When two people decide to “tie the knot” the decision is typically followed by elaborate celebrations and being enthusiastically congratulated by about everyone they know. All of this can be rather annoying to those who do not view marriage as essential or even particularly desirable. It is not that marriage isn’t a wonderful thing for many people, but that the alternative life of choosing to pass on being in a long term committed relationship is very much misunderstood. Many people associate a lack of desire to marry or commit to a long term relationship with a fear of getting hurt, selfishness and/or shallowness, or eventual unfulfillment. Perhaps in some cases this is true, but many times this is a very false assessment.
If you remain single by choice, perhaps even after a long
line of lovers have tried to persuade you into loving ‘til death do us part’,
often times family and friends will say to each other, “I think he/she is
afraid of getting hurt.” They imagine that you’ve been burned so badly in the past,
had your heart crushed so severely, or lost someone so important to you, that
just the thought of loving someone new is terrifying. But it’s not always about
an unwillingness to get close to someone, to open your heart, to make yourself
vulnerable enough to fall madly in love. Sometimes it’s about a desire to
simply embrace that love in the moment without trying to control the future.
Doesn’t this often
make you more vulnerable to pain and suffering instead of less? You are willing
to allow the people you love the most to leave you whenever they feel like it.
You are willing to accept the intense loneliness and longings such goodbyes
might bring, the kind of loneliness lifetime partners will likely never have to
feel. You are choosing to the forfeit the security of a committed relationship
in spite of the risks, but why? Maybe it is because, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh
once said, "Him that I love, I wish to be free-even from me." Maybe you just
don’t believe that true love and chains can live in the same place.
Maybe American Psychologist James Hillman was right when he
said, “Loving in safety is the smaller part of loving.” Many people can commit
themselves to a relationship that they think or hope will end in “happily ever
after,” but it takes an entirely different type of courage to pour your heart
into something that you acknowledge you’ll eventually be forced to let go of.
Perhaps it’s not that you fear intimacy, but that you refuse
to ignore the reality that as life and people change love does too. It takes
courage to admit that people can grow out of things, even each other. For some
people, the comfort and safety of marriage is just not worth the possibility of
being forced to eventually live a lie. Marriage can be an illusion in the sense
that it forces you to make and believe in promises that humans do not always
have the power to keep. As writer Michael Ventura once stated in one of his
columns, “We can promise to want to love someone for the rest of our lives, but
we can’t control falling out of love any more than we can control falling in
love. We’re all aware of this terrible uncertainty whether or not we admit it,
so our promises are no more than good intentions and (as promises) they ring
hollow.”
Sometimes two people can start out in love and eventually
find themselves in a situation where they only bring out the worst in each
other. You can find yourself in a spot in a relationship where you try and try
and try but find yourself somehow incapable of not continuing to hurt the other
person. In Derek Cianfrance’s movie Blue Valentine, a couple struggle with this exact situation, and in one scene
the woman (Cindy) says to her husband during a fight, “I can’t stop this … I
can’t stop what’s happening … can you?” As painful a reality as it is, sometimes
the best people can do is put their hands up at the scene of wreckage and walk
away. You just don’t want spend years of your life trying to fix something that
is permanently broken. As Will Grayson says in the John Greene book of the same
name, “When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from
getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost-the two
remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape
has changed”
One of the greatest misconceptions of marriage is that it is
the only way to achieve a certain type of fulfillment. But the problem is
people like to talk about the joy and fulfillment of finding someone that you
can spend forever with, without considering the cost. As Ralph Waldo Emerson
once said, “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and
for everything you gain you lose something.” This is absolutely true of a long
term committed relationship; the price of this so called “fulfillment” does not
come without a steep cost.
The cost isn’t just
about being able to do whatever you want and be a sloppy, drunk, slut on the
weekends if you feel like it. It’s easy to see one could grow weary of that
lifestyle, and the weariness is exactly why many people settle down. It’s about
all the people you will miss out on, and what they could teach you about
yourself, that your mate never will. It’s about playing the same roles your
entire life. It’s about never again experiencing the joy of when you first fall
in love with someone. Or even the joy of leaving someone and then coming back
to them and falling in love all over again. Not to mention the fact that
marriage often does not lead to the fulfillment we thought it would anyway.
But what about this thing called faithfulness? So many
people have been taught to idolize faithfulness. I love the quote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde that says, “Faithfulness is to the
emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a
confession of failures. Faithfulness, I must analyze it someday. The passion
for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we
were not afraid that others might pick them up.” The demand for faithfulness is
a need to claim a part of another person. Why do so many people rush to be
someone else’s property? I believe in freedom, especially the freedom to give
yourself in love.
“Non-marrying” types are also often accused of being
shallow, selfish, and/or immature. But maybe the people who chose to only love
once in their lives are really the shallow people. Perhaps there is more
selfishness in fidelity, in choosing to only share yourself with one person, in
tying someone else down so that you never have to worry about experiencing the
sharp pangs of jealousy or the reality that not only is there someone else that
could take your place, but it might be better for everyone but you if they did.
Maybe it is more immature to want to cling to a relationship. If you’re not
clingy, jealous, or insecure, fidelity just seems rather silly.
Part of the argument that “non-committers” are selfish is
that they hurt and disappoint so many people by leaving. But within marriages
don’t people hurt and disappoint each other every day? And if someone stops
loving you, is it really a terribly selfish thing to want to be with someone
that you can make happy? Vows are great and all but deep down don’t most of us
just want to be with someone that stills laughs at our jokes, smiles when they
see us, and kisses us in the rain?
Similar to the fulfillment theory is the soul mate theory.
People love to say, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.” But even if we
were to meet our soul mate, and I do think one can have multiple soul mates in
a lifetime, why do we need to live with them forever? As Elizabeth Gilbert says
in her book Eat Pray Love, “A true soul mate is probably the most important
person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.
But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come
into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then
leave.” You can love someone forever without being with them forever. I wish we
could stop celebrating marriages so that when they end we no longer have to
call them failures. As Patrick McBride said, “The end of a relationship is not
a failure any more than the end of a book is a failure.” Even the greatest love
stories have to end eventually.
I guess in the end people have to do what’s right for them.
It’s easy to criticize people for being delusional but in many cases, a
relationship, as many lies as it might be based on, is the best shot they have
at happiness. People are afraid of not believing in monogamy because they like
resolutions. The want the false illusion of security, they want to believe that
promising something has the power to make it happen, and they want to think
that they won’t die alone. They want to think that maturity will bring
stability. Like the people who look for patterns in the lottery numbers, they
love to downplay the impact of chance on our lives. Once again, this is not an
argument against marriage. Last night, I watched the movie When Harry Met Sally where throughout the film there are elderly
couples talking about their lives together. It is hard not to see that “growing
old together” can bring joy. But some of us are born to love strangeness and
get bored with familiarity. There is a quote from the tagline of the movie Closer that states, “When you believe in
love at first sight you never stop looking.” Some of us don’t really want to
fall in love just once but over and over again. We are addicted to the magic of
the ability to love someone before we even know their mysteries, or perhaps
because of the mysteries. To us, there is more beauty in strangeness, and as
said in "The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God" by Michael Ventura, “All paths cause
pain, so to choosing the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain
only less beauty.” And we want to soak up as much beauty as we can during our
brief time on this earth. So romance or security, what shall we choose?
We can’t always have both.
