In my last article I wrote about a man who’d gone through a horrible divorce last year. Me, having been twice divorced, offered him this sage, Dalai Lama like advice. One day, you will wake up in your new apartment and you will head outside with your morning coffee and experience a happiness and peace like never before. Very recently he told me this exact thing happened to him. He also thanked me for my words of wisdom, if you want to call them that.
Today, he has found a new love, and I’d wager the mortgage he’s going to ask her to marry him one day. If he does, it will be his second marriage and one that will stick for him. Fingers crossed. I have seen them together and they are perfect for one another. She is his Yoko and he is her John. No question about it.
Will I ever get married again? My answer is a solid no. I’ve have my chances and once you’re two and out, my guess is you’ve developed not bad luck, necessarily, but instead, a pattern of behavior. Marriage should not be chalked up to an anthropological experiment.
Do I enjoy my freedom to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it? I cherish it and I’m always going on about how wonderful the free life is. But are there aspects of marriage that I miss? I would be remiss if I didn’t admit the truth. I do miss some of the wonderful things a good and solid marriage have to offer.
Here’s five of them:
- Stability: Living the life of the roving bachelor, while having its many advantages, can sometimes get old. You don’t always eat right, or you drink too much, or you develop bad habits like sleeping too late or too little. If you don’t have a steady girlfriend, you sometimes serial date and that also gets wearing on the nerves. My second wife once said I was the type who always needed a girlfriend to get through the night. That’s not entirely true since I spend most every night alone. But there’s also some truth to it.
- Friendship: The shame of my personal divorces are that I was good friends with both my wives prior to our getting married. Only when we were thrust into the responsibilities of what’s intended to be domestic tranquility did things start to get ugly. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I can be a little bit selfish about the things I want to do, when I want to do them. But I do miss opening a cold beer at the end of a long writing day and shooting the breeze with my ex while she made dinner for our daughter. We used to get along great, until other things got in the way.
- Parenting: I’m going to admit something else, and I’m not proud of it. I’m not the best parent in the world. You won’t see my ugly mug on the cover of Parent Magazine. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids. If the situation with my second wife had been better, we might have had more than one child. Problem is, I loved the kids, but I wasn’t a very good disciplinarian, and what’s worse, if I thought a decision my wife made regarding the child wasn’t the best, I’d rarely back her up. Marriage is a team effort and if you have one member undermining the other, things are going to fall apart. As a single man, I feel like I’m an even worse parent since I’m very much absent from one of my kid’s life. But I’m working on that.
- Health: They say (you can Google it) that a married man lives a longer life than a single man. As an unmarried man for the past fifteen years, I can definitely see where this is the truth. Unmarried men tend to eat out more often than they should. We take chances we might not otherwise take, like visiting war zones or places where revolution and/or terrorism are rampant. We are also lonelier than many married men. Even men who are in bad marriages aren’t necessarily lonely. I love to travel solo, since I pretty much have no choice but to do it that way. Which means it’s a special treat to actually travel with a wife or a girlfriend.
- Days Off. I work all the time. That was one of my recent ex’s problems with our relationship when we tried to make it work a second time. However, come Sunday, I would make sure I did not work at all. If I had my way, I’d gather up the troops and we’d head out on a day trip. Didn’t matter where. The Catskills maybe, or simply an apple orchard to pick a few bushels. It was the being together part that meant the world to me. It’s something I definitely miss about being married.
I doubt many heads are blowing up over this article. Because like I mentioned in my last piece, 5 Reasons Why I Don’t Miss Marriage, I’m coming at you from personal experience. So I’ll ask of myself the million dollar question one more time. Will I ever get married again?
The answer is still no. I do love my freedom too much for that. Naturally, if the perfect relationship presented itself I would consider living with a woman. As for legal marriage, however, no dice.
But then, perhaps I had my chance to enjoy a good marriage for all its hardships and warts, and just blew it. Or maybe we both blew it at the same time. Sad thing is, we’ll never know.
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.
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