I was insulted when the man I’d later marry told me early in our relationship that he dreamed we got hitched in an Elvis Presley wedding chapel in Las Vegas at my insistence. It wasn’t the venue I despised, but the idea of marriage itself. His dream came soon after I told him that I never intended to wed. I didn’t intend to tie myself to someone who I would inevitably come to loathe, I’d said, impressed by my own fatalism. I needed to be able to leave when the relationship palled. Max didn’t try to dissuade me but said he thought it would be unimaginably sad to consign oneself to spending a life moving from one not particularly meaningful relationship to another. Usually I enjoyed sparring with suitors on the subject of marriage, but I pondered this and didn’t find an easy rebuttal. Like mine, Max’s parents were divorced. But while my parents’ divorce had been a relief, Max wished his family had stayed intact. I found his longing endearing but also misguided and intensely naïve.
I learned while eavesdropping at the age of 10 that my mom had been married and divorced before she married my father. Holding court with her church ladies, she joked that she was so relieved to be rid of her first husband, she nearly sent his next wife a sympathy card. My mom howled with laughter as the group chuckled uncertainly, and I was filled with ecstatic hope. If my mom had split from someone else, I thought, surely she’d divorce my father. He was a dictatorial man, intent on bending my merrily intractable mother to his will. Even before my mom defied him by starting a Holy Roller church in our living room, my parents’ union was a continual showdown, a series of diatribes, shattered china, and cars screeching away into the night.
But when I asked my mom about her first marriage that day, she said she’d ended it before she found Jesus. Now that she understood the Bible to mandate staying together for life, she was stuck. My father resisted divorcing too. He agonized over the sanctity of his family tree, over his parents’ insistence that their people didn’t do that sort of thing. But as my mom continued to speak in tongues, play her tambourine, and boom her sermons over a microphone every Wednesday night—to the amazement and disgust of our posh neighbors—my father finally served her with papers. I was thrilled. And fairly sure I’d never be so foolish as to get married myself. After my new stepfather molested me, my resolve to avoid that kind of commitment deepened.
The marriages I knew of on my mom’s side of the family all seemed extravagantly doomed in one way or another. My mom’s father had spent so much money on liquor and other women that my Texan granny said, “I couldn’t even buy your mother a goddamned toothbrush.” Granny divorced him in 1944, when my mom was only three years old. Ultimately, he was said to have been married 13 times, to 12 women. And Granny’s father, also an alcoholic lothario, had moved his family around Texas to various construction jobs and then run off with other women. Time and again, he stranded my great-grandmother in unfamiliar towns with two young daughters and no money, so that her brother back in Dallas had to hitch up the wagon and go fetch them. My great-grandmother became depressed, and eventually suicidal, but stayed with him until he died, sometime after their 50th anniversary. My father, too, enjoyed juggling women. After my parents’ divorce, he often used me as an excuse to get out of seeing one girlfriend when he wanted to see another. During my parents’ marriage, my mom had once come upon him walking around a lake holding a young woman’s hand. My father claimed she was a distraught student in the class he was teaching as an adjunct professor.
Each of my early relationships seemed to echo a facet of this family dysfunction in some new, increasingly twisted way. My first boyfriend was sweet, but toward the end of our time together, he lied adamantly about being a nonsmoker, despite the fact that his mouth tasted like an ashtray. I wondered what else he might be lying about and triangulated out of the relationship with a guy who was maybe breaking up with his girlfriend but happy to pick me up for drunken midnight hangouts while he tried to make up his mind. My first college boyfriend was charming and flattering in the courtship phase, but when we started dating, he revealed that he wasn’t really attracted to my looks, only my mind. I tried to be okay with that for about nine months, and then we parted ways. Later, I launched into a long-term relationship with a man who came from a family that rivaled mine in dysfunction and who had also been molested. Our relationship was a combustion of shouting, sex, and a thousand endings. I broke up with him for good at the age of 22, when I was unhappily embarking on my first year of law school.
I prided myself on never making the same twisted relationship choice twice, but all these painful relationships seemed fated, close cousins to each other in some way that I hadn’t anticipated and that, even afterward, I couldn’t fully see. I felt increasingly doomed by a history that seemed to suffocate and override any individual choice I might make. By this time, a certainty had settled that marriage would never be a good fit for me.
I ran into Max a few months after the breakup. I’d first known him in ninth grade and had a secret crush on him. Later, we’d gone to the same state university and tried to be friends, but I was mired in a toxic relationship I didn’t want to talk about, whereas Max was endlessly mourning the end of his parents’ marriage. Our experiences seemed so different that I felt we had little to say to each other, and I flaked on returning his calls. When we happened upon each other again and made vague plans to meet up for coffee, I thought my early attraction to him had run its course. Over the phone beforehand, though, I learned that he had a daughter from a failed relationship of his own, which seemed to have made him more humble and less sure about what should happen between two people in love. I still didn’t think of it as a date when we met at a diner. We talked for hours, though, and when he expressed surprise at the length of my last relationship, I found myself thinking, You and I will be together much longer than that. Still, marriage was not on my mind.
I soon learned that my youthful crush on him had been mutual—and also that he’d written the anonymous note from a secret admirer left in my mailbox years before. I’d studied the note on and off, scrutinizing the handwriting, going back over old letters and yearbooks to compare, and developed the notion that, when I was very old, I’d fall in love with the person who left it.
Max was easy to talk to, smart, and funny. We both liked to read, and we both liked a lot of time alone to work on our art. I didn’t want to have biological children, but I loved spending time with his daughter. We dated for more than two years after his Vegas wedding dream, and then one day, I had an epiphany: Though I didn’t want to get married in general, I did want to spend the rest of my life with Max in particular. Never shy about expressing my feelings, I informed him of my realization with the same intensity that someone might announce their determination to marry in an Elvis Presley wedding chapel. After all my years of uncertainty, he was taken aback. I was patient at first. It made sense that he needed some time. But a few months later, insulted that he didn’t share my certainty that we should get married, I broke up with him—for about a week. Then I realized it didn’t make sense to split up with the person you wanted to spend your life with just because they didn’t want to commit in a ceremony you yourself had viewed with suspicion and disgust for most of your life. I apologized and we got back together, and I began to resume my prior practice of ridiculing marriage. A few months later, we were at our friends’ wedding rehearsal, standing outside in a citrus grove after dinner, and he asked me to marry him. It was a casual request, unplanned and perfect. No ring, no bowing down on the ground, just the shared conviction that our lives would be better if we committed to spending them together.
Twenty-four years after we married at the young age of 26, we’re still committed to each other. We respect each other’s art; we commiserate over the time spent on day jobs. We give each other love, support, and a great deal of space. As my cynical young self had foreseen, we’ve had rocky times. We’ve become familiar with flashes of each other’s negative family dynamics, as our own disagreements dredge them up time and again. But we’ve also known the joy and comfort of being together and being known by each other. The sudden conviction that I wanted to spend my life with Max was one of the truest moments of insight I’ve ever had, more powerful than generations of bad marriages—a torch of pure faith in the stifling cave of my cynicism, a choice I’ve been able to look to over the years as proof that the patterns of my ancestors are not necessarily fated to repeat.
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Marriage Skepticism: A Love Story
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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