Not that I wasn’t happy for my daughter when she announced her engagement, and I surely didn’t react with the moron-like “Well, that’s too damned bad” of her father, but I basically think of weddings as a great party followed by family health insurance.
On giving this more thought, I realized that I have pretty much specialized in the non-traditional marriage.
My first marriage was a weekend at the Cape pretend ceremony, which both sets of parents bought because the alternatives were too outrageous to consider, while we cohabited and waited to turn legal age. When that happened a few months later, we hustled off to New Hampshire with a couple of friends and made it official. We likewise separated less than a year later, only divorcing when my father-in-law could no longer stand the thought of being my father-in-law and proceeded with the proceedings, what seems like years later. There were no kids to fight over, and he got the cat and one of my 3-piece set of luggage, which latter he refused to give back.
I changed my name back to my birth name unofficially a few years later. The only paperwork on it is the communications with the Attorney General’s office in Rhode Island agreeing that, yes, as long as I had been consistently using my original name and wasn’t planning on using it to swindle anyone, I could assume it as my legal name without any legal proceedings.
My second marriage has been pretty much as ass-backwards as the first. In the midst of Long Island and my Ph.D., I persuaded my future husband to become my husband sooner than later, and we could move in together after I got my Ph.D. I think I told him I would move back to Maryland when the dust had settled, but as with doctoral programs, dust takes forever to settle, and it made more sense to start my career on Long Island. Eventually, being the silver-tongued doctoral candidate that I was, I convinced him to give up his secure job and come up to live with me, where I would make tons of money and he could live comfortably forever.
After managed care decimated my career and burned me out, and income dwindled, I decided to take my two wonderful children and leave my despicable husband. We three moved to South Carolina, which falsely promised a slower, happier way of life. It’s 11 years later, and we remain happily married, due in great part to the fact that we see each other twice a year, for three-week visits, and don’t complicate things with sex. Referring to him as my husband just confuses people, so I sometimes refer to him as “my kids’ father”, but that is an incomplete description. He is my best friend, and when I have a problem and I need some perspective, he’s the one to call. We came to a reasonable child support arrangement that will be ending in two years, and, as the visits by my youngest become shorter and less frequent, I wonder how much I will be seeing him in years to come, which makes me sad.
We actually get along better before the kids arrive, or after they leave, and we are no longer playing dueling parents I like my second marriage just fine. As for my first, it was necessary and relatively painless, as was the first wedding ceremony.
The second wedding ceremony was the best party I ever had. And we still have family health insurance.
ruminations from the empty nest 