“marriage is a wretched institution”
For those of you who know me, you know that I’ve historically been a naysayer of marriage—of the institution, but also of the concept of a lifetime commitment. It seemed foolish to me, not to mention, obnoxious, to profess your love so publicly, so explicitly, and with so much grandiose conviction, so much sentimental melodrama. How can anyone be so sure of anything? How can anyone believe that something as inherently mysterious and elusive as love can become something rigid, unchanging, unequivocal? There was a time when I suspected that everyone was punking me with these vows. And don’t even get me started on the whole “forever” pantomime. How can anything last forever? What makes love the exception? (so why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh).
In my estimation, marriage was conventional artifice that was once convenient and economical. Now, “marriage is a wretched institution”—
Beautiful romances are transmuted into dull marriages, and eventually the relationship becomes constricting, corrosive, grinding, and destructive. The beautiful love affair becomes a bitter contract.
[…] It is an institution that evolved over centuries to meet some very specific functional needs of a nonindustrial society…Today it is the titillating prelude to domestic tragedy, or, perhaps more frequently, to domestic grotesqueries that are only pathetic. […] The very idea of an irrevocable contract obliging the parties concerned to a lifetime of romantic effort is utterly absurd.
“i find partnership unoriginal”
How many of us would commit to one person in a legally enforceable contract if that wasn’t the norm, established and enforced by our society and all of our systems? We’ve constructed a world made for sets of two, and if you don’t find a life partner by the time you turn 45, you’ll be turned into an animal of your choice. But imagine a world in which staying single, and having three or four or seven great loves is the norm—the rule rather than an exception we only see embodied by chain-smoking, “quirky” Aunt Margot who spends all her money on “eccentric” hats. What would you choose then? When a friend eloped in the same place that Tom and I had been “planning” our ceremony, I quipped, “aren’t we all so unoriginal.” Tiffany responded, “generally speaking, I find partnership extremely unoriginal.”
in the beginning, there was only darkness
How did I get here? It all begins with the beginning: my parents had a euphemistically “tumultuous” marriage that’s mellowed as they’ve settled into their 50s; their prolonged absences left me emotionally muted and savagely independent; quick to tears at the end of a book or the pilot of Glee, the emotions I was capable of feeling lived only in fiction. As an only child for thirteen years, I became accustomed to solitude, by necessity at first, by preference, ultimately.
My marrow-deep fear of marriage began in high school, while my girl friends were proclaiming that 25 was the ideal age to get married and mood-boarding their future weddings. I remember feeling wistful, wishing that I could be like that too, could feel what they seemed to be feeling. Instead, marriage, to me, marked the end of something precious, something I had and wanted to hold onto: youth, freedom, the freedom that comes with being young, the freedom that comes with uncertainty, ambiguity; and my knee-jerk response to its imagining was dread.
Since then, I’ve stubbornly held onto the belief that I’m not “made for” marriage; when I thought about the faraway horizon of my life, marriage never appeared in my daydreams. (My oldest or closest friends seem to share this belief and aren’t shy about expressing unadulterated surprise that I’ve gotten this far—hi Alice, Allie, Vivienne, and the rest of you.)
enough about marriage, let’s talk about me
In those quiet years in Tennessee, I unearthed an inner world that not only kept me company through all of the empty moments, but was also, to my later surprise and disappointment, infinitely more fascinating to me than the company of others. In Canada, I found family in friends, but, as would become habit, I always preferred to come home to myself (I believe this is what Dr. Myers and Dr. Briggs diagnose as introversion).
Until recently, I believed myself to be a drifter, empty-handed and unrooted. As my family moved from China to the U.S., to Canada, back to the U.S., the only thing I had to my name was the inner world that I’d been cultivating since I was 4-years-old, that I’d been nurturing with musty library books and naive attempts at writing. I assumed that being in a relationship necessitated its surrender; in a marriage, its permanent abandonment.
I began by resisting falling in love, including a two-year relationship in which I never said the words, “I love you”; I ended by suspiciously shooing away anyone (read: Tom) who tried to peek inside. You could be welcomed for a time-boxed, invite-only spot of tea, but how dare you show up unannounced. It was mine, and no one else belonged there.
