The Married Life

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.

It has been seven months since my last posting.

But, before I say my Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, allow me to explain my unforgivable lapse.

I have probably the best excuse, save being dead, that it is possible to have: I got married.

It's interesting, by the way, that being dead should come up. I learned at my wedding that marriage is death. My wife has been attending Holy Cross Lutheran Church for quite some time, and thus we were married by the pastor, Rev. Stephen Mentz. However, my very own uncle, who some time back decided to stop being an architect and to start being a Lutheran minister, was good enough to grace us with a brief sermon as part of the service. The topic of the sermon, naturally, was that marriage is death.

I don't remember a lot of it, because I was spending the time wondering "what the hell is he doing?", and almost all of the attendees were doubtless wondering the same thing. Still, it was ultimately a comforting sermon; because now, whenever I'm feeling a bit rough about married life, I can remind my self that marriage is death, and therefore not a fate worse than death.

All sorts of interesting things have been happening; marriage really turns your outlook on life onto its ear. I was noticing the other night, while I was folding laundry, how drastically one's point of view can be altered.

Most nights I stay up until an obscene hour, because I find it impossible to get to sleep at a reasonable time. This gives me a lot of time to turn on the TV and shut out the lights, so to speak. However, the other night laundry was riding instead of Roy Rogers. (Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" album, for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Now mostly my lovely wife and I do our own laundry. This is a sensible division of labor, because I like to have my shirts folded in sixths, and she likes hers folded in quarters, and neither of us really wants to have someone else fold our laundry the wrong way. Still, the other night I was folding her laundry because it was quarter to one and she wasn't going to get any sleep until it was done. I gallantly volunteered to do it for her, and thus it was that I ended up folding her underwear.

When you are a single male, women's underwear is a very exciting sort of thing. It holds a great deal of interest when it's on, and perhaps a great deal more when it isn't. And no matter how much women's underwear a single guy encounters, the novelty seems still to be there.

When you are married, women's underwear is not an exciting, exotic, titillating thing. When you are married, women's underwear is laundry. Not something to ogle, not something to try to remove. Something to fold.

This motif is repeated, of course. Eating at a restaurant with one's girlfriend is a date; eating at a restaurant with one's wife is something that happens when I don't want to cook dinner that night. When I buy her flowers, they come in pots instead of bouquets.

Ray Bradbury wrote, in his immortal "Martian Chronicles", that "marriage makes people old and familiar while still young." I think he's absolutely right, although I don't agree with the tone in which he wrote it. Bradbury was talking about a young wife who thought that all the love and spontaneity had gone out of her life; I'm asserting that familiarity is a form of stability. And I think that stability is something we should appreciate, not rebel against.