Morning Pages — 16

I’ve been thinking about the nature of marriage a lot lately. Maybe it’s weathering that first big emotional storm, or maybe it’s because so many of my friends seem to be longing for something they don’t have, in marriages or still single.

I re-read “Marriage is an Abduction”, this awesome piece in the New Yorker which is one of those rare pieces of criticism that stands completely alone from the work it critiques (in this case, Gone Girl.)

There’s one section in particular that always strikes me:

Both books restage marriage as a violent crime — an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.

This passage stands in stark contrast to the Christian concept of marriage, which is essentially one long exhalation to sacrifice of the self , to continually give, to be one with the covenant. I’m sure, to many women, happiness lies that way.

For me, I continue to perplex my husband by not seeming particularly sold on marriage, even though I am married. It’s similar to the whole alternate universe things that comics do so well — yes, right now, the me of this time and this universe chose to get married and have a child. The me of another universe may not have done so. She may have done all those things she dreamed of, run away to London, moved to NYC, spent a year biking around West Africa, taken that fellowship opportunity — the possibilities are endless. But knowing that things could have been different aren’t an indictment of my current life, not at all.

When I was younger, my African American studies teacher in high school told the story of his life. He was very proud of his educational accomplishments, having started from a tiny bible college in the South and making it all the way to Yale. He (Mr. Lindo) would have studied at Harvard, but then he got this faraway look in his eyes and said “but then I met a lovely woman and I had two wonderful little boys and I didn’t finish Harvard.” I don’t know what he thinks about that path now, or how it lead him to teach in a trailer in Prince George’s County Public Schools. But these are just choices in life.

Last night, I hung out with a single (by way of divorce) friend whose life I had always admired. From the time we were young, she was always jetting off on some kind of adventure. First it was Europe, then it was the semester in Nice, then it was the Peace Corps, then it was starting a non profit in Mali, then it was doing more international consulting before finally settling here to finish her Masters and look for work. We met up at my favorite wine bar to talk about our lives. And she said to me “You’re living the dream! You’re married and you have a kid and everything.”

Grass is always greener, I suppose.

So once again, the three of us (including the husband) talk about marriage and I find myself explaining my own conclusion about how these things go. To me, it’s simple: your happiness in marriage is about how much you value individual happiness vs. how much you value collective happiness.

For people who value individual happiness and individual pleasures, marriage is always going to be a tough walk. Bonding yourself to another person (even sans kids) means a lot of compromise. It means always negotiating everything, from where you want to live to what kind of job you have, and it’s a hard thing to keep two people in sync and on the same path for their whole lives. If the most important things are things that happen to you as an individual, then marriage is going to be rough.

For people who look to a more collective happiness, marriage is much easier. But it requires quite a bit of sacrificing of the self. Ideally, you don’t really think about the old stuff anymore. The happiness I found in my 20s isn’t the same happiness I find in my 30s. In my 20s, I took a lot of pleasure in an all day drunken brunch. To me, that now seems like a colossal waste of time and I take a lot of pleasure in the thirty bucks I spent on can lights for the front garden. It’s just a different accounting of value.

I told my friend a story, to illustrate the differences: as a family, we went out and got ice cream from a local shop. The shop was out of my favorite flavor, which was the whole reason for making the trip into the next town over. There was nothing else I wanted, so I didn’t get ice cream. If I put a high premium on my individual happiness, I would have been upset. But the ice cream shop had other lovely flavors my family enjoyed, and a view of the train station, which delighted the kid. All in all, it was a lovely family outing. I didn’t eat any ice cream, but I was still happy.

Neither of these ways is wrong, mind. I think there is this push to rank one way of life over another. But collective happiness and individual happiness are just frameworks in my opinion — they help you understand what you want, and that makes all the difference.