Saturday, April 18, 2009

My friend’s father took her and I out for dinner, and Lee happened to mention that I had recently been conceptually married. As a man in his third marriage, he's lived every stage of our relationship, and then some. For him, hearing about my project stirred up some mixed emotions. He praised the idea for its creativity, and took his time carefully (he’s a lawyer) articulating his reservations.

He kept on stressing that he was coming from “parent’s perspective.” I think he was concerned that I was doing this merely to debunk the validity of these societally-accepted relationship stages-- i.e. attempting to serve as my own spoiler. He was afraid, he said, that a young person such as myself would see this pseudo-relationship of a way of testing the waters as to whether or not I wanted to be a part of these traditions in the future. You can’t really know how you’ll feel about going through these experiences, he said, until you really go through them in real life.

This friend got engaged last year, and that was a big surprise for me. Among my friends, she was probably the last person I imagined opting to marry somebody, but she went ahead and accepted her boyfriend’s real-life marriage proposal and there she was, staring it right in the face. I remember her telling me about how overwhelmed her Dad was when she told him, how emotional he became. I doubt he saw it coming anymore than I had, but clearly it had made him very happy. This summer, however, she ended up breaking it off. I’m not sure how he took it. I’m sure he wouldn’t wish any of the potential pitfalls of the marriage and kids lifestyle on his daughter, but clearly he values the positive elements of it enough to defend it and hold out hope that she’s not too jaded to eventually move, as he himself, beyond that stage.

I’ve never found myself in the situation of feeling sure I wanted to devote myself to one particular person, but I’m sure that would be a pretty incredible feeling regardless of the final outcome. Marriage is certainly a powerful way of sealing that bond. I’ve never been a father, either, but I have an idea that if I did become one, it’d probably be one of the most incredible experiences in my life. Her dad seemed worried that I was ready to seal off these potential life-paths after I’d followed them in a partial way with Ellie, and he felt that that’d be a shame.

I don’t want people to think that I’m making light of their life choices. We are imitating people in trying to live out these social norms, and people rarely like to be imitated. Being imitated is very frustrating, because the imitator does need to have to know the true motivations for your actions in order to effectively imitate you. In a way, it’s like they’re stealing from you. So if he felt a little defensive there in the presence of his daughter, I don’t blame him.

People have reasons for doing the things they do, and it’s hard to judge from the outside. But will these experiences, when taken in capsule form, make me feel like more or less of an outsider? That’s yet to be determined.

-Zach