Howl, baby.
The one, the only.
Just when you get to feeling like there's nothing doing on a Thursday night, throw on a little Wolf and you'll get to thinking there's a party goin' on.
I was feeling a bit like the blues tonight, and the Wolf never disappoints. I had lunch with a very good friend today who is moving to Connecticut next week (the good ones always got to go, isn't that what they say?), and we got to shootin the dust about relationships big and small. She's been married for five years or so, after a whirlwind courtship and quick engagement. At first they seemed to epitomize everything romanticized about marriage: true love, sure thing, hot lovin'...the whole package.
And this very same woman said something that stuck with me all afternoon. She said that marriage doesn't solve anyone's insecurity problem, doesn't solve very much in the way of feeling vulnerable or at risk of losing the one you love. It gets the law involved, sure. But that doesn't mean that every day both people don't have to agree to stay married. They do.
My parents have seven marraiges between them. You wouldn't think that I would be the one to place much faith in the institution, to have the desire to enter into such a seemingly risky proposition. But I do. Against my own desire to shun the concept as indulgent, empty middle-class schtick.
Perhaps I want the security that I assumed came with marraige. Perhaps I want the statement of love that marriage enshrines. But what I learned today is that the security isn't a gimmie. Everyone says that marriage is work; I'm just a bleeding, ridiculous romantic who envisioned marraige as a permanent ride on cloud 9. I've been around far long enough to know that relationships are work, but I suppose I always thought that marriage would mean that I had finally done it right. Hit it and quit, you know? Case closed. Right. Hm.
Marraige is more realistic than I thought it was. It's off of the pedestal. For now. Not off the list of things I'd like to do, though. Like I said:
Bleeding. Ridiculous. Romantic.
posted by Jackie at 7:39 PM
1 Comments:
The security doesn't come with marriage - that's just signing your name somewhere. Going through a ritual isn't what makes it.
If you don't feel the security before you're married, it's probably not gonna be right, ever.
At first, the relationship feels like all the other ones - the excitement of getting to know each other and starting to think, "Maybe this is the one!" The lust. Yep, that's all there.
But then at some point you realize you're not spending a moment wondering if he loves you, or if you love him, or wondering if you belong together - you just know it's right, and you know it works. You realize you're happy, and you make them happy. You smile at each other a lot. Other people can tell you're crazy about each other, and not in a crazy way.
It already works, you don't really need to get married. If you get married, it's for material reasons, or external reasons - practical reasons - but not to add anything to a relationship that's already right.
I know people say all this stuff about how marriage is work but, really, that's pretty misleading.
Sure, there are things you have to work out between you - when you're actually living together, you have to get used to the fact that one of you wants to read in bed at night and the other wants to light out right away, and you have to figure out how you deal with those things or whether you're going to sacrifice reading in bed.
And sometimes when you're tired or distracted you forget to do some of the things with them that are fun, that your relationship has always thrived on. You can let things get routine and forget that this isn't just a roommate or something.
But some people misunderstand "marriage is work" to mean you have to constantly be trying to make the relationship work, and that's just not true. If you're still trying to figure out how to be happy in each other's company, how to feel secure, it's because the relationship doesn't work - it's the wrong relationship.
Remember that before you make any committments.
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