A little over ninety years ago, British philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered a famous lecture called "Why I Am Not A Christian," in which he rejected God, Christianity and the notion that only religion produces truly moral people.
Russell wasn't against the idea of love or humanism, nor did he argue that those who sought solace in some kind of god should be deprived of the right to do so. He simply felt that religion wasn't the best way to learn how to be good. In fact, he argued, it was one of the worst. Yet nearly a century later, people still flock to religion for its promise of self-fulfillment, just as they flock to a related institution, marriage, which also promises fulfillment and seems equally indestructible, despite its embarrassing failure rate, anachronistic qualities and implied sexlessness.
A big fat wedding will still fill a movie theater, just as a big fat sermon still puts asses in the pews. Rabid brides remain popular TV characters on par with home renovators and homosexuals.
I won't argue the myriad ways in which marriage as an institution is old, tired and obsolete. That's an old, tired, obsolete argument. But at forty, I'm tired of evading that perennial question: Why have your siblings and every single one of your three-dozen cousins been married and not you? I can't use a broken home as an excuse — my brothers and sisters, raised under the same awful marriage, practically sprinted down the aisles in their twenties; two remain happily married. Nor is it true that I haven't met The One. I've met plenty of The Ones, so many that my sister took to calling my boyfriends The Two, The Three, etc. Counting the last boyfriend, we left off at The Eight.
Truth is, I was afraid, not just of marrying the wrong man at the right time, or marrying the right man at the wrong time. Most people have those fears. My fear was about how malleable, how changeable I was. I was afraid of permanency because I didn't know who I'd be a week, a month, a year from the big day. And though the men who loved me were stellar, I can't say the same for the men I loved. I still assumed one would show up in time to eliminate all those fears. He'd pin me down in a fixed point in time: after college, after I got settled in my career, after I bought a condo, lost ten pounds, went blonde, wrote a book, saved money, got a dog.
Part of the problem was that I was drunk for the better part of the two decades most women spend looking for an appropriate partner.
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Though the men who loved me were stellar, I can't say the same for the men I loved.
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I was drawn to increasingly blurry guys: brats and posers, glowering self-loathers, the last ones to leave the party. Since quitting the booze years ago, I have discovered that, with rare exception, real love did whatever it could to avoid getting tangled up with a drunk girl drenched in fear. Lust stuck around for a while — years, even. But true love, the kind that evolves into sturdy amity, took a walk a while ago.
I can't blame booze entirely. Lots of party girls got married. I went to their weddings. Even the trailer for the upcoming Sex and the City movie implies Carrie Bradshaw will smug down the aisle. But it was another HBO series that helped me understand why marriage remains attractive, even to the chickens. The ten-part series Tell Me You Love Me, just released on DVD, skips the predictable confection of the wedding to expose the hidden decay of neglected marriages. I assumed the series would feature miserable couples bemoaning their arid relationships, envying single folks their magnificent freedom. And we do meet such couples, each in various crises of faith. But during their therapy sessions, we get to see how the abject pain of intimacy brings them thisclose to sloughing off their troublesome spouses so they can lather, rinse, repeat the same sad issues with yet another partner — or how it brings them thisclose to total transformation. I found myself rooting for transformation.
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