Most of the people I know say they will NOT get married. They apparently want to continue the crazy bachelor lifestyle they are living. Or think they are living. Or wish they could be living. No one I know is a super stud and I can’t think of one single instance in the four years I’ve known these people that one of them went home with someone, or got a number that they actually called, or was actually called by someone who took their number.
I point out these things to them, when I tell them that they will be married some day. Yes, they will, because they don’t want to die alone anymore than anyone else does. They don’t want to whittle away their golden years watching CNN and hoping that when the phone rings it might be a relative. They don’t want to be the weird aunt who never got married and was cool for a while, but now wears too much lipstick, has too many cats and is always trying to pawn off strange, glass-like candies on her nephews.
And neither do you and neither do I.
Because that is what it is all about. Someone being there, beside you when most of the world doesn’t consider you worth sitting next to. Someone who will look at you, and won’t see a wizened, old, toothless prune…instead they’ll see you at twenty-five. And under their fingers you’ll feel like twenty-five because you and he or she together make something more vibrant than you’d ever be apart. Someone to touch you, hold you and love you when the world wants nothing more than to deny your existence.
When you can’t recall anymore the little details, the two of you can pool your memories and everything will stay vivid. The children. The love making. The pain. It’s the time you will have shared that will prop you up against each other when your bodies want to lay down and decay. You will protect each other and keep each other young. Marriage bonds people psychologically in a way that living together seldom does.
In dying the one who goes first will die near the one they love, and so they needn’t be afraid…the one who dies second, passes on with the knowledge that they needn’t fear the unknown, because their spouse is there, waiting.
It isn’t perfect and it isn’t always like that in the end, people grow apart and they move on, and they hate and have too much pride. But somewhere, there are two people, shriveled and spotted, who are looking at each other, and all they see is beauty.