Jeffrey’s post about a certain Pisces Male Blogger Who Shall Remain Nameless and his ambivalence toward marriage got me thinking about that honorable institution. Somehow my career as an astrologer took a weird turn somewhere along the way and I settled into a sort of niche as a wedding astrologer. I work with brides a lot, my book is about marriage, and most importantly I’m the veteran of 14 years of happily wedded thingamie. So I suppose I have a certain measure of credibility on the subject.
But do I? Really, all I have is my own experience and a lot of opinions. I’d love to jump in and tell Mr. Pisces Male Blogger (PMB) what he should do about his marital status, but the truth is, I don’t have a clue. His situation is worlds away from mine when I decided to marry. I was marrying a man I’d known for about a year and a half; PMB has lived with the same woman for 15 years and shares a child with her. I found someone I didn’t want to live without, and his immigration status happened to force the issue of marriage. We wanted to get married anyway, but would we have had the nerve to broach the subject to each other without that pressure? It’s hard to say; we’re both kind of shy. In the end, it didn’t even feel like a decision. No one proposed to anyone; we just started to talking about it as a fait accompli (“when we’re married…â€).
And it’s been just great. I mean, we’ve gone through some tough times together, but I have literally never regretted marrying him. Like most people I’ve seen a lot of horrific marriages, so I must say I feel pretty damn lucky.
Just after the wedding I asked my mother, long widowed, what was the best part about being married. “I think,†she mused, “that it’s having someone to talk things over with.†All these years later, I can’t argue with that. But of course, you can have great talks with a person without marrying them. You can buy a house and raise a child, cook dinner, fight and make up, get the car fixed, and haggle over laundry chores. You don’t need to be married to do any of it (if you doubt it, ask your gay friends), just a good lawyer to help cross the t’s and dot the i’s. So why get married?
Unless you have very specific religious or cultural beliefs, the best reason I can think of (which also happens to be the only argument in favor of having children that makes sense to me) is: Because you really, really want to do it. I’ll tell you, there was something sweet and powerful about standing up in front of people who had followed my hapless and debauched escapades through the years and announcing, “I choose this one. Loving me means at the very least tolerating him. Try to come between us and you will lose. I don’t care if you gave birth to me or shared a playpen with him, you talk smack about him to me at your peril. I am your daughter, your sister, your sister-in-law… but before any of that, I am his wife. Trust and honor this commitment, and offer us your love and support. We’re gonna need it.â€
But that’s my thing, you know? Maybe, too, that stuff is more important in the beginning of a relationship; I might feel a little silly saying all that now, even though it’s still absolutely true. Living together for years, burying parents, watching the birth of a child, shepherding each other through illness and job changes and fights with friends – all of it is profound beyond any words you can use, and makes those words feel kind of embarrassing because they’re so inadequate to describe the reality of being committed to somebody.
Well, good luck PMB. It must be scary to consider changing the status quo 15 years into a relationship. Luckily relationships, like people, are pretty adaptable organisms. And as Woody Allen once famously said, “A relationship is like a shark – it has to keep moving or it dies.” Whichever way it ends up, it sounds like things will be changing. And that’s as it should be, of course; you don’t want a dead shark on your hands.