Remember in my last post, when I oh-so-wisely proclaimed the word "never" should be banished from your vocabulary? You probably even believed me, didn't you? Hey, don't feel bad -- even I believed me, and I'm the earth's largest skeptic. Well, like the idiot that can't seem to learn from her own mistakes that I am, I'm about to do it one more time:
I'm never getting married again. There. I've said it.
Well, smarty-pants, says my internal italicized voice, didn't you mention in your last post that you're moving in with your boyfriend? What's the difference? Umm, a lot, actually.
And I find that the only people who don't understand the distinction are people who have never been married themselves. The main difference between the two is that, by not being married, you have a much better shot at being able to retain your own sense of identity -- that and the fact that if it doesn't work out, you call U-Haul pronto and get the hell out with a minimum of fuss and bother. You don't sit in a lawyers office for months arguing about who's going to get the car, the wedding china -- not to mention the things you never thought you'd even want, much less fight over -- something Billy Crystal wisely points out in When Harry Met Sally, when he mentions that his newly married friends will someday be fighting over "that stupid Roy Rogers, wagon wheel coffee table."
Now, please, those of you who have fantastic marriages, relationships that make your friends want to vomit because you're so adorably perfect together, please take what I'm about to say a grain of proverbial salt -- hey, take it with a whole fucking salt mine, if you like: Marriage doesn't work -- at least not for me. How do I know this for a fact? Well, I've been married. Twice.
The first time was a mistake -- I was 24 and I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do with my life other than grow up, get married, and have kids -- just like my mother who sat in a huge house all night long with a man I suspected she didn't love, completely and utterly miserable. No matter that the only time I was ever really happy was when I was writing, that, although I loved my ex-husband deeply, those bells and whistles people speak of just weren't there. I wanted them to be there -- but they just weren't. I got married anyway, because I'd never been married, and, hey, I could always get divorced if it didn't work out -- which we promptly did nine months later because I'd started being wildly, flagrantly unfaithful and couldn't seem to stop . . .
The second time not only did bells and whistles go off, there was a four-alarm fire happening in my pants. No problems in the bedroom to speak of, no problems whatsoever at first. So we got married -- really fast. After six months I was officially someone else's wife -- again. And, against all statistics we stayed married for almost eight years -- the first four mostly good, the last four terrifyingly awful. Ex-husband number two just didn't believe in compromise -- on any level. The only things I ended up having control over in our marriage were the vacations we took, and the apartments we lived in. Moving to another city where I could have a career as a writer was out of the question -- in fact, anything that took his attention away from his own all-important work was out of the question. And one day I woke up feeling so dead inside that, for a moment, as I lay there I wondered just what there was to really get up for anyway. That was the day I decided to leave him -- a decision I agonized over, but will never regret. I had lost myself completely in that marriage, confused what I wanted with what he wanted until I no longer knew anything for sure at all. In order to recover myself, I had to move out and find out exactly who I was -- all over again.
Now, I'm not saying that marriage as an institution is the problem per se -- not for everyone. But I don't like what it does to a relationship -- to my relationships, to be specific. I get lost in the shadow of belonging to someone else, my own sense of identity becomes muffled, as if wrapped tightly in cotton wool -- until one day it simply suffocates and dies. I don't like the everyday-ness of marriage, how after six years I felt about as sexy to my ex-husband as a baloney sandwich, how we took each other for granted--simply because we could. After all, we had a little piece of paper that claimed we'd always be there for each other -- through sickness and health, good times and bad, till death do us part--and it gave us permission to be ambivalent, to be lazy. Nowhere in those vows did it state that after the first few years things would get comfortable -- a little too comfortable. Now I don't expect skyrockets and flight every single night--sometimes I like to crawl into bed with a cream on my face, a good book, my glasses on, and my hair up in a ponytail. Sexy, right? But I have come to realize that I am a person who likes a certain measure of uncertainty and intensity in her life -- sexual and otherwise. And in both my marriages, the excitement, if it was ever there in the first place, was sucked out in a short four years -- and, contrary to popular belief, its impossible to want to rip someone's clothes off when you have become deeply, deeply resentful of them, and of the way your marriage has morphed into this thing with a life of its own--a monster in a horror movie--and you can no longer recognize its once sweet, placid face -- or your own.
So, while I am madly in love with my boyfriend, and we are currently in the process of moving all of his crap into my space (God help me), I won't ever marry him -- something he knows all too well. I also doubt he would ever ask--which works just fine for me. I want adventure, travel, excitement--the thrill of living other lives, of another chance. I can't ever risk losing my core identity ever again.
It's too great a price to pay for a small piece of white paper.