Down the Rabbit Hole

Starter Marriage

The other day I reconnected with an old friend on myspace (which has become a reunion forum for old college buddies as of late) who'd recently gotten married at the age of 33. He told me he loved his wife and they were great friends and that he figured by waiting until 33, if it didn't work out, the worst that would happen was he'd end up with a few more cats. I didn't chide him for being flippant. I could see where he was coming from. In the process of catching him up on my life over the last ten years, I filled him in on my ill-advised marriage at the tender age of 21 and subsquent divorce. If he read my shame between the lines or not, I can't be sure. I thought his comment back was one meant to convey both humor and compassion, "oh, a starter marriage, yeah my brother had one of those." And I laughed outloud. I decided that I liked that phrase a hell of a lot. I think its far more appealing of thinking of the past as training missives rather than a catalog of mistakes and missteps. A starter marriage, like a starter home, is a place you "start". There are not many rooms, sometimes just a sparse little yard. So you grow into it, slowly. You discover your indentity, decorate the rooms, experiment with colors, rearrange the furniture over and over again to try to make it fit. In time, you find you've outgrown it. You move. You move on. A starter home, a starter marriage. Sometimes it lasts forever, sometimes people get it right. Sometimes it comes part of the landscape of your life. For others, you try to do it better. You try to make the next home the right fit, not just an upgrade and most of all, you forgive yourself.