less than five days, now

i was going to be lazy and not blog what was on my mind, but then i got IM-ed a quote (from an odd source (yet, oddly, not so odd, since the source was included in one of the groups of folks to be mentioned below)) sourced to the inimitable (yet nonetheless poorly imitated in that cruddy time travel season cliffhanger of st:tng we watched the other night) mark twain:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths.
No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they 
have been married a quarter of a century. --Mark Twain

i've been in a bit of a mood, lately, as i swiftly approach the first and only real commitment i've ever made in my entire life. it's a bit scary. all right, it's a lot scary. i can think of, and have thought of, a lot of reasons to go through with it. new reasons that i hadn't thought of back when i proposed. to whit: look, man, I’ve got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I… this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it’s not just, it might not be just such a simple… uh, you know?

just when i started to get a grip once more, i sat in on a meeting with a coworker whose marriage of six years (that magic number: someone on slashdot (yes, a world-class expert!) recently posted that six years is the duration of the hormonal cocktail that induces people to have LTRs) broke up quire recently, and, apparently, quite bitterly. "don't do it," he said with conviction when he heard that my marriage was six days away. "don't do it," he repeated, several times, to be sure i understood.

that got me thinking, as things tend to do. i'd imagine that he wasn't much younger/older than i when he began his marriage, and i'd assume that at the beginning, he and his wife were just as in love as 203 and i are now. now, we've moved out of the realm of things i've never thought of and square into teh middle of Heavy Thought Land. i've run the question of "how do you make a happy marriage" through the old sausage grinder, and the awful smelling mess that extruded out the other end indicated, "you pick a good place to start, and you do your best. the future's not ours to see."

way back when, i ran some mental calculations and came to the conclusion that marrying 203, i can't lose. if we live happily ever after, we both win. if it goes to crap and we split up, i've spent some years happy, and some years unhappy, and come through with some kind of greater understanding of something or another. if i stay stuck for decades in an unhappy marriage, then i'm one kind of a moron or another -- and truly, i've come to realize that though i have my faults, i'm not really that kind of a moron.

that covers the hindquarters of the extrusion, right up to the "do your best", and the "pick a good place to start" is all up to me. i think i've picked just such a place, which is to say, just the right person. though i could do differently, i could not, in my honest opinion, do better. whether my marriage lasts fifty years or fifty minutes, as i've said to 203, i don't want to not marry her. so i will. and since i go into my vows with the intention of holding them sacred closer to fifty years than to fifty minutes, i step over the threshold with the best of intentions and the fewest doubts that i, as me, can ever be expected to hold.

as i drove to work the other day, i thought to myself: you really can't beat being intelligent. i lucked out on that one, i guess, to the extent that i am intelligent. once i learned to harness it, everything that is good in my life followed.

as an ant follows a trail of slime to encounter a tasty dinner of salted slug, so this post follows a trail of my thoughts, and we are rapidly approaching the point, the thought that has emerged in my mind today to be provoked onto the blog by a quote of mark twain. i have a number of friends. the ones that i am closest to are, for the most part, married, and of the ones that are married, including the source of my twain quote, i can think of none that are married unhappily. i can think of none who are morons, none who are losers, none who are especially different from me in any important regard. and yet, among my acquaintances, the one who gave me the advice yesterday has never struck me as particularly like me. perhaps that is why he is counted among my acquaintances rather than among my friends.

while i do not know what happened in his relationship, and while i do not know how his marriage started, i must conclude, from what i know of him and me, that we selected our wives on different criteria, and i expect he glossed over the "longevity/loyalty" aspect not only in her makeup, but also in his own.

i know i don't have many of the answers, and that every time i find a Life's Answer it comes wrapped around two more Life's Questions, like a ransom note wrapped around a brick through my dining room window. i am expecting that my marriage will bring more unexpected surprises than not, and i'm expecting them to be mostly good. i can see for myself the things that i want from marriage in the marriages of those that i respect, and while i may have cut my bachelorhood a little too short, i will surely survive that mistake, and many others to come, by leaning on the unbreakable strength of the House whose foundation we will lay next week.