A Preface to Lunch: Marriage a.k.a "Desperation Psychosis"

Over this Thanksgiving break, my friends from high school and I got together in Boston for a “Boy’s Night Out.” Of course, we didn’t call it “Boy’s Night Out” — that would have been embarrassing — but as a graduate of an all-boys Catholic school, any attempt to hang out with friends ends up with us rolling 10 men deep into bars that tell us they would really prefer it if we could get a female to come along next time. I spent most of our night marveling at the fact that, in exchange for little more than providing a couple TVs and a place for strangers to make out, a bar establishment can get away with outrageous 800 percent markups on Pabst Blue Ribbon! I have a more cost-effective suggestion for single people: buy your own case (30 beers included! Batteries not) of PBR at an affordable price, sit down in front of your computer, and then see how many beers you can drink before e-Harmony finds a date for you.

Of course, most people, including Luddites like me, prefer the face-to-face method of sex/relationship hunting — though a surprisingly prevalent reason I hear for this is “I don’t want to have to tell people I met my spouse online.” Seriously. I’ve heard this more times than I can count, and at this point my response to hearing such nonsense is to sing, to the tune of Fine Young Cannibals’ “Drive Me Crazy,” “don’t get married!” The reasons for this are simple. We’ve all heard about the 50 percent divorce rate, and most likely the other 50 percent are so worn out and beaten down from inner turmoil over their life choice that they would never tell you they’ve made a tremendous mistake.

So, maybe I’m overstating the case a bit here. But think about it. Let’s imagine I’m leading one of those weird self-help, get-your-life-together type seminars, and I ask the hundred or so people in the room, “Have you ever been able to stand having one person in the role of your “significant other” for more than a year? Two years? Three?” At some point everyone in the room starts shaking their head. Then I ask, “Well, who is planning on getting married?” According to an admittedly small survey conducted among my single friends (and two people who accosted me to sign their Petition for the Environment), 80 percent of the people in this hypothetical seminar would raise their hands, citing the fact that they “haven’t met the right person.” At this point in the seminar, I would pause a moment for dramatic effect, before then cuing strobe lights and playing on the big screen behind me a creepy clip of me pointing at the camera, saying, “That’s because the right person isn’t out there!”

And before the audience could even say, “Why did you play that obnoxious clip when you could have just told us that yourself?” I’d have hit them with my hypothesis about marriage. I call it Desperation Psychosis. Now, I have no basis for this theory aside from my own cynical views about relationships, but I have spent late nights next to a candle with a leaky quill pen writing drafts the of “The Communist Manifesto II: Marriage vs. Masturbation.” Though these writings bear only a loose resemblance to Marx, they do speak extensively of communal living with a mate.

The anti-marriage arguments are overwhelming. There are psychologists guaranteeing that you’ll have to go through whole years where you just don’t like your spouse. You’ll argue, you’ll stop having sex, you’ll start secretly screwing the other members of your bridge club… But this is reality, they say. It’s full of compromise…

But the thing is, though as an idealist I’d proudly tell my seminar not to give in to the “institution of marriage,” non-married life sounds just as terrifying. As far as I can tell, this is the situation we will be faced with in the next 20 years: The longer we wait to get married, the longer we watch all of the good-looking people leave the market. Then all of the sane people leave the market. Then even your hippie girlfriend Sunshine, who promised you she would never, ever get hitched, will be jumping at the chance to legally bond herself to some granola tycoon.

So you look around at the ever-shrinking sex pool and you realize that your options are next to nil. There’s no one left! So what do you do? Oh, God, now you’re an adulterer! Shame! Guilt! H1N1-esque panic!

Is life really this full of fear after Middlebury College? I presume not. I fear I may be getting delusional in my senioritis months. So I apologize. I didn’t mean to bring you down into my own psychosis. But if you continue to look for the perfect person, and you continue to pursue the goal of marriage, all I’m saying is you may want to get that commitment in writing from the guy who agreed to marry you if you were still single by forty.