Some Things I Have Learned

Me and the bear were talking about marriage the other day — not a potential Harriet-bear marriage talk, but marriage in general, and how it works, and  how it doesn’t work. Having been married once, though it was very brief and not at all typical, I picked up a few things I wouldn’t have known otherwise. When people say, “Oh, when you get married, everything changes,” I used to respond with an equally arrogant and knowing, “Well, I just consider marriage a piece of paper, it doesn’t actually change anything.” Somewhere in the middle ground is correct: marriage really does change some things, but there is no radical overhaul of your life or your relationship just because you danced your way through a ritual; really radical change takes immensely painful and difficult personal work that a veil and a bouquet just can’t manage, so your basic template stays the same, for better or worse.

When people used to say to me, “Oh, marriage changes everything, you just don’t understand,” they never got very specific. I can theorize a lot of different reasons for this, but my generally pessimistic nature assumes it’s likely marriage-changes-everything people didn’t want to go on to describe how many dreams, hopes, and expectations their marriage had killed/crushed/destroyed. Which, okay, that sounds really bad, but honestly, that’s not always a bad thing, the kill/crush/destroy — if your dream is a perfect house with a perfect fence and a perfect child and perfect skin and perfect sex forever, you will need to become thoroughly acquainted with disappointment before your marriage can stop sucking so much ass.

Anyway, I thought I would take a moment to describe in more detail a few of the things I have learned about marriage in my brief and terrible experience of it. For those of you who have not been married before, here is some shit you oughta know:

1. Getting engaged generates a snowball effect as more and bigger pieces of your life become invested and tied to the success of your relationship. Large chunks of money are deposited on the assumption of your happiness. All casual conversation between you and friends/family/coworkers morphs into questions about your relationship. You develop several business relationships that are solely based on the fact that you are fucking this one person. And, too, all your future plans become hinged on this one new truth you are trying to absorb and integrate. Being tied to one person forever and ever is going to influence where you imagine yourself moving, what jobs you imagine yourself having, what kind of home you imagine living in.

What this means: previously, your relationship was (hopefully) based upon mutual fulfillment of your current needs. If it stopped meeting those needs, it could end with comparatively little fuss and muss. Oh, sure, there’d be changes to your life, and you might mope about a bit, but the person your relationship mattered the most to was you, so it’s all your own personal grief and growth. When you get engaged, your relationship becomes more than a thing that fulfills you — it becomes a living creature that generates money, social relationships, and future mystical lives and goals. To end a relationship after an engagement requires a major dismantling — you will have to fight to regain your deposit from the dress store because “he doesn’t love me anymore, so I don’t need a dress.” You will have to repeat yourself to every casual acquaintance you meet for at least a year: “No, we actually broke up. Well, it’s a long story. Yes, I thought we were getting married, too.” And everything that depended on your relationship — the job you took for the health insurance, the city you moved to so he could be near his family, the house you planned together — all that becomes entirely devoid of meaning.

Before an engagement, you could just break up with your boyfriend. After an engagement, you have to break up with the entire meta-structure of your life. Hence, the snowball effect. As more and more pieces of your life and identity become dependent on fucking this one person, the idea of slowing down or putting a stop to the whole thing becomes unthinkable. Prior to an engagement, you could approach arguments or serious problems safe in the knowledge that if this all went to shit, well, you could leave. After an engagement, any argument or problem is overly invested with the knowledge that if this all goes to shit, you’re going to have to call the caterer from the bottom of a bottle and explain that you failed at your fucking life.

The biggest mistake you can make: to avoid the soul-crippling fear of “what if this doesn’t work out,” you put off dealing with serious or not-so-serious issues as they arise, telling yourself, “We’ll have the rest of our lives to deal with this, we can talk about it after we’re married.”

2. Eternity amplifies your problems as if they were pores under florescent lights. “We have the rest of our lives to work on this,” becomes “I have to deal with this for the rest of my fucking life.” If you can’t stand that thing your significant other does now, no matter how small or petty, you will not discover some infinite well of patience and tolerance after you have been married. In fact, you will discover new depths of bitter resentment as you realize you have just signed yourself up for 60 years of her unfathomable inability to clean out the fucking litter box just once. Sixty years of crouching over the litter box once a week, bandana over your nose, muttering to yourself, listening to the TV blare as she watches her favorite show and ghda;hdhkvbnaeca;ncka;nve it’s not like she’s busy or anything I am going to be cleaning this litter box until I die.

What this means: If you cannot make your peace with your partner’s quirks, limits, needs, and boundaries now, right now, right this very minute, living in closer proximity and deeper entanglement with your source of frustration will only serve to make you a very passive-aggressive spouse. And if you think compromising, communicating, and eventually accepting the catbox situation is hard right now, you will find that you will be scientifically incapable of acceptance after you realize you are stuck with this catbox-avoiding fucknut for the rest of your life.

The worst thing you can do: Say to yourself, “Things will change after X.” Things will change after the wedding. Things will change once we get back on our feet. Things will change once we get a house. Things will change once we have a child. Things will change once the baby’s old enough for day care. Things will change once her job isn’t so stressful. Things will change once we move to the retirement home. Things will change once they’re fucking dead already.

