Marriage: The Final Frontier

As a single woman who views marriage as one of the Final Frontiers (I have a list...), I followed the link to a blog post entitled Marriage Isn't For You with a little smile on my face. The whole thing -- how and why people choose to do it, what goes on behind the nuptial doors, the ingredients required to produce the courage and confidence to pronounce before witnesses that you want to spend the rest of your life with one particular somebody, how people find each other out of the kazillion possibilities,...not to mention the rationale behind purchasing extremely expensive clothing and paraphernalia that can only be used once -- it's all mysterious to me.

Which is not to say I've never dreamed of having a life partner, as those of you who've read this blog know very well. If there's one drum I beat regularly, it's the "where is my tribe" drum. Most of the time when I've fantasized about the Perfect Commitment, it's involved me and at least two other people. It's not an easy arrangement to create. Even the most adventurous and generous of past partners were highly resistant (at best) or adamantly opposed to the idea once I found the courage to bring it up.

Anyway, the title of the post struck notes of ambiguity and irony in me and I clicked the link with playful curiosity. The blog title, "Seth Adam Smith on a LITERAL odyssey" was promising:  I perceived some resonance between "Sojourner" and "odyssey"... 

I read the opening paragraphs with respectful attention. After I hit the "punchline" -- "...marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy..." -- I was content to skim the rest of the post. "Make someone else happy"?  Well, add that to the list of Things That Mystify Me About Marriage. How in the world do you go about making someone else happy?

As expected, the Comments were not mysterious; just more grist for the People Are Truly Crazy mill. One good thing about the internet:  people are on display in all their unadulterated imperfection. Surfing the waters of cyberspace it makes perfect sense that I've never met anyone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.