Marriage Material

"I want to offer my most sincere congratulations but mostly I want a look at that ring."

"Sapphire."

"Stunning."

"We wanted something different."

"Very different. Arresting. And big enough to take a dip in."

"..."

"Do you have a date yet?"

"It'll be a ways out."

"Planning is good. How's your family?"

"On fire."

"Oh?"

"About the age gap, the cultural gap, the fact that I dropped my classes to run off to Paris with him and never went back. To the classes I mean."

"The way they lend out money to teenagers for useless degrees they'll spend the rest of their lives paying off is criminal, if you ask me. You were eighteen. You didn't know if you wanted that degree or not, in…?"

"English."

"Yeah. You don't need that."

"..."

"Always skip school to go to Paris."

"I assure you."

"How are you doing?"

"Of course I'm nervous. But that's healthy, isn't it? Given all the things that can go wrong."

"Bad catering?"

"Ha."

"Divorce?"

"I'd rather have a hundred divorces than the sort of marriage my parents had, which they just stumbled into and never got out of, never bothered. In which they both grew fat and complacent, the middle of their bed cluttered with remotes and address books and sleeves of Ritz crackers to excuse them of any intimacy. Is it weird that I have these thoughts about my parents? I don't want to, but when you have all that stuff in the middle of your bed, how do you...?"

"When you have those thoughts about your parents, just find a closet to scream into. It's not your fault but it's not… good."

"My dad athletic all around but a great college tennis player and saw matches like math problems, he told me. I mean he had the brain for it, not just a body. He's fat now because my mom is fat and only knows how to reward with food, to console with food, to entertain with food. And not especially good food. Like, one of her favorite things to do is to take a burger patty, stick five toothpicks around the perimeter and five hotdog ends into the toothpicks, one with a cute little carved face in it, okay, and then she goes in with bacon and weaves like a quilted formation, a shell, for the… turtle. Can you picture it? It's supposed to look like a turtle, bringer of heart attacks, colossus of sodium -"

"Turtles did nothing to deserve that. I'm so sorry."

"And my mother, social butterfly that she was would bring friends around to sample her… creations, and apparently said friends were so insufferable that my dad started camping out in closets, under the bed sometimes, just booking it out of there when the doorbell would ring, and my mother, apron strained with turtle grease would have to round him up until it just became too much, as she tells it, and she became an antisocial."

"So she made him fat, he made her antisocial. Some marriages are better off over."

"Some marriages should never begin."

"But that's not how yours will be."

"One can hope."

"I know a gal who’s a real talented tattoo artist, absolutely lives for her work. Married a Mormon. Which is funny because, you know, tattoo parlors. Mostly guys, locker room talk, drinks after work, blow parsed out on the breakroom table."

"That bad?"

"As she tells it. So she’d spend some sixty hours a week in that, then she'd link arms with her very respectable church secretary husband - some blonde haired blue eyed guy who did a mission in Hawaii where he almost grew his first chest hair or so I'm told. And she'd smile along as they condemned her and her livelihood to hell."

"That sounds healthy."

"The Great and Spacious Building, is what the Mormons call it, in like an ominous way. When people have fun."

"I'm debating between a few of those for the reception."

"All I'm saying is you can have a very different set of interests, different backgrounds, different everything. And if you love one another, and listen, you'll make it work."

"Did they make it work?"

"Well, ha. No."

"Ugh!"

"They get a pass, he was gay. The moral of the story, again, from the top, is -"

"I don't need the moral again, I think you need a better story."

"Do I detect some tension?"

"I have a friend giving me a hard time about the engagement, too, always on the basis of the longevity of the relationship given, again, the age gap, hitting the career milestones at the same time, two and a half kids, white picket fence, etc. And I go, Becky, your husband gave you chlamydia."

"Oh?"

"And insisted to her that it can be transmitted by means other than sex. Chlamydia is just growing on the walls over here, in the air vents. Yeah right. He had her going to her doctor and explaining, to a doctor, that it couldn't be her husband, so what else? And the doctor's on one side going… 'you sure about this husband?' And husband's on the other side deflecting and gaslighting and covering up one lie with another until the other girl reaches out to apologize - "

"Oh!" 

"She had no idea he was with someone. Felt horrible."

"Wow."

"And she's pouring over this girl's socials, asking me if she's prettier, what does she have that I don't, etc -"

"And I hope you told her she's the most beautiful and worthy and -"

"Of course I did! But there's no helping her. Something about not wanting to throw away a whole four years and start over, a reticence about men, I think something bad happened before…"

"Most likely."

"And get this! He carries a gun."

"A gun?"

"A gun. Because he sold drugs in high school or something and thinks he's being followed."

"What drugs? Just curious."

"I think just pot."

"Who didn't sell pot in high school? A gun?"

"A gun. One of the reasons she doesn't want to leave, doesn't want to risk it." 

"Oh…"

“And she always goes back, always will, because he promises he’ll fix himself, same as he swore he didn’t cheat.”

"He’ll keep his dick wet with his same old safe bet.”

“Ha.”

"The guy I'm seeing. His ex was the same sort of case, can’t be helped. Not that he's an abuser or cheater or carries a gun, he just doesn't love her anymore, and is giving her every possible signal, and by that I mean mostly saying, explicitly, I'm not in love with you anymore. Eventually he blocked her so she set up a burner phone number and spammed him with … glamor shots."

"Oh?"

"And by that I mean nudes."

"Ohh."

"He didn't want to deal with them, he let me."

"What do you mean, deal with them?"

"I filed them away in a safe little place of mine to detonate if she gets too close to my guy. While he's my guy."

"Noo."

"Oh yes. This ain't your parents' bedroom. I've got plenty of him, too. I say, first date, if you can get a full frontal with face, you’re safe. You'll never be betrayed, because they know what you're capable of, that you can ruin them.”

“That’s sociopathic to even consider disseminating revenge porn -”

“Well I never said I was marriage material, like the rest of you.”