Marriage...

It often baffles me as to how we spend our lives searching for the “right” person and then select a person, dedicate our lives to that person and then spend the rest of our time trying to get away from that person.  Well, maybe not away physically, but emotionally, sexually. Hell, let's be honest, we often want away from them physically also a great deal of the time.

I was scrolling through Facebook this morning and there was this video of husbands and wives in the super market selecting fruit and/or vegetables.  The wives were clearly “in charge” and the men stood idly by.  The men, when their wives weren’t looking, took an item their wife had already selected out of her bag and gave it to her as a possible selection.  There were about 20 couples they did this with and in every shot, the wife put the selected fruit or veggie back, often with a look of disgust or disdain.  The husbands laughed.

I did not find it all that amusing.  In fact, it kind of broke my heart.  It left me with so many questions...

Why were they there together but the Husbands totally sidelined and just standing there?  Did this happen because they were told that was their role, did they just assume it or did their wives treatment of them relegate them to a position of silent presence, like a young child, to be seen but not heard?

Why did every single woman reject the fruit or vegetable offered by her Husband?  She had already approved it, but then when he offered it, the women rejected it every single time?  Why did men think this was funny?  Was this the kind of thing they acted like they thought was funny, but silently resented?  I mean, I fucking would!  My opinion or selection is below your standard, every single time??

Why did the women dismiss the Husband’s selection EVERY SINGLE TIME?  Of an item that had previously passed their inspection?  Why did all these women have this not so underlying scorn for their partners?  Why were they with men they clearly didn’t respect or trust with the most basic task of selecting fruit?

Why were the men with women who would so diss them and treat them like an incompetent child?

Was this just a one off, the relationship being more reciprocal and mutual in places other than the grocery store?  Was the Husband tagging along and the Wife resentful of his entrance to what was considered her domain?  Was this something that happened every week?

Why is the supermarket the woman's domain? I swear to fucking God, it is not my domain. I hate it there, and if I could never, ever go again, I wouldn't.

I could go on...but I think you get the fucking point.

Honestly, the whole thing made me feel sick.  THIS is what is wrong with marriage.  This not so subtle disdain that seems to pass as part and parcel to a marriage or long term relationship. Men should not be viewed as an inconvenience, a trifling child who is inept in so many ways.  I would not be happy at all if I were a man to be viewed as such and treated as though I am completely useless even for the most basic task of fruit or vegetable selection...

And the women!  Fuck, I have been that woman.  And it pained me to see.  I used to feel that way about my ex-husband.  Like he was not useful and a bother.  That he was not competent to do the most basic tasks because he didn’t succumb to do them MY way.  It was a painful look back at who I became in that marriage...I did not like it one bit.  Which, is, by the way, one of the main reasons I left.  I did not like who I had become, even more than I did not like him anymore.

Why does marriage seem to do this to people?  Why is there this underlying disdain that seems to freely flow from women to men, and men to women?  And why the fuck do we put up with it?

I know I couldn’t.  I could never stay with someone I felt that way about.  I could never be treated like I was incompetent or inept.  And if proximity and repeated contact bred in me a feeling of that towards my significant other, count me the fuck out.  I do not want to feel that way about a person ever again! Myself included.

Why do we devolve to this?  It seems we all spend the effort and time in our selection process, how is it so fucking common to end up in this awful place?  Why aren’t marriages always places where people love and support each other and the love grows exponentially over the years?

After 30 years of watching marriage implode, I guess I would say that we are lazy.  We take things for granted, we fail to see our partner because we see them every single day. Perhaps the intimacy of marriage is too much for some of us so we find ways to create distance to survive the confines of the intimate encounter on the daily.  Does daily intimacy just ask too much from us?

I know for me, if I were to ever marry again, I want to cherish and be cherished.  I want someone who looks at me every day and marvels in me.  And I, in them.  I want the relationship to be a vehicle for personal and intimate growth.  I want to have hard conversations and outright fights.  I want to hold nothing back, partly because I held so much back before.  Can I actually do that?  I am not sure, which is why I remain single.  What I want to give and receive is something I am not sure I have in me.  I, mean, I want to have it in me, and I do believe it is in there, but my last go round with this whole lifetime commitment ended badly, and I did not like him, appreciate him and he irritated the fuck out of me daily.  I did not cherish and I was not cherished.  We were the couple in the supermarket, for sure.

And I hate that.  Really, I do. But it was who and what I became. Perhaps it was marriages' fault, perhaps it was all mine. If I could unwind this particular conundrum, I would be fabulously wealthy, and likely still single.

I am idealist.  I know that no relationship will ever live up to my idyllic thoughts about it. The reality is always way harder than the idea of something.  But I do believe, since leaving that marriage, I have done the work on myself which allowed me to select a man I did not respect, who in turn did not respect me.  My marriage was all about each of us trying to recreate the person into who and what we wanted them to be, instead of being able to respect the persons we were.  I see that now.  I should have never married him.  He should have never married me.  He was never who I wanted him to be, and I am quite sure I was never who he wanted me to be, either.

In the end, we are just another couple who got it wrong.  Had children and divorced.  So commonplace, cliché really.

I have a friend who seems to have gotten it right.  Her husband refers to her as “his most favorite person in the world.”  That is what love and marriage should be about.  And she equally loves him and feels like he has her back always.  They adore each other and the life they have created shows the love in action.  They have their squabbles.  But they fucking love each other and it shows in their children, in their lives and their marriage.  It isn’t often I see a marriage like that.  It makes me cry, actually, when I think about it.  It is that rare.  It is that special.  And it provides me great hope for the rest of us that it is possible to get it right.

Why does it always seem to devolve into some sort of passive domesticity that results in no one being happy, comfortable or having their marriage be the place they feel the most supported, loved, desired, cherished and adored?

Aren’t we the architects of our relationships after all?  Why the fuck aren’t we doing a better job?  (I do realize that if we all did a better job, I would be out of a job...). I think, in today’s world, the land of temporary dreams and superfluous and tenuous connection, my job security increases on the daily.  It is said people are getting married less these days but that doesn’t bear out in my world.  People are still getting divorced at alarming rates and the stories, though their are particular “flavors” of divorce stories, are usually the same.  Two people who loved each other enough to make the leap, now can’t really stand each other...sometimes openly, often with a great deal of the spite and disdain barely contained beneath their surfaces...

Why is marriage the place that love seems to go to die?  Is it marriages fault?  Or is this just we have done to the institution?  Perhaps the institution was never supposed to be about love.  Marriage was a social construct devised to protect wealth and to provide legitimacy to children...perhaps the idea of romantic love is what fucked up the institution to begin with?

There are those out there though, I have met them, who have taken the vehicle of marriage and made it a stable, fun, dependable, vital, loving basis for their lives.  And their lives are forever better for it.  I envy those people, I really do.  I honor the amount of work required to sustain it over decades.  If you are happily, lovingly married for decades, congratulations!  I honestly am impressed, awed even.

I am not sure what fate waits for the rest of us...

Again, still...