{"id":505,"date":"2009-10-12T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=505"},"modified":"2018-10-30T20:06:13","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T00:06:13","slug":"random-thoughts-on-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=505","title":{"rendered":"Random Thoughts on Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’ve been to two in the past two weeks.\u00a0 Three if you count Jim and Pam on The Office<\/em>.
\n<\/p>\n

These were both long-overdue affairs if you asked members of the family, but us generational contemporaries always have our doubts.\u00a0 It always seems to surprise me when someone claims to have caught the special fire of permanent love.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But I also had the chance to see it from the other end.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So long that I can barely come up with memories of their huge 50th anniversary party.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Breadwinner husband boasting a champion recipe artist wife with 1,700 square feet and a pool along the celebrated coast of the Sunshine State.\u00a0 No drama, no vices.\u00a0 My grandfather coached high school football Friday nights.\u00a0 My grandmother went shopping on Saturdays.\u00a0 Church on Sunday mornings, lunch all afternoon.\u00a0 On and on until recently as my grandmother’s mind has started popping tethers and losing air.\u00a0 She has no short-term memory and will bother you with the same questions over and over.\u00a0 No sense of time whether it’s the hour, the day, the season, or even the year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And, like a child, with the erosion of her ego, small routines become complicated obstacle courses.\u00a0 She only wants to eat ice cream and never wants to bathe.<\/p>\n

My grandfather, the stoic, the ultimate believer in established roles, has never had to babysit, shop, prepare food, scold or constantly remind.\u00a0 He’s getting more used to it by the day, but it still makes him unbelievably exasperated, chases him with an uncalmable fear.\u00a0 He has to be more forceful than he ever has just to get her through the day, which makes her resentful.\u00a0 She accuses him of wanting a divorce, of wanting to throw her over for another woman.\u00a0 I can’t tell if these are new pains or old worries that she’s always found a way to fog and disguise.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n

Random Thoughts on Marriage<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[68,133,134],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-cassander","tag-marriage","tag-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}