Marriage is a Dirty Word

Not so long ago, we had movies like "Runaway Bride" and "So I Married An Axe Murderer" that poked fun at the issues surrounding fear of marriage. Each still resolved itself in the girl in a white dress as the credits rolled. Then a few years back, "Forces of Nature" (a personal favorite of mine but hated by the critics, with reason) went a level deeper, putting Ben Affleck into the throes of temptation on the verge of his nuptials. He takes a step in, but in a very anti-worldly move, gets his head back in the end and teaches us all a lesson about love and commitment.

Nowadays, marriage has been redefined by our media. It is often the empty shell that represents doing what we're expected to, or false hope, or foolish, immature escape from real love - that of course exists outside of marriage. Movies, both comedy and drama -- "Little Children," "The Hearbreak Kid," "Notes on a Scandal," "Spanglish," "Finding Neverland," "Closer" to name a few -- directly or indirectly attack marriage as a B.S. institution.

Cable TV's new sensation, "Californication" does the same. Today's modern family can be seen in David Duchovney's on-again, off-again relationship with a woman and their child. The first season's climactic ending leaves off with her leaving a man at the altar and running off with Duchovney. Although I haven't seen the show, it all sounded very "General Hospital" to me. A friend of mine recently told me how his watching of the show made him really question the purpose of marriage for the first time. "Is the point to blow a lot of money on a fancy wedding, or to marry rich and get a good lump sum when the marriage ends? Or is it just for the facade of security with someone you don't really love? I don't know about marriage..." was his sad, jaded conclusion.

The problem with making mass media our guide to living (don't get me started) is that though the fantasy worlds of TV and movies are so persuasive -- with their hot actors and so-called happy endings and all -- we don't seem to pick up on the fact that our problem is our obsession with finding that happy ending in a person. In Chris Rock's "Never Scared" HBO special, he expounds on the dilemma of "married and bored or single and lonely," saying there's no happiness anywhere. Although I don't quite agree with the hopelessness of this diatribe, I appreciate the honest treatment of a subject matter that often has all its hopes lumped into one category or another. As our generation awakens to the reality of the difficulty of marriage -- that it's not what will make all of our wildest dreams come true -- we are now putting our hopes in extra-marital affairs to make it all better. The problem is, people are still people whether you are married or single or having an affair. We are all one big, hot mess.

I wonder what the next wave of TV and movies will bring when we realize that that wasn't the answer either.

Unattainable or Defective?

I know an older single person who was asked once why he wasn't dating and whether he was interested in getting married at this point in his life. His answer regarding his options: "Well, you figure if a car's been on the lot that long, what's wrong with it?"

As a single person myself, I don't feel like I'm yet at the point of no return. I'm not "old," even by my standards, and though most of my friends are married with babies or kids, there are still single guys out there. But it does beg the question - who's left?

I used to complain about the guy who always went after the "unattainable" girl and then got her - like somehow he was enticed by the chase of the unattainable. But really, if he got her then she really wasn't unattainable. In fact, if we are staying true to definition, it's the still single people who are unattainable. We literally haven't been got. And maybe that's the problem.

As I've started looking around, I've realized that we are all cars with missing engine parts. Some just don't have the parts missing that make them flee from relationships like others do. And I have to take responsibility for my own faulty engine.

Still, I have no regrets so far. My happily married friends don't know how to rock a dancefloor like I do... and I consider that a gift of singleness.