Right now, I'm watching one of my best friends go through a divorce after her husband decided to come out. For me, this is a very old song and dance, and I'm tired of it. From my own father's infidelity and eventual exit of the closet, to Celia's infidelity and eventual exit of the closet...and now my friend's husband.
I naively want to assert that it's 2015, being gay is not the same as it was in 1986 when my parents separated, and not even the same as it was nearly a decade ago when Mike and Celia split. Can we please get to a point where people aren't completely lying to themselves and their partners and leaving them to make decisions with faulty information?
Legally, marriage is more or less a business contract. You work together and intermingle your lives together for a better rate of survival. It has serious consequences, and we have been doing the whole marriage thing for countless generations by now. You'd think we would understand that relationships are work.
So people spend fortunes to get married to people they've never lived with, people they barely know so well as to not realize they don't know them at all, and then "something bad happens" and they are shocked to find themselves talking to lawyers more than their spouses.
There are days when Mike and I have that kind of love you see in romantic comedies - finishing each other's sentences or reading each other's minds, falling all over each other giggling and laughing and just generally enjoying us. But we have nights where we go to bed grumpy, most often because I'm prone to reading far more into things than is reasonable and get pissed off over some imagined slight.
We are a good match, but we work at it. Normally, anyway. We try to be reasonable with our expectations and try to be open with our communication. We both drive each other crazy, but we thankfully like who each of us are at the base of it all to not avoid being ourselves to keep conflict at a minimum.
So back to my friend.
She has tried hard on this relationship. She has held her husband's hand through his coming to terms with his bisexual leanings. She didn't kick him out when she found out he had cheated on her with a man. And now she is looking at the new year as a single mother while her ex spends a lot of time feeling shitty about the choices he has made.
Marriage is not for those lacking in self reflection. Love means saying you're sorry repeatedly and honestly and actually trying to do better next time. It's not easy all the time and it certainly isn't pretty a good percentage of the time.
My advice to most people is to not get married. Don't get married until you're sure -- and I'll admit, the only thing you can be sure about is when it's over because you're signing paperwork saying as much.
I'm not much of a romantic. I knew before the ring went on how difficult devoting your life to a shared ideal was: I watched my mother pick two lousy husbands. You could say it had an effect on me. But here I am, a wife. Do I know how all of this will pan out? No.
What I know is that, if this marriage dies, it will do so after a long struggle because I take my promises very seriously. I will wear my war paint, I will grit my teeth, and I won't go out without a fight.
I signed up for a lifetime with a guaranteed travel companion, and sometimes that road will be bumpy. I don't know what's at the end of this journey, but I know the roads won't always be clear and smooth. Sometimes you have to be prepared for disaster, even on the most beautiful of days. Otherwise you take things for granted and get sideswiped later.
Not cool.
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