VD 2: Love/Marriage

This week is Freedom to Marry Week. You know that I support the right for everyone to marry the person they love, regardless of their sexual orientation. It’s about fairness and equal rights.

But in reality, I have serious doubts about marriage. I grew up in a house where my parents fought regularly. They weren’t just normal arguments, either — my mother would end up screaming and then go into convulsions, become delirious, and get really really sick, scaring us all half to death. Yet she still maintained that she would not have a divorce because of her religion, even though we were all slowly dying because of it.

Which brought me to realize that it’s silly to expect a marriage to last until death. People change and grow in unexpected ways every day — how can anyone think they can predict their future attitudes? You meet someone you like now, and think you will like for the rest of your life. Yet there is still a 40-50% chance that you will end up divorcing. Or, if not, you will spend a great deal of your life unhappy.

My definition of love is allowing yourself to be vulnerable to another person. Which means that they can and will (often inadvertently) hurt you.

Fuck that. I’m with Sondheim:

“Because I had a lot of friends in my 20’s and 30’s,” he continues, “I didn’t feel alone. I liked working, which you do in a room by yourself. I wasn’t missing anything. I really wasn’t. I had so-called relationships, just not very intense or none that I wanted to make a sort of permanent daily relationship. Not unlike Bobby. I’m sure one of the reasons I had no trouble writing for him was I understood what that emotional, not so much disconnection or dysfunction, but aloofness, or reserve, was. Or perhaps fear. I don’t know. At any rate, it actually never really occurred to me to live with anybody. It just didn’t occur to me until it happened by accident, when I met Peter Jones and we got together.”

Sondheim is now living alone again, though he and Jones are “still close and seeing each other.” His daily routine is fairly regimented: work into the evening, exercise and a late dinner. He’s not a habitue of the New York show-biz party-and-premiere circuit. “I like writing, and because I don’t have a family, I don’t have an awful lot else in my life.”