“This huge event is hers and everybody knows it’s hers, including him. A marriage that starts off that lopsided, crippled with debt, mired in animosity, is already dragging one leg behind it when the couple walks down the aisle.”
—“The Wedding Trap” by Matt Teel in Rebel magazine, Summer 2011
Yesterday was my parent’s anniversary, marking 49 years that they have been married. Together, that is. Almost half a century. Through about twelve Presidential elections. Most of those years with my pain in the butt self in their lives. What is the secret of their longevity? In a word: Oil Of Olay.
I called them on the phone last night at around 10:00 p.m. I would have forgotten about their anniversary altogether if it weren’t for my sister’s reminder emails about all-important events in the X family household. She may be annoyingly organized but without these friendly reminders both my brother and I would never remember anything family related.
One year my brother forgot to call my mother on her birthday—again. He said to me, “Can you imagine what it’s like to forget your mother’s birthday two years in a row?” I told him to ask me next year.
At 10pm my Dad was already asleep. I was thinking about making a joke to my Mom about her sexing the energy out of the old man on their special day but I found the thought of them banging each other a little nauseating and I didn’t want an eruption of the Mt. Vesickius bile volcano that was already rumbling in my gut.
I asked my Mom how she and my father managed to stay together for so long. “Companionship. Similar interests.” Now “companionship” told me one of the benefits of a committed relationship but it was nowhere close to the ballpark of “HOW.” It wasn’t even in the parking lot. And I knew the “similar interests” line was just formula recitation and more parking lot Pinocchio and I didn’t let her get away with it.
“Similar interests? That’s crap. For instance, Dad has always been involved in sports and you had no real interest in that. And you’ve been involved with…uh, you have always…did you ever needlepoint? No? Well, if you did Dad wouldn’t have been interested.”
She told me it was late and that she’d have to think about it some more but did offer me a few nuggets, all of which I forgot because I was multitasking. But I did remember one thing she said.
While she acknowledged that, especially when they were younger, they had some knock-down fights in their time, “We were committed to each other; we knew neither one of us would abandon ship just because of a fight.”
There were many times in my relationships where the girl or me would get in a fight, and one or both of us would eventually abandon ship and jump overboard. Had we made the same commitment my parents made to “stay on deck,” maybe we could have remained dry…and enjoyed the complimentary buffet as well!
I thought about how whenever Ogre and I have gotten into a fight, it would usually end with her storming out of my apartment or telling me on the phone, either via voice or text, “I’m fuckin’ done with you!” While I totally understand the feeling of, “I’ve got to get the hell away from this person!” and the need for space, when a relationship is based on a foundation of quicksand, it doesn’t leave either party really feeling secure enough to commit to building a skyscraper together.
Now I’m not one who happens to believe in marriage. I think it is based not on love but on insecurities and a desire to possess another human being. If they legally enforced “’Til death do us part,” with about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, a mandatory “spousal suicide pact” would certainly keep population growth in check—even with Dominican 20-year olds spreading their seed like a drunken farmer who hit the sauce and then the seed bag.
But I do like commitment. Commitment to Self-Awareness; commitment to finishing a task at hand; commitment to another. That is, of course, if the commitment is based on a higher principle and not based on some obligatory construct, one where you want to see it all the way through not as a default mechanism resulting from it being too difficult to fill out all the paperwork, and pay lawyers, and find another man who is not (at least initially) completely annoying again, but because you have an inexplicable drive from inside that tells you, “This is the one I am to grow old with.”
I have always looked at the marriages of my brother and sister, who have each been married for about 17 years, and my parents whose marriage has just about made the half-century mark, as examples of a legal plantation where there are no masters and only slaves. I’ve seen the resentment, the ball-busting, the petty nonsense and the fights, not to mention the stress of each family raising their three kids, which includes financial as well as emotional turmoil. To me it looks like a nightmare, only one that you never wake up from “Until death do you part,” which would involve at least one of the two parties not waking up at all.
I still don’t see their marriages as anything that I would wish upon myself. What I wish upon myself is an independently wealthy deaf mute supermodel who will support me, feed me, sex me and keep the “f” quiet. She could let the other letters of the alphabet make all the noise they want but that “f” is just such a blabbermouth!
I would also want both of us to be committed to something even beyond each other, for if you are only committed to each “other,” the next step is to be committed to an asylum. But if you are committed to Love, to Truth, to the expression of Creativity, Joy and Self, then, on some level, it doesn’t matter who the “other” is—both of you are just there enjoying Love, Truth, Creativity, Joy and Self and it is gravy that there is an “other” body there with which to share it.
Otherwise the honeymoon will end, hormones will dry up, penises will lose their vigor and little idiosyncrasies that you once found cute will now be grounds for you to fantasize about the other’s “death doing you part.”
It sounds like New Age cheesedome, “It’s all love! We’re all love! Let’s make love!” but I honestly think it is more than that. Unless you make a commitment to LOVE more than you do to the concept of loving an “OTHER,” you are diving off the high board into a pool with no water and you will either have to be prepared for a life of paraplegicism or misery or both.
“But what about those couples—like your parents—that ‘make it’?” This will probably sound unfair but I think that the only thing most married couples “make” are babies. The rest is survival but not thrival. And those who convince themselves they are, in fact, happy are sleeping at the wheel and only “death do them part,”—meaning their death—will open their consciousness to grasp the limited perspective that they had believed to be expansive.
At times I wish for this level of unconsciousness for myself. I’m sick of seeking Truth, seeking Self, and just want to have some basic happiness that isn’t so fleeting. And at times the God of Atheism grants me this wish: like when I have been making love with Ogre and it is not just about physical pleasure but about connecting to something deeper than our genitals. In those few and far between moments, life seems to make sense and I feel truly at peace. Other than that, my life is bursting with misery and I might as well be married.
But when Ogre and I get out of bed, the insecurities, the resentment, the ball-busting and the fights are picked up just like our clothes, to be worn as a covering to naked LOVE…and this has become an unbearable burden to me that has made even my bed no longer a safe haven, for it is hard to lose oneself in love when you know misery is hiding just around the corner with a pipe and is planning on braining you.
49 years. Wow! I wonder what that level of commitment for another even feels like. Through the countless struggles, perhaps there is a sense of peace knowing that you have found your partner and neither one of you is going anywhere, through changes in waist sizes, to graying of hair, to forgetfulness, to health challenges, through even disagreements and arguments…until death do you part.
“When love became the lord of my life, I became quite fearless.”
—Living With The Himalayan Masters by Swami Rama (p. 4)
