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By this time tomorrow, I will be a married woman. This is not a new state for me. I spent ages 19-27 and ages 31-33 married, and a little arithmetic wizardry yields the unpalatable realization that I have spent only six years out of the entire seventeen of my adult life as a single woman, and they weren’t even consecutive years. (It occurs to me also that I spent only one year of those seventeen not being a mother, as well–essentially, I’ve never been an adult who was not also a mother, not since I was eighteen years old. It must be interesting, to be an adult with no children. Since I’ve been relatively happy in the parental state, though, I have no real angst to work through on the subject.)

But I hated being married. Ever since the last marriage ended, I have entertained my friends with any number of reasonably funny jokes on the subject of marriage, both the possibility of me entering into another one in particular and the joys of the marital state in general. I did so with a fair amount of confidence that I was never, ever going to marry again. This was not based upon a hopelessly broken heart and a dramatic declaration to the world that I would nevah love again! nevah! I had no idea if I would love again or not; I was both amenable to the idea of doing so and also amenable to the idea that I might never do so–it was all the same to me. I admit to some stress about my future sex life, but that’s really about it.

So why the h-e-l-l am I getting married? Again?

It is probably fairly obvious by now that the impetus for getting married does not reside with me, but rather with the other interested party. (This is one reason that I find the male “marriage strike” contingent hard to take seriously. Fellas, I don’t want to marry you. Do me a favor and don’t want to marry me!) I won’t go into the specific details of the inter-relationship negotiations that will result in me planting my semi-unwilling feet in front of a justice of the peace tomorrow afternoon promptly at 3 pm, as they are quite intimate and even more significantly, not just my intimate details but somebody else’s. However, I do want to talk about why I was willing to agree–beyond the fact that I am deeply and romantically in love with him, of course. I felt that way about the previous two husbands at the time I married them as well; I am clearly well aware that those feelings do not guarantee betting odds on the resultant marriage surviving unto eternity. I do feel that way about the upcoming husband, but that is not the reason I have agreed to attempt, for the third time, to live within the bounds of unholy matrimony. So what are the differences between the relationship I have with this guy and the relationships I had with the previous spouses that makes me think both he and I aren’t going to really regret this move someday, more likely sooner than later..?

1. We have similar backgrounds. I used to think this wasn’t important, and I still have no fixed opinion about whether or not it is important for everyone. However, I have learned that, while it is not important to me (which is why I used to think it wasn’t important at all) and while it probably isn’t important to many other people, it is very, very important to some people. Namely, it was important to the last two guys I married. It was not as important to the first guy, but it was VERY important to the second guy. The second guy found that he could only accept being with a woman who met one of two preconditions: either she came from the same wealthy conservative family-values background as himself, or she desperately hated the fact that she did not and was willing to dedicate the rest of her life to making herself over to emulate that golden standard. I failed at both. The first husband felt much the same, but it was a milder situation–it was not really a cause of the failure of our marriage, just a cause of friction during. With the second guy, it actually was one cause of our marital demise.

2. We have similar moral and societal values. This is actually similar to and related to the first point, though not identical. The religious aspect was distressing to the first husband, as he considered himself Christian, although not a fan of organized Christianity, and at the time we were married, I was comfortably agnostic. (He actually once told me that it saddened him to know that I was going to hell.) My second husband was agnostic as well, so that was not a source of friction between us. However, my complete indifference to tradition and automatic questioning of authority were a sore trial to them both. None of the previous examples resulted in irreversible marital breakdown; just, again, marital friction. What did was my avoidance of and lack of interest in conspicuous displays of consumption and artificially installed markers of wealth and social prestige; it did not really trouble the first husband, but with the second husband, it was another cause of our marital demise.

3. We enjoy the most of the same activities– This was not a problem with the second husband at all; we had many interests in common. Those particular interests were ones that required a great deal of money to realize, but we had that, so in that area, there was harmony. This was much more of a problem with the first husband. There were only two things we both liked to do, and those were (a) reading and (b) playing computer games. Reading is a solo activity, and since we were too poor to ever own more than one computer at a time, that shared fondness actually became a source of friction (“It’s my turn! You’ve had it for hours!” “So? You had it for hours yesterday!”) This was not a marriage-ender, but it was yet another blow to an already shaky structure.

4. –and we have no problem either with the other person not wanting to participate in activities we like but the other does not, nor a problem with the other person then doing those things without us. Again, not a problem with the second husband, but a whomper of a problem with the first, and actually did contribute to the breakdown of that marriage. Specifically, he didn’t want a nightlife, nor could he tolerate me having one without him, even the infrequent one that was all I had the time for.

