the necessary post: marriage

I am not sure when it happened, how long the shift has been going on--the belief that marriage is only a convention or a settlement; that cohabitation will break you less if it falls apart.

Maybe it was when we watched the neighborhood divorce. Maybe it was when Bill Maher made it cool and contemporary to be an atheist (--or, I'll admit it, when Campus Crusade for Christ made all of us consider abandoning God). Maybe it was only when I noticed it, when I came to college. Maybe before that it had always been but it didn't matter because it wasn't me and now it is.

I am engaged. I am 22. By our society's standards, I am young and free and wild of spirit and up for anything and excited to travel the world and not, usually, attached to any kind of suspicion, life plan or convention.

Somehow, being engaged has canceled these things. Somehow, it has become impossible for people--not all people but a growing segment of my social circle--to see marriage or engagement or an endless attachment to another person more beautiful in those interior, poetic (a poor word choice in my case) ways as an opportunity. A real chance for me to be challenged to chase the things I talk about, to stop saying that it would be nice and start saying it will be nice when we get there.

We are not a television show, not a teen couple getting married because they found God and want so desperately to have sex and babies and more and more God that they get married. We are two people that, by the grace of God, found a way to deal with each other and wipe the egg from the other person's face on a daily basis.

There was a moment, sitting next to Joe on a couch in a woods in southern Ohio, when he held me down and farted on me. (He would be embarassed, maybe, but this is a chance you take when you're engaged to a blogger.) That evening, on a bench by the water, we talked about loving each other and missing each other in the months that I had spent in France and wanting never to do that again. We talked, for the first real time, about marriage. I believe that the link between the moment on the couch and the moment on the bench is stronger than we knew at that point or know now.

So when people tell me that they need a few years alone, they need to get to their big city and make it, or they need years they can trust someone, I think "Jesus, they've got it together." Because I don't. I know that if I did not have him to thank everyday for listening to me piss and moan, to remind me that I won't be a writer if I don't write or won't go to graduate school if I don't apply or won't love someone if I don't let myself--in short, if I did not have him--I would go to a city, alone, and I would fail. I would settle into the challenges I am used to, become a part of a company instead of letting my career become a part of myself. I would lose myself.

Instead, I am growing in another person. It is easy to remember to thank him for this, each night when we settle in for our hour of long-distance phone call that we steal from the cell phone companies after peak times. I thank him for forgiving me when it's gotten exceedingly hard for me to forgive myself.

We have been perfect; we have ruined it; we have survived and rebuilt and forgiven. And we will do it again. And again. And when that is done and we are still sitting next to each other, so long as we are given the years, I hope I remember to thank him. Again.