What They DON'T Want You To Know About Marriage
Follow along as I expose the secrets of Big Matrimony!
What no one tells you is that marriage is impossible to comprehend before you sign the contract. It’s no less difficult to understand a couple of years in than it was when you first got the bright idea to get hitched, but at this point, you’re already fully submerged.
The average age for marriage in America is 32. By that age, you ought to have gotten your sea legs underneath you. You’ve seen a few things, gotten into trouble, and fallen in love — but imagining yourself a decade older at 42 is almost as mind-numbing as imagining what it will be like to be dead. You’ll have been at least a couple of different people by then.
So, how are you supposed to make a decision in the comparatively youthful age of your early thirties that should only be negated by the grim reaper himself?
For those of you at home scratching your head on this one, I’ll answer for you. You can’t. The unknowns and vicissitudes of life are too many and too volatile for even the wisest of us to make an educated determination that will shape the outcome of our entire lives.
And that’s why you should do it.
I got married at 23 to a moonbeam of a young woman. By the grace of God, we managed to fall in love five summers before, despite the pretensions and fakeness of youth and the temptations of liberal arts colleges and rock and roll. As dumb as I was then, how could I have managed to purposefully make the best possible decision from which the rest of my life would unfold?
I wasn’t wise or smart or religious or at the wrong end of a shotgun; I was just in love and had no idea what that meant. I didn’t realize the incredible amount of faith it took from the both of us (probably more her than me) until years later.
In the book of Genesis, woman was created as an equal ‘fitting helper’ to man; a corresponding piece to complete the puzzle, a positive adversary. Someone to challenge you, to whittle away the erring of boyhood and wilderness within. To keep loneliness at bay and make the world anew.
It wasn’t the same genius that led me to drop out of college and play in a band that would inevitably break up on the precipice of something resembling success. Only the most self-aggrandizing version of myself could take responsibility for my good fortune, but that’s also the one who thinks if things had gone slightly differently, he could have had a professional soccer career, so nothing he says is to be trusted.
It wasn’t me who said yes; it was the unseen hand of divine fate that thrust me here. I can only hope and pray I’ve been as good for her as she has for me. Yeah, I’ll probably never be David, but it won’t be for the lack of skill and effort of her chisel.
So, get married to the woman you love, you’ll never be able to outthink a better outcome. And to my wife, once again, happy anniversary.
sultans
we were children
and I loved you
emaciated, rail-thin
gnawing
desperate for a meal
now we sit like the sultan
made round by the fatness of love
rich as romans
and thick as thieves
on the great trapeze in the sky
visible only to the zealots
and true believers
who sing our song in the sun
and whistle in the rain
held aloft
over despair and loneliness
some sort of divine larceny
years on, scarcely remembered
by those on the ground
humming a tune they know
but can't recall the words
to a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA