Love Hotel

Love is a many splendored thing

I’ve been reading a book called “Love’s Apprentice”. It is (as the subtitle proclaims) a woman’s education in the art of love. What’s frustrating about books of this sort is that marriage is always some sort of disease that kills anything like love off with the scorching rapidity of MRSA sepsis.
I often feel like I’m missing something important about this. Like I’m swanning about my daily life happily, and then one day Paul is going to present me with a laundry list of things I’ve said, things I’ve done, inadequacies, horrors and meanness that I’m simply not tracking.
Once, I was dating someone (whom I should not have been dating at all, rebound and all that) who told me his therapist recommended that we stop seeing each other immediately. That I had been physically and emotionally abusive to him. I was astounded. I recalled nothing more than an intense discussion or two with him. Nothing that I would even consider and argument. When he laid out the facts to me, I remembered exactly the event that he was describing. I had sat on his lap, with my hands beneath his chin, which I tilted up, and looked him deeply in the eyes. What we had been talking about was his, as it turned out intractable, impotence. I was telling him that it was all right, that we could take things as slowly as he needed (Now! Dammit! Now! Fuck me Now!!!). It was intense, for sure. His therapist, so he told me anyway, had advised him that I was violating his physical boundaries by sitting on his lap and forcing him to look me in the eyes. I was violating his emotional boundaries by doing the same and forcing him to talk about his erectile dysfunction and humiliating him in the process.
Whuhuhuhuhut the Fuhuhuhuck?
We parted ways. For sure. I’m not going to be inflicting myself upon people and ruining whatever fragile sense of self they have. No thanks.
But maybe I just am by like living here with my baby and my husband. I got married at the excruciatingly old age of thirty two. At least by some standards. The woman in the book I just read was twenty seven. So here we are. No spring chickens.
I got married because I love Paul more than anyone or anything. I want him to be happy more than anyone or anything. (I’m sorry, I love you all and I wish the best for you, but seriously)
I’m not play-acting out some conversation with society or the world we live in, or my parents, or his parents, although I’ve had to have an extended conversation in action with people at work or at the store. “Let me see that ring! You’re a legitimate woman now! I never knew you were so conventional! What a cute baby! You need a bib to keep her from drooling!” I’ve just thought that I’ve finally found someone who I love and who loves me and who I am completely and deeply committed to sticking with for-like-ever.
I see the people I know who are getting or who have gotten married and I feel like they’re doing the same thing. If things get tough, we work them out. If things get too tough, we’ll get counseling and search ourselves tirelessly. If things get weird, we’ll ride them out. We talk. We get bored. We have sex, not often enough for either of us, but we have a baby and are tired, and know that it’s not enough for either of us. We are companions, and not like boring asexual companions but like ACTUAL companions, who accompany each other and enjoy each other’s company.
I don’t feel like I’ve given up love or happiness. I don’t feel like I’m waiting for the axe to fall because I never really wanted to engage in this institution in the first place. I think my sister did that. I remember her calling me to tell me she was cheating on her husband and never really believed in monogamy in the first place. She was twenty three when she married her first husband. Who believes in monogamy at twenty three, really?
So perhaps I should just say, Paul I love you. I think we and the others who we know now have started to redefine not only love as a long term sustainable happy fun thing, but we’re also redefining marriage. Marriage.
Marriage.
Marriage is awesome. And hot. And cool. And complicated. And I love it.

And I hope I’m not living in some dream. If Paul has a list I hope he’ll give it to me soon. Otherwise, I’m just going to be here all like loving him and Betty and being happy and crap.