In the face of Plato’s two-world theory from The Symposium, I believed that there was no worse fate than needing someone to be whole, someone to “complete me.” I refused to predicate my identity on someone else. “Wife” is a permanent label (in theory) that’s defined in relation to another person. Who do I become when I become someone who is defined by another?
There’s a part of me that feels disgusted at my need to be loved and cared for—because I believed that I had survived so long, so much, without it; because I, by myself, singular and gloriously alone, have always been enough; and because I believed myself to be without needs, especially the need of another; because I believed that needing was a weakness. I was terrified, to be honest, that I would abandon, or at least, compromise, who I am—the only thing that has been true and enduring for me—in the name of love. And that, in marriage, restrained by vows and paperwork, I would never find myself, by myself again.
haven’t i given you flatlands converging into one flyspeck until i could never see a water lily pond or a starry night over the Rhone or the basket of apples or myself by myself again? instead i saw the flicker of deathlessness a satellite in cloud cover a star’s slowing heartbeat my first blaze my first death didn’t you dare to imagine the abyss or the bliss of eternity?
“marriage is a happy delusion”
Someone once wrote, “at best, marriage is a happy delusion.” At its essence, marriage is an act of optimism. For exactly the reasons public proclamations of eternal love have historically stupefied me, inherent in marriage is a suspension of disbelief, an idealism, and bottomless faith. Despite the 40% divorce rate and the Groundhog’s Day fights or the sterility of never arguing, two people agree to believe in the same god. And, as a recent convert, this is a god worth believing in, worth worshipping, worth fighting for.
i don’t know how to be unabashed in love i don’t know the love of forever but loving you is my protest against mortality it is my only chance for meaning
Love, you see, is life’s pièce de résistance. You can—and knowing my readership—likely will, do many great things, but I believe that love is the greatest thing you can do. And marriage, is the conviction that love is a magnum opus worth devoting your life to.
“it’s all in the pillow talk”
Some of us will leave behind our names in history books, or at least on the cover of alumni magazines, or maybe in an issue of Forbes. But, most of us are toiling quietly at ordinary lives. And, all of us are paying attention to the details of our lives, unaware, maybe, that our lives are the accumulation of the smallest details. And who will bear witness to that? I don’t imagine news stations will come running to listen to your account of a Wilson volleyball languishing in the Bay; it’s long become passé to share your breakfast on Twitter, or even on Instagram. And yet, this act of sharing our most frivolous intimacies is fundamental to becoming real; of illuminating ourselves for another, and another for ourselves. As my friend, Izzy, once said to me, “It’s all in the pillow talk, isn’t it?” Holding these details, these intimacies for another; waiting for them, palms outstretched, to pick up where they left off, is a kind of devotion.
Marriage is the routine, the practice, of this devotion. It is the canonicalization of listening to, of noticing, of seeing, of understanding—it is dedicating ourselves to paying attention—day after day after day. It is only through consistency and time, through going through the same small motions, day in and day out, that you can come to knowing, to a kind of mastery. In this practice is the promise that, one day, someone will see you, will know you, will bear witness to you, as your singular self, at your purest—and as you evolve to become different people in different bodies. And that you will do the same for someone profoundly worthy.
the ultimate character friend
Ian, a character friend of mine, shared with me a passage from an Ezra Klein/David Brooks interview of Leon Kass:
But the deepest friendship, he says, is the friendships based upon character, in which you love the person for who he or she is. It’s, in a way, what you said before, in terms of admiration. And you wish that person well for their own sake and enjoy being in their company because it’s uplifting and ennobling and the activities that you engage in with them go deeper into your own soul.
The best of those friendships — and this, I think, over a lifetime, I’ve come to endorse — the deepest and richest and most permanent friendship, he says, is the friendship not of doing deeds in common, but the friendship of sharing speeches and thoughts, a friendship of seeking understanding, a friendship that is in some way philosophical. There’s no topic’s off limits. And you can spend a lifetime and never get to the end of the conversation.
For me, Tom is my ultimate character friend. Everything in any relationship—whether it’s singing A Whole New World in the car, or lobster diving in Malibu, or sex on a cliff’s edge, or avoiding eye contact at dinner—is really a conversation. And Tom is the person I can have every conversation with (when I’m willing) and never touch bottom. How could I not want to get married domestic partnered to that?
"And you can spend a lifetime and never get to the end of the conversation." ❤️