2000-01-20
Since getting married, I seem to think more about death. Not in a particularly morbid or obsessive way, just more than I did before. I think it's because I have the long-established habit of looking to the future, to the Next Big Thing. (Not that I'm alone in this, it's a built-in part of our culture.)
I spent so much of my life geared to looking for love. I wasn't really so aware of it, but once B moved in, I guess I fixed my sights on our getting married. Some in my position now would be preoccupied with the next classic milestone -- procreation -- and frankly I'm surprised I'm not. (We're undecided on the matter.) Instead, I wonder about which of us will predecease the other.
There isn't a lot more to say, it doesn't go too far. It's just, I'll be walking the dogs and idly start wondering. With the exception of my mother, there's some serious longevity on my side, so I think the odds are I'll last longer. But the writer in me expects the ironic, which flips it back to B's outliving me.
And then there are the dogs, who are, statistically anyway, bound to predecease us both. I really don't want to think about that.
I'm thinking about this whole marriage thing. I said in the section above
that I was geared toward it and I was; I've been geared toward it for as
long as I can remember. I recently met a woman at a party who was very much
the opposite. She also married in her mid-thirties. We agreed that this was
a good time to get married. I added, "If only I hadn't been such a nervous
wreck throughout my twenties and early thirties." She said, "Oh, not me. I
loved dating!" Can you imagine anyone loving dating? To me it was never more
than a means to an end.
Anyway, why get married as opposed to living together? I'm glad no one is
asking me to defend the decision, because Id have a hard time articulating
the reasons. (Except for the fact that my employer now withholds a mere
twelve extra dollars a month and B gets health and dental insurance.) It
just felt right, felt fun, felt like the thing to do.
And having a wedding was pretty cool. I read somewhere -- might've been Miss
Manners -- that there are two occasions when the people who love you will try
their hardest to be there, and one of them is your funeral. The fact is that
without this wedding, my best friend of some fifteen years would probably
never have met my family. Hell, B's family would probably never have met my
family. There was something very powerful about having so many people who
care about me in one place, and it will probably never happen again. With me
around to appreciate it, at any rate.
And the presents are nothing to sneeze at. We had a fully functional home,
complete with Henckels knives, but now we have All-Clad cookware as well.
And just for the record, we aren't restaurant-hopping types who have it just
for show; we cook constantly. B, after reading disturbing things about even
"high-end" commercial dog food, has even started cooking for the dogs.
And speaking of marriage... I read today that only 2 percent of American
women who marry continue to use their original surname on its own (90
percent take the husband's name and the remaining 8 percent hyphenate or use
multiple names). I knew I was part of a minority, but I didn't realize just
how small the minority was.
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