Marriage

My friends were married a few weeks ago. It's weird because it's such a permanent thing that it seems rash, but your parents are there smiling quietly the whole time. It feels like maybe the parents should be jumping up, reminding you that tattoos look saggy when you age and are you sure you really want to look at that the rest of your life? Thirty, forty, fifty years from now?

Which is a reasonable reaction; at twenty-three, you have no idea what you'll care about when you're seventy. Maybe you'll still think that peace everlasting is important, but no longer think the Hopi symbol of it on your hip was such a great idea. Maybe you'll still love the same man and want to be around him every day, but for God's sake don't ink his name on the back of your hand. That shit doesn't come off.

Er, marriage. That also doesn't really come off, or rather it's like a tongue ring: you can commit to it, and then years later you can throw away the ring and hope the hole closes up, but it will probably leave a scar, and if nothing else the effects on your tooth enamel are permanent. You and that tongue ring committed to each other, and changed each other in permanent ways.

Anyway, it was weird to watch them walk down the aisle, simple, classic, in the woods, and have them make lifelong vows - vows to keep for several times longer than they've been alive, and everyone smile at the romance and love of the happy couple who have just done something so recklessly binding that they can never take it back as long as they live.

And it's amazing what soft music and cultural norms can do. As I sat their watching, I smiled too, and reached next to me for my partner's warm hand. Perhaps the very foolishness of the act is what makes it beautiful, because it means you're so in love you either can't see all the coming years, or that you see them and can't think of anything you'd rather do than cling hopelessly bound together as years hurtle by.