Better Off Without A Wife?

“all my friends are married
every Tom and Dick and Harry
you must be strong
to go it alone
here's to the bachelors
and the bowery bums
and those who feel that they're the ones
who are better off without a wife”--Tom Waits

I must have listened to that Tom Waits tune on Nighthawks at the Diner about a hundred times and it never fails to make me grin. Though I’m not a bowery bum, I have been a self-made bachelor for the better part of the four years. Now I’ve dated within that time frame, dated sporadically and in these intermittent courtships I’d never entertained the notion of marriage. Thankfully it’s never been brought up. I’m a firm proponent against such institutions. Gay, straight or that guy in New Zealand that wanted to marry a sheep, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t a budgin’. Then my mother got married last year. I buckled…somewhat. Think of a really large dam suddenly showing a crack. My mother’s wedding was a wonderful event to take part in and walking her down the aisle made me so proud to be her son. I’ve never seen my mother as beautiful as she did on that day. But after the flowers had been tossed, the toasts made and the final song played at the reception I was back behind the dam. Sure, marriage was fine for my mother and my brother who had tied the knot earlier that year but I’ve got a mantra and I’m sticking to it. Wives are bonds, balls and chains and I’ll not get pulled into that prison when there is a world of freedom to explore without the shackles of the W word. Thoughts of the contrary would still have been kept out of my anti-marriage fortress if not for three events of the last year. The first was my good friend Megan announcing her engagement. Shit, Megs, they got you too, I thought! How could this be? I was sure Megs was just as persistent in her anti-wedding stance as I was. This was a sign of the apocalypse. I’d lost a great fighter on the battlefield that day.

Next came Facebook and discovering old friends there that had been married, some for years, with families heading down the pathway of common individual evolution. You are born, you grow up, you go to school, you go to more schools, you get a job, you fall in love, you marry, you have children and then they grow to repeat the entire cycle over and over again until the end of days. Of course, there were many that had ended in divorce, bitter custody wars and lots of hatred, the all too typical misstep. Yet those who were still locked in the love of matrimony were happy. I flipped through various wedding photos of these friends online, perused gowns and tuxes, churches and limousines, cakes and flowers and a feeling started to envelope me, one I couldn’t describe at the time. Surely that wasn’t another, much larger crack, in the dam. Was it? No, I told myself. Again and again, marriage was not for me. Sure, these people are happy but who needs rings and flowers and vows to accentuate your love? Shouldn’t the love be enough? Why the need for such ritualistic ceremonies validating such love in the invisible eyes of an invisible man? No sir, not for me.

And then came this week when Stephanie, the mother of my wonderful redheaded little girl, announced her engagement. Unlike Megan I didn’t peg Steph for the none-marrying type. In fact, she’s spoken highly of such things in the past and I think as she watched her friends marry off one by one she started to feel the bite on her line. This is natural. She’s been with a great guy for years, endured his obsession with Star Wars to the point that she remains even after he got a tattoo branding him with this obsession and if that isn’t love, folks, I don’t know what is. Most important to me is that he is good with her kids, one of them being my daughter. It takes a lot for a guy, I imagine, to enter into a relationship that is already mid-way towards a family and continue forward form this point. Come to think of it, I wonder why it has taken so long for this to happen. I had pegged Steph to be married off a few years ago. For Cornwall, she’s a late bloomer in the marriage department. So her now sporting a diamond shouldn’t have struck a chord in me as it had and I still can’t really explain why. Maybe it was just time for the dam to start loosing.

I took awhile before replying to her engagement announcement. I am a man who likes to think he dictates his own surroundings but the deeper your delve into the layers of me you discover that often the catalyst to my alterations is the surroundings I am current within and/or the people that are within them. Megan, for instance, initiated my leaving of Toronto. The video store existence propelled me to Japan. Could it be that all the events of this year are tossing me towards marriage? Damn that dam, I think, as I start to patch. Upon reflection I found that it wasn’t so much a motion towards a wife that was rattling the emotional internal cages but a different thing altogether. I found myself wondering if this was the last stop on the relationship ride for me, if the car was out of gas, stalled on the highway as I watch other riders pass me by. Sporadic encounters sprinkled with longing. It was as though I were examining Megan and Stephanie under glass, like strange science experiments I knew nothing about in worlds I couldn’t possibly enter. Dissection only yielded more confusion. I mean, I know what marriage is and have been to a few weddings in my day but the concept seemed foreign, like stepping off the plane that first day in Japan. You knew what was around you but you just couldn’t read it, couldn’t quite understand it thus preventing you from, well, fully enjoying it. I’m of course happy for both Megan and Steph. Both will make beautiful brides at two more weddings I will attend as a spectator and though the two of them have left me questioning my solitary nature I wish nothing by the best in their endeavors despite how alien they may seem to me.

I wrote my friend Stacy about all this. We share a few common bonds. We are both solitary travelers. We’re both single. We both enjoy being single. We both wonder what it’s like not being single. We both just enjoying the ride for what it is. She passed me some putty to fill in a few gaps on that dam of mine, much needed in a time of a mind walking a path of temptation. As much as I wonder what the other side of that dam might have waiting I feel it is not time to break down the barricade just yet. I’m sure there’s a wonderful woman there, maybe a few kids and possibly a dog named Snizzlefritz but right here, in the now, there is a me and an open road to ride. Maybe I’ll never see what is on the other side and maybe that’s what’s meant to be. If somewhere on the road I find me a hitcher who wants to hop in for the long haul I guess then I will decide whether to stop or keep right on riding as she eats my dust. For now the sledgehammer is on standby and the dam is holding up just fine. Here’s to you Steph and Megs. All the best…all the best. As for me, I’m sticking with Tommy. I’m better off without a wife.

“I like to sleep until the crack of noon
midnight howlin' at the moon
goin' out when I wanto, comin' home when I please
I don't have to ask permission
if I want to go out fishing
and I never have to ask for the keys”--Tom Waits