Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue...

My in-laws had their 40th anniversary this weekend. I have been married for 3 years. I have a friend who is looking at an impending marriage. Someone at my gym has a husband with leukemia. These things together have caused me to consider what it all means. I haven't come to any conclusions but I'm hoping that, with some careful attention, I may be able to do what I do in order to organize information and that is to come up with some themes. I'm going to use a numbering system and start with the easiest:

(1) Sometimes life is incredibly sucky. It is critical to me to have someone around to take care of me when things are not so great. I lost my mom last year and having a partner in the whole thing, imperfect though any partner can be, having a partner made things dramatically more palatable. My sister was very very helpful and her role was absolutely indispensible, without her, the whole thing would have been much worse, though that's difficult to believe. But, my sister and I rarely sleep together and also she was going through the same terrible thing and couldn't very well be stronger than me. So, bottom line, I was very glad to have someone who knew me and cared about me and also someone who knew my mom and cared about her and my dad and everyone else.

(2) It is good to be known. I have strengths as well as weaknesses. My family know many of them but we don't spend that much time together anymore. I need for people to know that, if I get to the place where I'm crying, things are extra bad and that, if I don't have enough food, I will become angry and that, working very hard at things is sort of new for me and I'm proud when I do it. I think that long-time friends can fill this need but I don't actually have very many of those. Also, when I'm even older, fatter, and stinkier that I am now, I would like someone to remember how I was before.

(3) Sharing is hard. So is compromising. I don't like either of these things. I don't want to do them. Not now, not ever. Probably I'm a better person, the more I do these things but I don't like it. Again, close friends and family would likely teach me these strengths but the older I get, the less those people demand from me, especially when I don't live with any of them.

(4) Being known is annoying. I have weaknesses. I know I do. I still get to judge other people and I don't want to be held accountable. Also, just because you're getting on my nerves doesn't mean that you should be allowed to point out how annoying I am. It may be fair but I don't like it.

(5) Sometimes life is good. On the one hand, it's nice when we can all recognize how good life is at the same time. On the other, sometimes things are going well for me and I don't want my bubble burst by someone else's bad day. I have a terrific day, come home, open a nice book and a bottle of wine, and start to appreciate things when Mr. Doom-and-gloom walks in and starts stomping around, watching TV, and guzzling my wine, which he doesn't even really like... the whole thing is destroyed.

(6) Having stuff that I didn't earn is fun. So, in a marriage, it's nice if what's yours is mine. This doesn't mean that I don't hate the fact that what's mine is yours. How about if I just get everything? That's fair. I think that's fair.

So, maybe the moral of the story falls into one of my themes for understanding life, which is that the good part of a situation is always also the bad part. This theme makes it hard to place things into categories in terms of whether or not I like the things because all the up-sides have down-sides and vice versa so I always end up on the fence. I guess that the thing to do is position the upside/downside list together with stars indicating how much you hate the downsides and how much you need the upsides. The grown-up thing to do then is to try and keep the upside of whatever it is in mind at the time that it's acting like its downside. For example, when my husband "joked" that he was going to "drop the iron fist" with regard to money management, I could have kept in mind that our house is nicer than the one I lived in when I was single instead of telling him that he could take his iron fist and shove it up his iron ass. Anyway, these things are very hard. Fortunately, I've already made this decision and what I need to do is learn to live with it. That's easier than the initial decision.