back.) A short while ago, an e mail from Coss landed in my inbox with the subject line: “An album & podcast about divorce” — a tantalizing hook, to say the minimum. Was this 5-section podcast some sort of elaborate divorce announcement?

“That is a great marketing method, I guess,” Coss states with a chortle. “But I’ve gotten that reaction from a couple diverse people today, where I stated that I was performing this venture. And the to start with assumption you leap to is, ‘Oh, you must be having divorced.'”

Spoiler alert: Coss is not receiving divorced — he’s been married to his wife, Kelsey, for six yrs. But marriages in his spouse and children really don’t have a tendency to very last. And these days, he’s wondered if he’s doomed to repeat the loved ones curse.

“I just…have this concern that interactions are just gonna hit a wall at some place,” he claims. “That no make a difference how sturdy it is, how shut you are, how appropriate you are, that I would not be equipped to have that with me in the lengthy time period, for the reason that, you know, so couple of people today in my spouse and children have been ready to.”

In “Permanently Is A Prolonged Time,” Coss attempts to figure out why so several marriages in his relatives failed. His interviews with his divorced kin are intimate and remarkably candid. There is the aunt who admits she married her ex-husband mainly because she preferred his family’s seaside residence. You can find Coss’ father, who talks about his anxiety of repeating his have parents’ messy divorce. There’s his grandmother, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor who tried to get her partner, Coss’ grandfather, to agree to an open up marriage right before she remaining him. For her, divorce was a kind of liberation throughout an period when women’s life had been far far more circumscribed. “Oh, god,” she claims. “Marriage really doesn’t suggest a matter to me.”

Coss also interviews his spouse, Kelsey Tyssowski, who is surprisingly cool about the full is-my-marriage-doomed-to-are unsuccessful line of questioning. She listens patiently as her partner outlines his anxieties about their connection, and deftly prods at the assumptions underpinning his fears.

When Coss wonders if he is “certain” to repeat the blunders of his forebears, Tyssowski is skeptical. “The way you say ‘bound to’ helps make it seem like you experience like it is your destiny, [that] you will do it, whether or not or not you stage again and believe about it,” she points out.

In spite of its concentrate on the failure of marriage, “Forever Is A Long Time” is, at its coronary heart, a quest to understand what helps make a relationship get the job done. If Coss can just determine out what went erroneous in his family’s interactions, he can avert disaster in his personal. He can stay away from suffering, and normally feel protected in his possibilities. It is, in some perception, a look for for certainty. Even even though, Coss admits, nothing at all in relationships — almost nothing in lifestyle, for that matter — is specific.

“There is no ‘supposed to,'” he claims. “There is no way to say for certain when when you have to have to work by means of people problems, and when it really is time to contact it quits. And that’s just just one of individuals decisions you have to make by yourself.“

Just about every episode ends in an original song, by Coss. In the 1st episode, it really is a state-tinged acoustic selection named “Appear Again Afterwards.” “I can tell a lie/ Suitable into your eye/ You can appear absent/ Hide it with a smile,” Coss sings forlornly. “Would you do me the favor/ And remind me it’s going to arrive back again afterwards?”

“Appear Back again Afterwards” is a warning: not to let resentments construct up, or to let thoughts go unsaid. Coss suggests he wrote it to remind himself that every fleeting emotion will return — the doubts, but the joys, as well.