married people

Newly married people have things.

They have elegant dinnerware still tucked away in boxes from their registry, matching cloth napkins, a splendid array of various-sized dishes and salad bowls and adorably sheik napkin holders. They have cushy towels embroidered with their first names, joint bank accounts and answering machine messages, wine racks and dental insurance. They have brand new photo albums stocked with their first Thanksgiving, first New Years, first apartment, first everything…together.

They have private jokes and unfinished sentences and furtive glances and sudden spurts of conflict..like getting annoyed at the other for buying the wrong salad dressing or forgetting to pick up the other’s clothes at the cleaners. Little things. Silly things. Married people things.

Married people are a unit…where one goes, the other will follow. In order to spend time with one, the other will be there too, in some capacity. If not directly in the room, he or she will undoubtedly be referred to multiple times during the conversation. He or she will most likely call in between the conversation and by the end of your session together, you will most likely know the couple’s dinner plans, work day recaps and most up to date office gossip scandal.

Married people seem to suddenly develop a short term memory..as if their lives without one another never quite existed. Gone are the days of nerve-wracking blind dates, take-out for one and Valentines Day spent with Tom Cruise and the remote control. Married people seem to have miraculously forgotten the doldrums of singleton. And, once you make the mistake of confiding in them about your first good date in a while, they are already planning out your wedding, sharing their own autobiographies…”remember the first time we met..the first time we knew..” Etc. Those stories. And then when the second date is a failure, they whip out the classics…”there are other fish in the sea…there is someone special out there for you too..” .Etc. Those classics.

Now, I am not trying to construe any animosity toward my newly married friends. I may be envious that their personal search for their perfect mate has ended…but this is not grounds to sabotage my friendships with them. Not in the least. On the contrary, I find it refreshing actually to be in the company of two people who so obviously care intensely for each other. Their feelings are reflected in their eyes, their voices, their touch. So what if they have found love at 23...there is still hope for the rest of us, right? I mean, surely the average age of married people nowadays, especially in NYC, exceeds far beyond the mere age of 23..(Nod in agreement to back me up here.)

I guess I find it strange to go from playing truth or dare in junior high and chomping down on Cup of Noodles in your friend’s dorm to sitting across from them at their perfectly arranged dinner table discussing wedding proofs and mortgages. Where does the time go?

As for me, I realize that getting married is not exactly the most simple of activities..It requires the right person and the right time. Two elements that need to go hand in hand. In fact, getting married seems to be like a rite of passage. The formal acceptance into a new sophisticated club that is colossally unnerving to become a member of but happens to offer very awesome benefits. Now, I do realize that marriage is not a piece of cake..It is work, just like anything else and I’m sure even my newly married friends could describe frequent quibbles since the honeymoon phase..Yet, the idea of marriage in the most glorifying terms I can think of sounds something like this: A never ending date that involves sleeping and waking up together. As bitter or cynical as this entry may have sounded at times, that definition of marriage is too alluring for my sarcasm.

Simply put, I may cringe at the dinner table as my married people friends make puppy dog faces at one another as I try to carry on conversation, but, in the long run, I’m just as much a traitor to my single readership as my married friends. And, to prove my point…do I intend to wait patiently for the right person and right time to come around in order to join the club of my newly married friends and have lots of married people things of my own?

I do.