Humans are monogamous, but we’re really bad at it.
As a friend recently said, she can understand why marriage was (and is, in many cultures) a financial decision and not a romantic one. Of course, she was a little upset with her spouse when she said that, but she’s got a point.
Looking back on my 46 years of marriage, I’m not so sure getting married is a great financial decision. Romance is definitely overrated as a reason to get married, too. Love certainly gets you off to a good start and a giddy beginning. That momentum lasts a while, but when things get tough, and you get lonely and put-upon, it seems like a good idea to find yet another soul mate, and it’s hard to resist unless you have some other reason to stay.
That hasn’t stopped couples from figuring out how to fool around, no matter what the official policy is about faithfulness. I never did it, myself, even when I was terminally fed up with my spouse, not for the sake of morality but because (a) I had made a promise, and I keep my promises and (b) it wasn’t worth the trouble. As I said to my adult kid the other day, when you get the urge to have an affair, I recommend joining a fandom instead. It’s a lot more rewarding.
Mind you, I give due credit to people who manage to maintain open marriages, polycules, and various other arrangements, but from what I can see, it’s just too much work, and often a just a first step toward divorce.
Besides, I always had a hard time managing my schedule, and I would always be double-booked.
Marriage is handy for raising a kid, whether you divide up the child care or not. But you just don’t know how your partner will handle being a parent, and when you’re talking about nightmare fears, that one is up there.
Even friendship with your spouse is not guaranteed. From time to time you really, really dislike the person you’re tied to, and you would be happy if they died. I felt that way from time to time, believe me.
Being married is not even a good way to ensure mutual care. My husband promised on our first serious date that he would take care of me, for instance, but what he meant by “taking care” was not what I meant, and so I often was very disappointed. For example, he really wanted to buy me presents that would be a surprise, instead of what I asked for, so I ended up with a lot of jewelry his mother would have loved, instead of the kind I liked.
I don’t think he ever understood me very well.
So would I get married again, if I was given the chance to do it all over again? Oddly enough, hell, yeah, I would.
He thought I was a catch, even though I wasn’t his usual type. I felt exactly the same way about him. He loved having someone to gossip with, and we had a lot of in-jokes. We defended each other against the world, sometimes, and provided excuses for escape from intolerable situations. I saved his ass a number of times, and consoled him when he lost yet another friend, and he bragged and complained about me to those friends.
He liked to have me watch television with him, so when I sat down next to him with my book, he would rub my feet, sometimes for an hour.
My husband’s job was to talk to all the neighbors and the bus drivers, to make friends with the odd-job men, and to make everyone happy. I found out after his death that a lot of the neighbors didn’t even know who I was, but they all knew “Mr. Steve.” That was fine by me. I’m a little face-blind, and I forget names.
Dealing with customer service was my job. Except when it came to really bad situations, where I would put him on the phone and leave the room, because it was so hard to hear him talking to some poor helpless person that way. (He hissed. He was venomous. People caved.)
My main job was to protect him from himself, because like our neighbor, he kept getting entangled in situations he couldn’t get out of. He stayed in awful jobs out of loyalty, for instance, and he kept trying to take care of women who reminded him of his mother, and to affiliate himself with men who seemed nicer than his father.
One of those situations he couldn’t get out of was the cancer that killed him (he refused to get a colonoscopy until too late), and it came as a complete surprise to him to be in that situation. “I promised I would take care of you, and you ended up taking care of me,” he said faintly, with surprise, near the end.
“That’s how it works,” I told him briskly, and moved on, because another job of mine in the marriage was to be matter-of-fact and stoic. He hated it when I cried. He would leave the room, and now he couldn’t leave because he was in a hospital bed, so I wouldn’t cry.
“Your mother is a hard woman,” he told our kid once.
Another thing he said to our kid was, “I hate that your mother is always right,” on the other hand, and I’m rather pleased by that. I’ll take that for a win, because he was always adamant when talking to me that he was right and I was wrong. Up until the end, he was arguing with me about his medication, and insisted on counting out his pills, even though I showed him my spreadsheet.
But I am not a hard woman, and I am not always right, and that is really, really unfair of him, and I wish he was still alive so I could tell him off. He would start to laugh silently, his whole body shaking, because he loved it when I told him off, the son of a bitch. I don’t miss him at all. I miss him terribly.