Why I'm Getting Married

Note about the future of Bite Me at the end of this blog.

            So, long and awesome story short, my boyfriend, normally called Wade on this blog, but I’m just going to call him by his real name in this particular post, proposed on our anniversary in the most perfect way possible: In a huge scheme at my beloved INation with everyone watching. It was awesome, and I may post about it in detail later. For now, photos:

            

           

            Now, a few days later, a friend of mine on Facebook who is not interested in marriage posed a question to her married and betrothed friends that boils down to: Why get married? Specifically, why pledge your life to someone when life changes so drastically as well as why enter into the legal institution of marriage, which more and more people are beginning to recognize as an outdated institution with a multitude of problems from a societal, feminist, humanist, and cultural standpoint.

            It’s a good question, and it’s one I mulled over years ago on this very blog. I’ve changed quite a bit since that previous 2012 post (the boyfriend mentioned is not the one I’m with now, for instance,) but I do carry many of the doubts about the institution of marriage as I did then. The main thing that has changed for me is my fear of marriage and my doubts about my ability for lifelong commitment.

            The answer as to why I agreed to the institutional aspect is a simple one: I will enter into the legal institution for its benefits, which make certain aspects of lifelong partnership much easier to manage. These aspects include financial investments, spousal career benefits, blah, blah, blah, we all know them. While it’s true that couples who wish to remain unmarried can participate in some of these, institutional marriage remains the easiest and most comprehensive method for managing said aspects of lifelong partnership.

            The answer of why I committed to a lifelong partnership of any kind is a much more personal one, and it hinges entirely on my and my fiancé’s (AHHH!! I SAID FIANCÉ!) definition of marriage and interpretation of such a commitment. This is the area in which I have most changed since my post in 2012, and it really has to do with finding the right person, and with having grown up quite a bit in the past three years.*

            My beliefs about marriage have been shaped largely by my parents and their relationship. They’ve been together for over 30 years with no drama (on a marital level—my brother and I were teenagers at the same time, so there was an abundance of drama in other departments). I’ve been fortunate enough to have parents who love each other, work well together, and are a perfect example of what to do well in a marriage, and what marriage can mean.

            For me, marriage is the commitment to sharing your life with a person you love romantically and platonically—someone you just like being around, like having around, like to share things with. This may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s a big difference between romantic love and just enjoying the hell out of someone. I know Josh is my future husband in this way because, out of anyone I know, he’s the one I like to hang out with the most. He’s the one whose presence I consistently enjoy. I love spending time with him, being around him, and sharing the dumbest details of my day with him. He’s also the person whose more annoying habits drive me the least insane. I just can’t see myself flipping out over any of them, and I have lost my shit over some very minor idiosyncrasies of friends/family/former partners in the past. Again, this all sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how many people in relationships drive each other nuts. Maybe it works for them, like some sort of Pride and Prejudice effect, but for me, I want to be with someone I’m happy to come home to after a hard day. I’m not so into the “You annoy me more than any other person on Earth…and that’s why I love you!” type of relationship.

            As I said before, marriage is about sharing your life with someone. Every. Single. Day. My spouse will be with me through every New Year’s Eve, every time my friends vent to me, every bill, every wedding I’m dragged to, every cousin’s birthday party, every triumph, every tragedy. That’s another aspect of marriage that’s been heavily romanticized, but I’m not sure many people understand completely on a practical level. I’m not a dependent person, but I’m not terribly independent, either. Ask any of my Facebook friends; I like to share! And the idea of sharing my life with someone, from the dullest machinations to the pivotal life events, is something I am drawn to. I want a partner in this life.

            Even this last paragraph sounds like a romanticization of marriage, and it’s surprisingly difficult for me to find the right words to best express my point. When I try to figure out how the fuck to do my taxes properly, I want to do that with Josh trying to figure it out right alongside me. I want us to be a well-oiled machine for making life run as smoothly as possible; texting each other about defrosting dinner, picking up the kids from extracurriculars, etc. I want a partner for every day, not just marriage/babies/romantic version of old age.

            Also, for me, marriage is choosing the foundation for my family of procreation. Josh will be the patriarch of the family we chose to create; a family that will grow and expand into generations. I have always taken the creation of family of procreation weirdly seriously; like Game of Thrones Houses seriously. I’m not exaggerating. I may or may not design a sigil…but I digress. My point is that an aspect of marriage for me is choosing the person with whom to create a House. The creation of a family is one of the most fascinating and desirable aspects of life for me, and a lifelong partner with whom to create and cultivate a family is the critical first step.

            For me, marriage isn’t so much “I love this man and I want the world to know! I want to have a huge money wasting wedding and make babies and grow old together and be the perfect love story!” so much as “I love this person. I can live with this person for a very, very long time. I want create life with this person. I want to handle life with this person.”

            I feel like I’ve already made this painfully obvious, but just for any particularly obtuse outliers: My personal definition of marriage is NOT my blanket definition of marriage. This is what I want my marriage to be. This is NOT what I think everyone’s marriage should be.

            As for the issues with marriage regarding, well, the fact that it will be two people, who change over years and decades and have a chance of growing into two people who no longer work well together, that isn’t something I glossed over when Josh proposed. One of the wisest things I’ve ever heard regarding marriage came from my mother, which is both fitting because of her successful marriage and ironic because she’s worked for divorce lawyers for 30 years. She said, “You know, you really just have to go into it and hope for the best. That’s all you can do.”

            I know that sounds simple, maybe even overly so, but for a person like me, who suffers from overthinking and overanalyzing every single aspect of life to the point of psychological disorder, it is the perfect marriage advice to live by.

*I’m not insinuating that people who don’t want to commit to something like marriage are not grown up or are somehow immature, just that as I have grown up, I have developed the desire to settle down in certain ways.

This has by far been the longest break I’ve taken from Bite Me, and there is no real reason for it, other than I haven’t had anything I wished to talk about in blog form. I’m hoping to continue Bite Me, since it’s been going on for so long, and I do love a good rant, but I may post biweekly or monthly rather than attempt to post weekly, especially when I’m writing (fiction-wise) as much as I am right now.