Random Thoughts on Marriage

You don’t need me to tell you that love comes in varied forms, but the past month for me has been a roll through all types of commitments, new and old, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about them in a short time period.  When you’re not involved in the particulars of a wedding, not caught up in the momentary paparazzi-style blur of the newly betrothed, there’s plenty of time for you to investigate and think.  I’ve been to two in the past two weeks.  Three if you count Jim and Pam on The Office.

These were both long-overdue affairs if you asked members of the family, but us generational contemporaries always have our doubts.  It always seems to surprise me when someone claims to have caught the special fire of permanent love.  But these two couples, one set closing in on their thirties, the other well into them, both seemed confident and content, satisfied that this ceremony and their new legal status would change nothing, would be nothing more than a finely dressed celebration for friends and family, an alternative to the more usual casual carousing of every other weekend.  They seemed certain that life allows you the choice of controlling change, that Marriage itself is always willing to let you fudge the numbers on your lease of time.

But I also had the chance to see it from the other end.  I visited my grandparents the same weekend as the wedding in my old hometown, Floridian expatriates bundled up year-round against any form of an Appalachian breeze. They’ve been married sixty-seven years.  So long that I can barely come up with memories of their huge 50th anniversary party.  Theirs has been one of those good old-fashioned post-WWII pairings that, whether you believe such relationships were ever the norm or not, has become an ideal past its prime.  Breadwinner husband boasting a champion recipe artist wife with 1,700 square feet and a pool along the celebrated coast of the Sunshine State.  No drama, no vices.  My grandfather coached high school football Friday nights.  My grandmother went shopping on Saturdays.  Church on Sunday mornings, lunch all afternoon.  On and on until recently as my grandmother’s mind has started popping tethers and losing air.  She has no short-term memory and will bother you with the same questions over and over.  No sense of time whether it’s the hour, the day, the season, or even the year.  So she tries the way a child tries to gloss what they don’t know with a thin spreading of what they do, a way to disguise their shortcomings and earn your confidence.  And, like a child, with the erosion of her ego, small routines become complicated obstacle courses.  She only wants to eat ice cream and never wants to bathe.

My grandfather, the stoic, the ultimate believer in established roles, has never had to babysit, shop, prepare food, scold or constantly remind.  He’s getting more used to it by the day, but it still makes him unbelievably exasperated, chases him with an uncalmable fear.  He has to be more forceful than he ever has just to get her through the day, which makes her resentful.  She accuses him of wanting a divorce, of wanting to throw her over for another woman.  I can’t tell if these are new pains or old worries that she’s always found a way to fog and disguise.

And when I come home to my own girlfriend, my own hard-won ideal, and tell her these stories both of us pause and slightly worry and think, goddamn, sixty-seven years is a long time.  We don’t envy their position, just their adherence to the goal: stay strong, stay committed if you believe in it, even when it’s gone past being an adventure.  This long enduring kind of love, this one that people dream of but rarely prepare themselves to achieve–that type of love’s never about the latest fad or the current trend, it’s not about the race for satisfaction.  So I’m offering my best wishes to my friends and holding out a higher hope for myself, wishing us to remember that beyond man and wife we need to marry the Constant with the Change.