Poetic License

I've discovered that it is easy to sound (figuratively speaking) like a jerk or an idiot when you comment about marrige. When you're dealing with a sensitive subject like marrige, people will decide what tone they're going to hear based on the weight of their personal baggage; and, let's face it, marrige can be the very definition of the word: ambivalence.  So, i'm just going to throw my opinions out there, and not worry about what tone anyone thinks i'm taking. I'm not trying to change the world, for heaven's sake, i'm just talking about it.

"no one wants to get married,"

That quote was part of my stream of thought in my last post, and even though i cannot justify it, i decided to leave it in. It can be taken as humor, like most exaggeration, but i was also hoping to shake people up, plant a seed, make the reader wonder if maybe there is something to it.

Marrige does what it's supposed to do: provide a couple with legal union; it does nothing else, though. But, seems to me, in american society the word "marrrige" has become synonymous with "instant happiness and magic." That's why when people fall in love, right away, they think: i want to marry this person; it's what people in america have been fed since childhood. You go to school, go to church,
join the Republican Party, and marry your sweetheart. Maybe in India it is different, since marriges are an arranged affair.

I try to see through the propaganda. When i knew i had fallen for Trish, 21 years ago, my first thought was not: i want to marry this this girl; i did not see her in a wedding dress or feel a desire to be legally bound to her. I simply felt a desire to share my life with her. I suppose most people would say that a secular person like myself, with my family background, of course i'm going to have a distorted view of this institution. I don't think that has anything to do with it; i think it's my proclivity towards progressiveness.

The marrige license started showing up in the middle ages; before then, a couple would just have to stand in front of their friends and family or the god of their choice and declare their commitment. The purpose of the license is exclusion: underage people, of course, are excluded to keep them from making the biggest mistake of their lives; and at one time, a man and woman of different color need not apply, also. I'm all for governing the masses  but we've seen what people of one color can do to people of another color, or of another religion. Of course,
marrige should be regulated, it's a legal contract, but it should be as easy as filling out some forms and filing them to dissolve it for two consenting adults who own nothing and have no children. It is ridiculous to have to pay lawyers exorbitant
sums of money and have it drag on so long.

So, yes i have some problems with the system of legal union, but i did not ask Trish to "shack up" with me. There was no point in doing that for more than one reason. There are two things that Mexicans take very seriously, make that three: baptisms, weddings, and funerals; they're mandatory. I was too young to protest the first, couldn't get out of the second, but i'm sure as hell getting out of the third, i'm donating my body to science. I want them to see how well i've evolved, but i digress.

I did not have to ask Trish what her parents would have thought if i had voiced my desire to live in sin with their daughter, i had my own parents. The fact was: if i wanted Trish to share my life here, we would have to marry. I did not hesitate, i did not think: dang it, now i have to get married! It was the law of the land and it's not like i am against marrige, some of my best friends are married. (If Trish read my blog, she would laugh at that because she knows i have no friends.)

So, just as soon as she said yes, i went about investigating the proper way of doing this thing. My friends, the ones i used to have, told me to just pay a coyote to bring her across the river and then marry her and fix her papers, simple as that, and absolutely wrong. I petitioned for a fiancee visa on her behalf. Several months later she would receive an appointment at the U.S. consulate in Monterrey for an interview; there she would either be approved to enter the U.S. or not; she got it on the first try, i was so proud of her.

But let's go back, back to before i sent the application in to what was then U.S. Immigration and Naturalization; it read very clearly on the application: the fiancee must stay a fiancee until she entered the U.S., she could then marry the fiance. I think this was when i started to think: this is getting interesting. When i called Trish to explain the situation, i tried to not giggle because i already thought i knew where this was going; she said she would talk to her parents.

Back then, hardly anyone in Trish's family or my Mexican family, for that matter, had passports, let alone U.S. visas, which are not easily obtained in Mexico. When the verdict came in, Trish called to tell me that her parents would agree to let her go with me if we had a church ceremony in Durango. I asked her how we would do that, because i knew that couples had to get married in a civil ceremony by a justice of the peace before going to the church ceremony. She said that in Mexico, if you know the right people, anything is possible. And that's when i started to get excited about this "wedding."

The only two pictures of Trish and me before we got married, 1989.