Things do change, but in terms of human relationships, change is relatively glacial, mostly because the biggest changes have to come from you, and you are a stubborn fuck all hung up on the catbox, like seriously, man. You cannot change the annoying shit about your partner, because that is up to them. You can change the annoying shit about yourself, such as your intolerance towards your partner, which is one of the quirks about you they can’t stand. And if you cannot do that now, you cannot do it ever, and time will only make both of you more annoying and entrenched. There’s no half-assing marriage, no “I love you forever, but…”

3. Getting married raises the bar for breaking up. In The Temple of My Familiar, by Alice Walker, a man and a woman get divorced after a tumultuous relationship that is sometimes very happy and sometimes very confused and angry. The argument that precipitates the break-up starts when the wife discovers a new author she likes a lot, and suggests the husband check the author out. Though he thinks he’ll probably like the author as well, and can tell how important the books are to his wife, he passively refuses to read the books. Maybe he’s too tired, or too busy, or he didn’t see them there, or he’s getting to it, seriously, why is this such a big deal?

After they break up, he goes around for a while bitterly telling everybody that his capricious wife left him because he wouldn’t read a book. After some time of self-reflection, he revisits the question: Can a marriage be destroyed by the refusal to read a book? And he decides the answer is yes. She liked it, so he wasn’t going to like it, and that was about the whole of it. And yes, when somebody is being such an asshole, that’s reason enough to end a marriage, regardless of what they were being an asshole about.

I read that book when my own marriage was falling apart, and that scenario struck me in a weird way. I both understood and could not understand it. Admired and sneered at it. Seriously, you end your marriage for that? How arrogant, how selfish, how needy. That made sense, considering where I was psychologically at the moment, with a husband I wouldn’t leave no matter how much he hurt me. With a little more perspective now, and some experience in non-abusive relationships, I feel like I understand this a lot more now. The little things don’t exist in a vacuum; they add up, and throughout the majority of your life, day in, day out, the little things are all you experience. Refusing to do a thing based on nothing more than “you like it so much” indicates a very deep disrespect for the core of a person. And the capability of being such a doucheshit indicates there’s more where that came from. And at the point where somebody disrespects you that much, it doesn’t matter what the subject of disrespect is, or how big, or how small.

A husband who, in all other things, is loving, supportive, respectful, and kind, but cannot manage to, say, complete anything on time if his goddamn life depended on it, likely that’s not worth a divorce — unless procrastination killed your father, or something. But in the context of a relationship where you suspect or feel that your husband’s procrastination is part of a larger picture of how little he respects, considers, or supports you, it is worth ending a relationship because the washer has been broken for two fucking years just call a mechanic already arghlbarbl Ihateyou

What this means: There always has to be some straw that breaks the camel’s back. You don’t have to wait for something that’s a “real” problem. If your back is broken, then there are deeper problems in your compatibility than the laundry, the book, the catbox. Problems so deep that seriously, why did you get married, dude. And while, before a marriage, you may have been more whimsically appreciative of your needs and desires, no matter how silly or banal, after a marriage, when the person you are fucking is the bedrock of all your plans, goals, and mortgages, it just doesn’t seem worth it to divorce them because they can’t manage to do the dishes even when you have been at work for 12 hours and then had to go pick up the kids. But if it bothers you that much, then it’s worth divorcing. If it wasn’t a big deal, you wouldn’t give a shit in the first place.

The worst thing you can do: Listen to your friends, family, or any other person whatsoever. They do not have to live with the insufferable catbox fuck the rest of their natural lives; you do, though you wouldn’t know that from the sheer tidal wave of hysterical, hypocritical, superficial, useless, vicarious, and guilt-inducing advice they give you. A family is about adults and children doing their best to help each other through life. A mortgage is about a financial agreement between some people and a corporation. But a marriage is about two people fulfilling each other’s needs more than 50% of the time. If that ends, you can stop the marriage and keep the family and mortgage. Really, you can. Really, you should.

Those are three of the most important things I’ve learned about marriage. The fourth and fifth are a little less solidified in my brain, but I’ll try to sum it up.

4. A vow is a promise based on a premise. Marriage vows are not blood rituals. You are not bound to them literally, like a monkey paw curse. When you take a wedding vow, you are promising to honor, love, cherish your spouse based on your understanding of who they are and what they fulfill in you. If after getting married you discover that your understanding of your spouse was wrong, that they do not or cannot or will not fulfill your most human of needs, your vows are meaningless. You cannot honor, love, or cherish a stranger whom you resent and do not actually like all that much by staying with them; imagine moving in with the guy who cut you off in traffic today — you’re not doing him any favors. You can honor, love, and cherish a stranger you hate, their lives, their needs, by leaving them. Vows do not create an obligation to stay in physical proximity with a person who makes you miserable. Vows are a promise based on a premise; when that premise is violated, the contract is null and void.

5. Marriage can only provide you with one thing: a spouse. It cannot necessarily provide you with happiness, personal fulfillment, economic stability, children, a legacy, self-esteem, a maid, a buffer between you and your family, a conversation piece, legitimacy, maturity, adulthood, etc. If you use marriage as a blunt tool to fix all your problems, you will discover a fancy problem marriage cannot fix: divorce. Only get married if you want a spouse, if you like a spouse, if you loooooove a spouse. Do not get married if you want your life to be a Hallmark movie starring you, in a new dress, with some yummy iced tea. Do not become a painter if you hate the smell of paint.

Put this in another context. Say you would really like to learn how to work on cars, because you’ll save a lot of money and have a really useful skill, but you fucking hate the smell of oil. Or you’d really like to be a bartender, because they all have super crazy stories and get flexible hours, but you hate alcohol. Or maybe you think you’d be a good mom, because you like to play with crayons and dolls, but you hate kids so hard. Why would you do any of those things? You could save money by riding the bus, or going to a cheap chop shop, or buying a new car with less problems. You could be a taxi cab driver instead of a bartender. You could be a creepy man-child. If you do not like the fundamental structure of a thing, you will not be able to acquire your goals through repeated exposure to the thing you do not like. You will have to find another way.