To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Ogden Nash (A Word To Husbands)
One thing that bugs me sure and often, is how a man and a woman can stay together in matrimony, year after year, decade after decade, when it is so obvious to me that men and women are not meant to stay together.
Marriage, as a concept, fails dreadfully. It involves the constant cohabitation of two people who do not share families, upbringings, perspectives and are not even of the same gender. It seems to be, from the beginning, a power struggle, one party doing its best to dominate the other party, which either gives in passively, or schemes and struggles to overthrow the power hierarchy in a bloodless (or even bloody) coup. They hold each other back; make their partners feel guilty for whatever it is that they enjoy doing, whether it’s shopping or beer. They are mostly incompatible. If one likes to sleep with the window open, the other cannot sleep unless it is shut and curtained. If one loves parties, the other avoids them like the plague.
And yet, the miracle is that marriage, as a practicality, is generally a brilliant idea. And people who are married will moan and complain and grumble, but they will, without fail, try to convince all their unmarried friends, children, children of friends, friends of children, that married is THE ONLY WAY TO BE. And though the two halves of a couple may be as different from each other as chalk is from a cheese pizza with pepperoni and anchovies, they still manage to develop an inexplicable friendship. And I think what keeps most marriages ticking for years, in spite of the theoretical impossibility, is not love or romance or even dependence, but this very friendship, this understanding that grows with cohabitation.
And since I began with Ogden Nash, I’ll finish with some favorite lines, also from Nash.
“…That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,particularly if he has income and she is pattable”
Ps- I want to thank my ma and baba for not listening to their wiser instincts and quitting a long time ago. Today their marriage turns 28 years old.
