What Happened in My Ex-Boyfriend’s Living Room and How It Changed My Life
Though you’d never know it from talking to me today, there was a time in my life when I wanted to get married. Well, not actually actively wanted to get married or planned around it or anything, but I just kind of assumed that it was this thing that happened to almost everyone, like going to college or whatever. In fact, I still think that’s a pretty spot-on parallel, especially in terms of the media hysteria abut “not getting in” focused on both—like, no matter how many articles there are about SAT scores this and higher admission standards that, it’s like, dude, you’re going to get in somewhere.
But anyway, my point was that I wasn’t born knowing that I didn’t want to get married—it wasn’t like being gay or something, where you always know something is a little bit different about you and when you finally figure it out, it’s like a total relief. I thought marriages were how you expressed love, and I did, and still do, believe in the existence of romantic love, or a rough approximation. I can’t remember what the first step was I took on my current path of consciously knowing I don’t want to marry or have kids—probably while getting bored watching some acquiantances get married and plan for babies, most likely—but I can tell you what was probably the first moment I questioned the idea of marriage.
I had a boyfriend in college whom I dated for years and was very serious with, though I never imagined us as people who would work well stuck together for the rest of our lives. As a college girl, thinking about marriage was more like a “getting discovered drinking a milkshake at Schwab’s” kind of fantasy than anything I realistically planned for—like, I could somehow find a guy to marry who embodied all of my ideals of an awesomely creative person who moved in an awesomely creative social circle, and I could seize upon that opportunity to live the freewheeling, Patti Smith-esque New York City performance poet bohemian life that I thought was my birthright. Getting married seemed like it might be a good way to get to this life, since I seemed to be having a hard time figuring out how to go about it on my own and appeared to be growing up into someone who would spend the better part of a decade temping rather than someone who’d write “Dancing Barefoot.”
I visited the boyfriend at his family’s house in New England fairly often—I was trying to get away from my own home situation, so slipping into his only nominally better home situation seemed like a relief. My folks were divorced, had been since I was a little kid, but my boyfriend’s parents had stuck out a marriage that was generally unhappy and periodically miserable for decades, or so my boyfriend told me. I didn’t really understand—my parents (being ethnic types, of course) had had such fiery, verbally violent fights almost nightly during my childhood, that I couldn’t imagine any other real way to express romantic misery. I had absorbed a lot of thinking from my mother about how people who didn’t have the “guts” to get divorced were “cowards”, but I still held my parents’ own marriage as the gold standard for how two people who should have never even met each other acted. Anything that fell short of that couldn’t be so bad, right? If you’re in pain, you cry out. That’s the way everything works.
One day, my boyfriend’s mother was cleaning the living room, as my boyfriend’s father watched television. His mother vaccuumed around and around the edges of the room, until she came across the middle of the carpet, and vaccuumed in front of the TV. “You make a better door than you do a window, Maureen”, the dad said to the mom. Five or six whole years later, I still find that sentence profoundly shocking. I had been used to my parents’ fights, which were shrieking and hysterical and involved a lot of cussing, a lot of incoherent accusations. But this thing—I had never seen such a quiet, casual display of absolute loathing, such a tiny display of the pain at having made the mistake of marrying someone you no longer loved. I had never realized that you could manifest hatred in that way, in a million tiny moments every day that people besides you two probably almost never even noticed, so that you were experiencing your death-by-papercuts all by your lonesome.
My mother thought people who were in bad marriages and didn’t get divorced were cowards because they would rather stick out a shitty situation than face the fear of striking out on their own, standing up on their own two feet and risking a fall. I do think she was half right—people who should get divorced but don’t are cowards because it’s terrifying to admit you made a mistake. And it’s obviously a proportional terror—the bigger mistake, the deeper the fear, and when you’ve built a whole life around that mistake, I can understand that. I can understand the fear. I can empathize with it. But in that moment, I thought this so hard I practically shook: “What fucking cowards.”
