Love and Marriage
Oh shit - I’m getting married! I proposed two weeks ago and it’s still kinda nerve-wracking but it’s also kinda awesome - I love my fiancee more than anything. But the surprise of it all is still kind of sinking in, and that shock isn’t lost on my friends or family who were happy to share their thoughts upon hearing of my impending nuptials. From “Congrats. My girlfriend [of 4+ years] is gonna be piiiiiiiiissed at me” to “I thought you were gonna go the George Clooney route. You know, except for the rich, sexy-at-50, actor thing”, to the simple yet powerful “WHEW” (thanks mom and dad), everyone seemed happy to chime in with some good-natured ribbing and well-deserved relief.
The funny thing about marriage (and death, for that matter) is that it exposes a lot about not only the people getting married, but the people that are in any way involved in the lives of those getting married. I suppose major life events have a tendency to do that…but having gone through friends’ marriages (and divorces), moves, career changes, having children, and tragedy, it’s clear that marriage is unique in the feelings that (for better or worse) it inspires. It’s these observations that have in the past given me a pretty heavy dose of skepticism on marriage in general. However, I think there’s a larger issue at play here: the battle of self-interest vs the interests of others. For whatever reason, marriage (and its Western precursor, love) seems to inspire that conflict more than anything else.
What’s most frustrating to me about marriage is that it is frequently about anything and everything except what it should be about: the love of two people who want and are ready to spend their lives together (I’m talking about the US here). I don’t have to look far among the experiences of people I know personally or have seen on TV to shake my head at just how absurd things have gotten:
- A bride who demanded the groom remove close friends from an invite list in order to be able to afford get a particular (expensive) brand of chair for the ceremony
- A groom who slept with a bridesmaid the night before the wedding
- A bride who was pissed at her fiancee that he didn’t spend [what was for him] close to a years’ salary on a ring
- A mom who threatened to boycott a wedding unless she could invite everyone on her personal guest list, which included people that neither the bride nor groom had ever met
- People (often politicians) who espouse “traditional marriage values” while staying mysteriously quiet about reality TV wedding contests and celebrity weddings that last only a couple months (or less)
If you’re one of these people, then congratulations: you are a shining example of everything that is wrong with marriage in this country, and a big reason that many people (myself included) have pessimistic views about love and marriage. In fact, before meeting my fiancee, I had fully intended to refrain from even thinking about marriage at least into my 40’s (if not indefinitely). To me, marriage (and love) were expensive and wholly unnecessary paths to anger, heartbreak, and disappointment, as evidenced by unending examples of failure. As long as I could still get laid (my thinking went), then what was the point? But when I met and began to fall in love with my future wife, my views…didn’t change. At least not at first.
What I’ve realized many months later is that for the first year or so with my now-fiancee, it wasn’t that I was scared of marriage itself (a common misattribution, especially to men), it was that I had wholly unrealistic expectations about both love and marriage - expectations that arose out of fear of ending up in the types of situations that I’ve seen affect dozens of people I know and undoubtedly millions more across the world. It was anxiety borne out of the unknown and uncertain, i.e. “what if my fiancee is secretly one of those awful people that I’ve known and/or heard about, and somehow I’m being duped”. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was projecting all of those insecurities onto my now-fiancee, despite her doing nothing to indicate that they were an accurate representation of reality. Ironically, it was a midterm break-up and attempts at dating other women that made me realize “What the fuck am I doing?”
Reconciling and resolving our issues came down to (on my end) some basic realizations that I’ve always intellectually known but never truly understood until recently: relationships require a lot of work, compassion, understanding, compromise, and most importantly - trust. Not to mention a whole lot of others things that sound straightforward in theory but aren’t easy in practice. But the biggest realization, in my opinion, is perhaps the most valuable and impactful point of all: nothing in life and love will be perfect, and it’s the things that people think are important and have to be perfect that often matter the least. I believe that it’s often this desire to achieve perfection (in this case, a person’s subjective definition of perfection), mixed with the increasingly American desires for immediate gratification and More!More!More!, that leads to failure, disappointment, and frustration.
The reality is that you (and your partner) will have disagreements until the day you die. You will hit hard times and feel unsure about your relationship. You will have to work hard to achieve most of the things you want, both independently and together. You will occasionally disappoint each other. Your ring size is a marketing ploy designed by the DeBeers diamond monopoly to make you feel insecure (and in fact, is inversely correlated with marriage longevity, happiness, and the man’s penis size - kidding about the last one, or maybe not - who wants to do a study?). You will continue to find other people desirable, no matter how much you love your partner. The concept of a soul mate is bullshit, and assumes that the universe somehow has provided you with a partner that’s out there just for you - no work or self-actualization or self-improvement required to actually deserve it. Your partner will change, as you will, and sometimes those changes will make a relationship untenable. Though if you are open, honest, and communicative, you can grow both separately and together, or at least more amicably apart. Your wedding is important, but it’s a single day in a life of ~28,000 of them - it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t turn out exactly as you had hoped or expected. Your proposal, your ring, and your wedding, aren’t going to look like Kim and Kanye’s, and that means absolutely nothing other than you aren’t a “celebrity” who got famous for getting dick and for being a dick, respectively. It’s ok to be single, even in your 30’s and beyond. You should test drive a few cars before you pick the one you want to keep. There are only five or so things that have been proven to truly matter to the success and happiness of a relationship: physical compatibility, shared values, shared goals, healthy independence/friendships, and effective communication (plus or minus). If you have a long checklist of must-have traits, you’re going to continue to be disappointed and unhappy and potentially miss out on someone who could be an amazing partner (as much as I hate myself for saying this, think Charlotte from Sex and the City). Most importantly: You’re not perfect. You never will be. Your partner (or potential partner) isn’t perfect. He/she never will be. But nothing in life ever is. I’m finally ok with that. And I’m excited to spend my life with the person who is ok with that too. It’s gonna be an awesome journey.