Without Ceremony

How I've managed to avoid getting married for forty years.

by Lisa Gabriele

April 15, 2008

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.

Though the men who loved me were stellar, I can't say the same for the men I loved.

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.

Of all the show's couples, the one I truly fell in love with is glowering Hugo (my type) and party girl Jamie (er, my twenties). Their entire courtship — the fuckfests, the fighting, the breakups, the booze, the drugs, the makeup sex — are all pit stops to the inevitable altar. They know they're doomed; Hugo even tells Jamie he felt like he was "detoxing" after yet another breakup. Still, the first season ends with their quickie ceremony, the camera capturing their stunned expression. For me, watching this episode was like reliving those years in high def, with an alternate ending.

A couple months ago Lori Gottlieb wrote a much-forwarded article called "Marry Him!" in The Atlantic. It was subtitled, "The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough." Gottlieb is a single mother of a sperm-donor child. Her theory: baby first while there's time, love of my life later. In classic Carrie Bradshaw-esque rhetoric Gottlieb asks: Is it better to be alone, or to settle? The answer, according to her: settle.

That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling "Bravo!" in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go . . . Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

It's a funny, forthcoming essay, but I wish Gottlieb had elaborated on her evident fearlessness instead of tossing crappy advice over her shoulder to younger women. Settle. Go for good enough, she tells them, failing to mention that settling requires the awful ability to lie to yourself, which, in my experience takes a lot of work (and drinking) to pull off. I couldn't do it, though I tried, bending every hapless boyfriend I dragged home into the shape of Mr. Right.

Am I seriously considering spending the rest of my life with this guy, or do I know in the back of my mind that this will end, but that at least I will have been married?

For me, it's been awhile since the aunties asked that perennial question: why are you not married? I still don't have a good answer. But I do know that the better question is: how did I manage to avoid it? Smarts had nothing to do with it. I was certainly stupid enough. I had the potential to run fast down that aisle, like Jamie and Hugo, before sober second thoughts settled in, before I started to question my motives: Do I actually love this guy, or is he a prize I have won? Am I marrying him to say I got picked? Because this is what people do? So I won't be pitied or scorned? Am I seriously considering spending the rest of my life with this guy, or do I know in the back of my mind that this will end, but that at least I will have been married?

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown . . . the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." Today, most couples I know have turned their backs on God and religion. In fact, the last time they saw the inside of a church was probably the day they got married. But when you have no religion, no god, no spiritual practice to turn to for comfort, it's easy to turn your relationship into your altar, to give it the power to heal you, transform you and save you. That's why most relationships crack under pressure, I think — they're not built to fix us. We're supposed to fix them. If Russell is right that religion is the last place to go to if you're looking for God, then perhaps marriage is the last place to go to if you're looking for love.

©2008 Lisa Gabriele and hooksexup.com