My Thoughts on Marriage Might Ignite You
I used to be married. It didn’t last long, which is a good thing, because we’re better off not talking to each other every day. Sometimes people just don’t get along with each other. Sometimes it takes 4 years to learn that.
When marriage turns into divorce, all those lovey-dovey memories of the wedding and the good times go bad and you don’t want to think about them anymore, and then lawyers get involved and you have to get judges to sign things for you. Negotiations take place, and you realize that marriage isn’t about love at all. It’s nothing more than a financial agreement.
If you don’t believe that, then you’ve never been divorced. If that’s true, then I feel sorry for you. Everybody should have their fondest romantic dreams destroyed and pissed on by the harsh, cruel cossacks of broken hearts. It makes you a better person. It gives you perspective.
It makes you appreciate the little things in life, like not being pissed on.
But you already know what it’s like to break up with somebody, right? That’s hard stuff to go through, too, but it’s not divorce. Our culture made dating a competition with your peers, and marriage is Winning the Game, it’s crossing the finish line, it’s winning the gold medal. Divorce is like having your medal revoked after they discover you’ve been doping the whole time.
When you date somebody, the road ends with either marriage or a break-up. There’s no silver medal. Hell, there’s no bronze medal. If you have any romantic notions of romance, they probably end with the phrase Happily Ever After, and marriage is basically just a way to tell everybody you know that you two are going to stick it out and stay together for as long as it takes to outlive the other person.
When you’re just dating somebody, you break up and everybody is sad for a little while but whatever, you weren’t serious enough to get married, right? So no big deal! Move on! Lots of fish, right?
But get married and then break up? Shit, son, you better get yourself a lawyer and hope you can afford the retainer.
I think about love and marriage a lot when this time rolls around because around now, four years ago, I was getting married. I was really involved in the parts of the wedding that mattered to me, like the no dancing part, and the no cake-feeding stuff and the thing that writers should always care the most about, writing the vows (which you can read here). The wedding itself was one of the best days of my life, even though the marriage didn’t work. That day, I was with my whole family and everybody was happy and I (and my ex, I guess) were superstars. I didn’t want it to end.
But it sure did end, and in a big way. There was no slow dissipation of energy like a balloon that loses its air, but an explosion of anger and sadness and depression and anxiety and every bad thing you can think of all rolled up and packed with dynamite.
It was a huge turning point in my life - I emerged as a better person, a person who was much more himself than he had ever been. It was like growing up.
We’re fine now, of course. She’s doing great, too. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that it didn’t work, just like it’s not the goddamn moon’s fault that it gets a few inches closer to colliding with the earth every time it swings around. It’s just how things happen. It was embedded in the nature of our relationship that it was going to end that way. That’s just the kind of people we are, and that’s just the kind of relationship we had.
I don’t know what my relationships in the future are going to be like, but the ones after my marriage have all had one thing in common: they ended. I’m afraid that the ends of things are too fresh in my mind when even good things begin, and I lose sight of the present tense, which is the only tense that matters. All I can do is keep going forward, because that’s the only direction that matters.
Marriage was fun while it lasted, except that last part, around the time that the lawyers got involved. I’m all for it. But keep in mind that it might end, and you might not know it until the papers are sitting in front of you, and you might have to make some hard decisions and you might feel like you’re killing something that is halfway to dead already. But hey, you’ve broken up with people before, right?