5. We both consider the other person to be contributing equal financial and labor value to the marriage. This was one of the destroyers of both my previous marriages. I worked part-time for most of my first marriage, as I was a full-time engineering student and mother of young children for most of it. My first husband stated that therefore I was not working as hard as him nor bringing in anywhere near the money and therefore had to shoulder all the household burdens plus give him the final say over everything in our day-to-day lives. I further discovered that even after I graduated and got a job working as many hours as he did with nearly as good a pay, that because he was a police officer and I was not, since his job was always going to be harder no matter how many hours or how much money I made, then I would always be relegated to those roles. Since becoming a police officer myself would have been the only way he would have allowed me equality in the marriage, and I had no vocation for that, it was a no-win situation for me. The second husband stated that, since I made only one-half his income, and between my children and myself was responsible for three-quarters of the household mess and drain on resources, then I needed to shoulder at least three-quarters of the household burdens plus give him the final say over everything in our day-to-day lives. I pointed out that he had known about the children prior to the marriage and had not stated that condition at that time, and also that he was eight years older than me and had his parents pay his way through college with the end result that he was twelve years ahead of me in his career; I was indeed making more that he had made at my same career point. He was indifferent to these arguments, and once more, since I was always going to have the children and the closure of our twelve-year career gap might never come to pass, I was in a no-win marital equity situation.

D and I have almost identical incomes, and I own the house we both live in. It’s very freeing.

6. Back to the children…He has no interest in either raising my children or how I am raising them, and feels no resentment of their existence. The first husband and I didn’t agree all the time on childrearing, but it wasn’t a major source of friction, and clearly he has no resentment of their existence since they’re his children; far from being a marriage killer, they actually kept it going years longer than it otherwise would have. However, my children were probably the marriage-killer in my second marriage. The second husband and I spoke a few times after our divorce was finalized; he apologized several times for the way he treated me about my children. He said, and I’m sure he was being honest, that he hadn’t understood how differently he’d feel about them when they were actually living in his house than when we were just dating. Don’t get me wrong; they were good kids, and he never said or as far as I know felt otherwise either during or after our marriage. However, he couldn’t bear that I spent any money on them at all, even though I often went without to ensure that he felt like it was “my” money I was spending, not “his.” (Didn’t matter.) He hated the noise they made, even though it wasn’t really that excessive. As the final straw, he stated that he was thinking of looking for a job in another state and he fully expected me to leave them with their father and travel blithely away and maybe we could sue for full custody after we moved (therefore snatching them completely away from their father instead).

Not only have I already lived with D for a year, so I know how he really feels about them, he was also previously married, with two stepsons and a stepdaughter not that different in age from my sons, and he had a good and comfortable relationship with them.

7. Back further to the housework…He does not expect me to keep the house cleaned and ordered to his standards as opposed to my own, nor does he expect me to do most or all of the household chores. This was a killer for both my marriages. Both previous husbands had stay-at-home mothers who apparently channeled June Cleaver. I was far from a stay-at-home mother who was, while not dirty about my home, quite cluttered about it. I attempted a compromise with both; I would do the majority of the housework, and I would do it more often than was my wont, but I wanted to do it to my standards. That compromise was refused; I was going to keep their homes in the same state that Mother used to, by God! I didn’t, and it did not go over well, ever. Memorable episodes from each marriage include, in the first, being screamed at and having a dirty frying pan waved in my face at 3 am while I was trying to nurse a baby with one arm while typing a term paper with the other; and in the second, being dragged all over the house at 1 am after the second husband came home drunk from a “boys’ night out” being shown every single spot in the carpet that probably YOUR KIDS tracked in, carelessly! and I want them cleaned RIGHT NOW!

Yeah.

D does whatever I ask him around the house the instant I ask him to do it and could care less what state I keep the house in. I do a lot more housework, because his standards are even lower than mine, but it is absolutely resentment free because I get to do as much of it and to the quality that I want.

8. He never calls me names. Another marriage-killer in both marriages. The winners from both marriages were “bitch” from husband no. 1 and “white trash” from husband no. 2. Never again.

9. He never hits me, nor threatens to. Not a problem in the second marriage, but the marriage killer in the first one. Never again.

…and, finally–

10. He has no substance abuse problems.Not an issue in the first marriage, but one of the death knells of the second; he was, depending on the specific time frame, borderline to full-fledged alcoholic. He rarely went an evening without at least one drink, and it did not enhance his personality, to put it mildly.

D does not drink and never has; he has also never tried any illegal recreational drugs and clearly has no desire to do so. An unusual individual; I’ve never met anyone else that meets that criteria. It isn’t criteria that I demand–I have a few glasses of wine once or twice a week myself–but it does go a long way towards giving me confidence that I won’t find myself married to someone with a substance abuse problem.

Well, wish me luck. Hopefully I won’t need it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 4:31 am and is filed under Wedding-big mistake or bad idea?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.