PHOTO: HER WORLD BRIDES
Getting married is an act of faith – comparable to jumping from a plane with a parachute. You know the parachute is there, but when it’s time to jump, your whole being screams, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and you just have to pretend you didn’t hear.
Then comes the sound of air rushing past your ears and the feeling of never-ending tumbling in a weightless void. The next thing you know, someone is pouring you a glass of champagne.
I’ve never jumed out of a plane, but i imagine that getting married i even worse, beacause your parents are there.
Being married, however, is great. Apparently it even makes men live longer. People are fond of insisting that a sucessful marriage requires continuous hard work from both partners, but if you’re really working that hard, you must be doing it wrong. Compared to being single, marriage is a breeze. Here’s why:
Fighting
Friends may see disagreements between unmarried couples as a bad sign, but they usually find the constant bickering of spouses entertaining. Married people can fight freely, without the serious risk of breaking up. This sense of security allows you to experiment with tactics — adolescent strategies may even make a comeback — you haven’t done since you stopped fighting with your parents.
You are never too old to employ the classic “You don’t own me!” counter-offensive, although it doesn’t work any better now than it did then.
Frequent arguing is actually a sign of a lively, if faintly dysfunctional, marriage. The time to really worry is when everything goes quiet, because that may mean your spouse has forsaken arguement in favor of poisoning your food.
Dating
When you’re married you always have a date. This may not seem like the best reason to tie the knot, but at least i know who i’m spending the millennium with. Not only does my wife provide me with a lifelong companion for dire events, she’s also someone to talk to at parties where i don’t know anyone. I always think it must look rather romantic to see a married couple tucked away in a corner of a crowded room with their heads together, especially if you don’t hear my wife saying, “Go away and leave me alone.”
Sharing
A good marriage is an equal partnership. That means that whenever an unpleasnt chore comes up, there’s a 50-50 chance it isn’t your turn to do it. Fortunate when you consider how many weird new chores spring up after your marriage.
Drying up dishes is a good example. Why dry them? I have long maintained that it’s folly to try to improve on nature’s very own dishcloth — evaporation — but the profundity of the argument is lost on my wife.
Caring
The big thing about nuturing and supporting a parner through good times and bad is that nobody wants to be the one to do it. But this tiresome obligation is one of marriages’s central planks, so it has to be done.
Grudging emotional support is better than no emotional support. Besides, being there for someone else makes you feel like a better person, even if you’re not very good at it.
To make things easier, it’s best to keep one’s emotional demands to a minimum and come up with some sort of rota, although in practice, this can be easily subverted. If it’s not my turn to be needy, I just pretend to be ill. Hey presto!
Frankness
They say that romance is the first thing to go in a mrriage, they never tell you what the second thing is. It’s politeness. The difference between a wife and a girlfriend is in a wife’s ability to give you a frank assessment of how ugly, boring, ill-dressed, unsuccessful, stupid, smelly or childish you are, at any given moment, in plain language.
No attempts to spare your feelings, thank you. This doesn’t sound like an obvious advantage, but it’s instructive, and the fact she has to be married to you is a kind of revenge in itself. It helps to have a sense of humor about it, which in my experience, is always the third thing to go.
Lying
An honest marriage is like a pollutant-free car — it’s scientifically possible, but real-life examples are just a few short-range, odd-looking prototypes. A robust marriage relies on a certain amount of pretty deception. It’s what we married people have instead of privacy. Sometimes the rigid 50-50 division of labour and the endless bickering can get you down, and it’s just easier to pretend you didn’t realse the cat was sick, or say you did pay the electricity bill.
Growing up
Marriage doesn’t make you a grown-up, but it does give a context for all sorts of grown up things you might otherwise never see yourself doing.
I would have been very uncomfortable with the idea of gardening not so many years ago; likewise with choosing curtain fabric. At first, you might have to approach these tasks in an arch, ironic, or postmordern fashion, but soon all that artifice falls away and you end up just doing them, and, in a perverse way, enjoying them. Best of all, when you can indulge your new obsesion with high-yeild savings accounts, family cars, or kitchen tiles, and stop pretending you care about The Spice Girls breaking up.
Children
They’re very expensive, but children are extremely good value. They provide an essential ingredient for a healthy marriage: a common enemy. In spite of what you may have heard, children are also quite good company, especially if you have no buddies. They have to like you, because you can reach the biscuits. With three children of my own, I now have enough for a poker game. In the meantime, I can boss them about and win arguments by saying, “Yes, I do own you — and i have the paperwork to prove it.”
This story was first published in Her World Brides December 1999 – February 2000.