Riley and I were married on a Saturday in a small Los Angeles church.
We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised.
Initially, the wedding was going to be an incredibly humble affair. I pictured us and a couple of friends in the first few pews. To our surprise, three weeks later, with the nearly-free and movie-montage-esque help of friends and family, eighty-something people showed up (some from clear across the country) at the behest of a mass text that said what amounted to “I know you probably can’t make it, but…”
It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce.
Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.
My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.
Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.
In
The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.
The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in
The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.
He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.
Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.
What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.
People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be. [...]
The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.
Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.
As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home. [...]
Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?
I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”
Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.
I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community. [...]
It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom. [...]
