Love and Marriage

      I always thought I would get married. That's what girls did when they grew up. I absorbed that truth, through my parents, school, fairy tales, children's books – everywhere there was the unchallenged assumption that girls got married when they grew up.

      There wasn't a whole lot of emphasis, at Vanderbilt University, on education leading to a career, but what there was was directed only to the male students. The women, as everyone knew, didn't need a career. They were just going to get married, anyway. 

      During the hippy years the assumption was that no one, or few of us, anyway, would get married. Some hippies had wild and wonderful weddings (whether celebrating a legal marriage or not is another question). Marriage was something the state set up, a legal thing that had nothing to do with our love relationships. We could fall in love, live together, have families, be committed without having to get married. We were philosophically against marriage. Certainly that was the thinking of my – well, one of the problems with not getting married was not having a proper word for our married-style relationships. He and I were as though married. We just didn't have the official paper proving it.

      Then, as happens in a lot of marriages, things fell apart. This dissolution was deeply disturbing to me As much as marriage was a given while I was growing up, "divorce" was a nonentity. There was no such thing; once married, one stayed married. But this, too, was a concept quickly dissolving in the social milieu of the day. (Three of my four siblings had second marriages.) My married relationship had been a deep commitment; breaking up was a deep loss. 

      When I finally came out of the grieving period and realized that I was single, I thought, "I'll be dadgum if I'm going to live my life as though it has a hole in it for some man to fill up."

      And, in fact, I have lived a very full, rich life. Maybe, I thought with chagrin years into singlehood, I hadn't left room for a husband in my life.

      Still, I always thought I would get married. I thought that a good man would come along whom I loved, and we would join our lives and be a married couple. Until I hit menopause. Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't going to get married, after all. Maybe the time had passed. That was a surprise, but it didn't trouble me. I was living a good life and a happy one. My life was proof that one didn't have to be married to be happy. I became kind of proud of my single status and its meaningfulness to other single women. I liked skewing the statistics.

        But life is full of surprises. 

      This spring, two months before my 75th birthday, I am getting married. It wasn't a matter of time, after all. It was a matter of meeting the right man. I have found him, I love him, and, reader, I am marrying him.