marriage

It’s a lie.  I know you’re out there, you people that think marriage is this great solution to one of life’s most painful problems.  You think one day you’ll find someone perfect who won’t ever break your heart or treat you with callous disregard.  You think the years of constant misery spent dating all the wrong people will some day come to an end and you will be with “the one” you were always meant to be with.  It will be the perfect marriage, full of happiness and content.  It’s time to wake the fuck up.

It’s some Hollywood manufactured bullshit that love conquers all.   There are two kinds of love, romantic love and the kind of love you feel for family.  Romantic love is weak and fleeting.  It fucks with your head and convinces you that you feel things you really don’t.  It’s only true power is guile; it can disguise itself in lust, infatuation and belonging.  Marriage will stomp all over romantic love.  It will just take one giant shit all over it.  I know that’s not a fun image but you need to see it to believe it.  The only chance romantic love has in a marriage is if somehow it can transform itself into the other love, that unconditional love that like an ugly, disgusting cockroach can survive almost anything.  That love, that love can fucking bust through walls.  It can have the piss beat right out of it and still come back for more.  That’s the love that can conquer all, and let me tell you, people don’t dream about that love.

This morning my wife said to me, “When I die, I hope I come back as a man.”  That’s the kind of thing you hear in a marriage;  a matter-of-fact statement, delivered with such contempt that you can nearly see the thorns spiking from the words as they fly through the air.  What she meant, and believe me there is no room for misinterpretation, is that men have it easy in life.  What she probably didn’t mean is to have those words tear through my soul as if to disembowel it from my very body.  What she probably didn’t mean is to stab the heart that pours itself into trying to make her happy with nearly every beat of its miserable existence.

I’m not going to ramble on about how most married guys I know certainly don’t have it easy.  That’s not really the point I’m trying to make here.  What I’m trying to tell you, however bleak it may sound, is that there is no end to pain where the heart is concerned.  Love is not easy.  As with most things in life, its rewards come at great cost.  What you need to ask yourself is whether or not you’re willing to pay.