First off and unrelated to post title: if you are a prayer, please commune/icate with God for my friends Mike and Stacy. They are in an uncertain and scary moment in a long yearned for, hoped for, prayed for, everything for, pregnancy.

Now, on to scary marriage.

Events of late have conspired to make me consider again that worthy institition. One day recently while wandering around the leaf-strewn neighborhood near my work I found myself keeping pace with a young guy. Old school punk rock: mohawk, leather, chains, tatoos. We pretended we weren’t walking the same speed or direction for awhile, but at the stoplight he gave in and asked directions to the local tavern. I gave them. He said he had to get there fast, before his wife’s shift ended. Why? He had just found out she had cheated on him.

“I’m so sorry,” I said lamely. “I hope the two of you can find a way to work it out.”
“I don’t,” he said, pointing at his cell phone. “This is the third time! She just lies to me and lies to me!”
“That really sucks,” I said.
“Yes, it does. We’ve only been married four months.”
The light changed, he went his direction and I went mine. I prayed for him as he walked away but felt I had missed an opportunity of some kind.

Then a friend told me that marriage was scary, because how do you keep from being sick of each other? This person’s parents, married more than 30 years, talk to each other through the dog: “Spot, mommy’s idea is really harebrained, don’t you think?” “Spot, don’t listen to daddy. he’s so unreasonable!”

Then this weekend I went to a wedding. It was a nice one, full of happiness and hope and the Holy Spirit. But inevitably weddings stir up talk of marriage and inevitably the Mister and I are the longest-wed in the group of acquaintances huddled by the hors d’oeuvres table. And inevitably we are called upon to dispense nuggets of insight. I’m kind of smug about my marriage so I don’t mind talking, to a degree. But part of me realizes that every marriage is as unique as the two people who make it, which puts an obvious limit on the value of any nuggets coming out the nugget dispenser.

Anyway all I can say is that marriage is scary. Not because I might get cuckolded (can a girl get cuckolded?)or sick and tired of the Mister (can’t imagine such a thing!), but because with every passing year I invest more and more in a losing proposition. My career choices, my friends, the music I listen to and movies I watch, where I live, my sex life, my politics, my spiritual path: all deliberately and permanently shaped around my spouse. (Not to say we share all the same tastes and opinions, just that we constantly take the other person into account.) For us, to be happily married means both of us committing to live life together. To change together. To make sure we keep eating out of the same bowl, so to speak. The more we do this, the more there is no going back to our old individual lives. We have a really good time, even in the sandpapery spots when life gets so rough we’re all abrasions.

But what is this thing we’re making together, this marriage? What’s it going to be in the end? Nothing. Zero.
One day, sooner than ever, I’ll lose the Mister, or he’ll lose me. It’s a basic fact, no getting around it. It will be like a sweater unraveled into separate piles of colored yarn. But we keep doing it anyway! In at least this one case, the Now is more than the End. How scary, and how great. Worth it, I suspect.

And that’s the only nugget I got, if it even is one.