On the issue of hiding (per romani), it has seemed to me that sometimes one has put up such an effort to be who the other may most seem to want one to be, that at the end of the day, after the marriage and headiness of it all has faded, one has not presented one’s self truthfully.
The article is rather sobering ,and, yes, Marian, seems out of sync with how young people are now forming the marriage relationship. Perhaps they are revealing more to each other, even in the times when there are the unspoken moments which also are quite telling.
I was actually saddened by this, " Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand." I am sure I will sleep on it, and take it with me into my days this week.
The following almost seems a rewording of the old idea that we marry one of our parents, even as we think we are rejecting the particular modes in which they expressed (or did not express) love :
“How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.”
My mother was an adherent of the idea that success creates happiness. I think she and I had different ideas of success, of course.
Each time I try to figure out how in the heck this guy has grown to be the repository of memories I share, memories of me growing fat in the belly with child, me looking sexier than ever after the birth of a child, a great storm, an incredible film, grief at the loss of a loved one - I think, ‘How in the heck is this the person who represents the other part of me?’
And I remember that everything we see at the end was also present in the beginning, and it just sends me into a quiet, wishful introspection that never really resolves the feelings of angst, but gives me a less self-centered prism through which to view him, and my choices in staying.