Dear Chainsaw,

Yours,
Dorcas M. Alorcas

No one ever asks me for relationship advice. I think this is stupid because, while my relationship with my husband may not be pretty, it is highly functional and satisfying. So I’m going to spew forth with my highly unromantic view of life with a loved one.

I think that choosing to spend the rest of your life with someone is just that, a choice. I’ve been in love lots of times, and I’ve fallen in and out of love more times than I can count. Falling in love with people never stops happening. But I’ve chosen Tom. Of all the loves I’ve had and possible loves I could have had, I decided he was the one I wanted to get married to. I made that decision fairly early on, before we lived together, before we talked about getting married, before I found out that he had never read a comic book or seen a Bruce Campbell movie. Destiny didn’t bring us together, I did.

Here are the reasons why:
1. He treated me with respect from the first day I met him, even though I was 16 years younger than him.
2. He didn’t annoy me after three months of dating, and when he did start to annoy me, I thought it was funny.
3. I was madly in love with him. You can’t explain that.

I gave him an ultimatum early on in our dating life that I wasn’t going to be one of those women who was stuck in a relationship for five or ten years without any stated promise of commitment, legal marriage or otherwise. I told him I didn’t see the damn point in wholly commiting yourself to a person for a significant amount of time when that person doesn’t have any intention of making a commitment or just wants to play it by ear. I told him I wouldn’t live with him unless I knew it would lead to a life together, because it seemed like a futile exercise otherwise. Some of that is my impatience. Most of it is pragmatism. Why should I have wasted time with him if he wasn’t going to be there in twenty or thirty years?

That’s the first thing: Choose your love.

So, he moved in. Two years later we got married. In that time, we have taken on a hard and fast rule of brutal honesty and almost constant bickering and joking. We’ve had two make-it-or-break-it fights in the entire time that we’ve been together. I expect many more. One was pretty early on in our relationship, on the surface it was about my social circle and his unwillingness to make an effort there, but it was really about our limits in a conflict. I walked out on him and he realized that I wasn’t to be toyed with. The next one came after his stepfather died and Tom got severely depressed. He wasn’t talking to me (or anyone else) and he wasn’t spending any time at home. He had basically walked out on me rather than deal with what his life was like. For almost six months I tried to make it easy on him while it got harder and harder on me, and then he ruined my birthday. It was horrible. I asked for a divorce. I wasn’t kidding, or playing some kind of trump card, I seriously wanted out of the marriage if he wasn’t going to put in any effort to be a husband to me. We cried and screamed at each other for hours. We realized that we both wanted to be there and make it work. So, we are. I think it’s important to point out that Tom and I are not drama queens, we don’t have huge fights all the time, most of our bickering is about who left the book on the floor or whose coffee cup is next to the computer, and I think that it helps us not be frustrated with each other because we know that we can always say whatever we want to without it being a deal-breaker for our relationship. I mean, we’ve talked divorce and survived it. Fighting rules!

That’s the second thing: Fight for it.

Sex is a huge part of a long term relationship. I think the easiest way to deal with the sexual part of a relationship is not to talk about it with anyone else. That goes for men and women. I made that clear to Tom before we ever had sex. If you can’t talk to your “partner” (I hate that term!) about your sexual health, I don’t think you should be having sex with them. That means pap smears, penises, periods, prostates, and pubes. The five Ps. Six if you count pregnancy. I do. Also, you should have the abortion talk. One of the first things that Tom told me was that when your girlfriend has an abortion, it ruins the relationship. That conversation convinced me that I didn’t want any accidents. Ever. Now, he doesn’t want to know anything unless I’m pregnant and decide I want to have a baby. Either way, I don’t think it’s fair, but that’s something that we need to decide between ourselves and it’s no one else’s business.

That’s the third thing: Keep it to yourself.

On that note, Tom would totaly shit if he saw this entry. He doesn’t tell his friends a single thing about our relationship. This is partly because all of Tom’s close friends are single men in their late thirties. The other part is because all of the married people that Tom knows have nothing but bad things to say about thier wives, husbands and their home life. Tom doesn’t want to share that stuff, and he figures if someone is unhappy in their marriage, he doesn’t want advice from them. I, on the other hand, talk to my mom about my marriage all the time. Some might think that odd, but she’s the only person I know who has stayed married. I’d talk to my dad, but he’s like Tom. I know my parents had problems, I was there. What I don’t know is how they overcame them. So, I ask if they overcame any similar problems to mine, and what do you know? They did. Sometimes, it’s nice to know you’re not the only ones who are retarded when it comes to relationships.

That’s the fourth thing: Ask “married” people questions.

As for the question posed in the title of this entry: If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Trust your gut and make a choice.

Was that too high handed? [crazy]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2003 at 4:29 PM and is filed under Cottleston Pie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.