Marry Me and Be My Wife/You Can Have Me All Your Life/I Love You and You Love Me..Tie Me Down and We'll be Free (props if you get the ref).

…The next time I get married, I’m going to seek counseling.

And I know about marriage, that if anything, I probably seem like I don’t think marriage is a great idea.

And, in truth, I don’t.

Divorce is more natural than marriage. That’s what I think.

…And yet, I know I will be married again. I can see that as a type of destiny. Not just because I want to—maybe I don’t necessarily want to—but because that is how I am.

All the little accidents that draw people close enough to believe.
Even if you know they are accidents, it doesn’t stop you from believing.
Even if you know belief is an illusion, it doesn’t stop you from acting accordingly.

Being aware of your motivations, that doesn’t always stop you from being motivated by them.

Even if they’re sort of questionable.
And in the end, aren’t most of them?

Learning yourself doesn’t cure you of yourself. It just makes it more manageable. Like any number of diseases, like any number of dis-eases.

…So you better ask yourself about this marriage that you’re going to be in, this marriage that you’re in, if you’re willing to be cynical about it all, if you’re willing to accept that divorce is more natural than marriage, then what really are you’re reasons for wanting to be married.

You’d be ask it.

And don’t just go blurting out the name of somebody you love and making that declaration of love after the name. As if that is an answer.

If that’s what you’ve done, you’ve just told on yourself.
You’re talking about wanting to possess somebody.

That, what you’re talking about, your excuse for the aisle and the flowers, the tuxes and children bearing rings, that’s just want and need.

Here now, do better.
Really, why do you want to be married?

Because you understand, don’t you, that want and need isn’t going to hold it together? Love itself, real and caring LOVE won’t either.
So don’t go counting on things less than it.

And as L will tell you, or MT, alcohol, well that’s a false remedy too.

You’re in trouble.
That marriage of yours.
That marriage that will be yours.

All that post ceremony.
All that post honeymoon.
What is supposed to be the rest of your life.

…The trick is not to find good reasons.
They all sound like good reasons.

These bumperstickers you’re printing on your heart.
These tshirt designs you’re wanting to wear on your sleeve.

The trick is to be honest about your reasons, not to have ones that sound good.
That way, when it all starts to go to pieces, you can get out your real reasons for wanting to be married.

You can see why you really thought you wanted to be here.
You can think about it.

If anything will save it, your fucked up marriage, it will be the list or real reasons.

Not the: I loved her.
Not the: I needed her.
Not the: I wanted to possess her.
(Fill in him if you like.)

It ain’t got cut it.

Your weakness and hers or his, it might keep you together. But is that what you got married for? So that known would just slightly under-weight the unknown and you’d stick to it?

Tsk tsk.

Like a man in a prison that has no locks anymore.

…You need a better list.
Get on.

…The doctor, he sees me today.
He listens. He taps. Reads a little from my file.
No pics necessary, no vision of the me inside of me made visible through some technology that if you think about it hard for even a moment is miraculous.

I’m sort of holding my breath. Three weeks since the other doctor tells me I won’t be doing anything for three weeks, buddy.

A month, a full month, since that first doc, the one with the red patch under her eye, tells me I’m got full on pneumonia.

And I’m waiting for this doctor, not the buddy type, not the oddly skin diseased type, this third doctor who seems a little sick himself, I’m waiting for him to say anything at all.

And he snuffles and reads and glances up at me and reads.

So I ask him, Doctor, how I’m getting on? Am I well again? Can I go back to my old life?

And what he says, it’s yes.

Glee. This is how I look when I’m happy.

What he tells me, It is that I can gradually work my way back into my regular life routine.
And what I think, it’s: You lovely little monkey (a term of joyous affection in this moment), I already have been gradually working my way back.

Because what he’s told me, I’m through it.
I’m finished.

…And driving home in that glow, I think of how this hasn’t been so bad, that sickness.
Maybe even bad’s opposite.
Some cleaning effect.

The way sickness makes you better.

…When I get married again, I’m going to seek counseling.
Before there is even a problem.
Before I even get married.

When I start taking some girl very seriously again, and she me, I’m going to say: Let’s go to counseling.

She’d look at me strange if she hadn’t already heard this speech.
You know, the one that starts with, When I get serious with someone again, I want to go to counseling.

Shall have heard that between the third and fifth date. Even not earlier.

So that when I say it, she’ll know what it means is: I’m starting to take this seriously.

Only, because of how much I want to take a serious relationship seriously, and because I believe in all that stuff they tell you about communication, I don’t want to tell her that in code.

I’ll have told her that I’ll ready: I’m taking this seriously.

So when I say it, let’s go talk to a councilor, it should be no surprise.

…Incidentally, I’m not built to think like that.
To walk around with my problems or their potentials exposed in begging bowls.

Men don’t like other people to solve their problems, or to try to.

But I know that counseling isn’t about somebody who can do that.
Just like love is not about finding the perfect person.

There is no perfect person.
There is no councilor who can solve my problems.

Most of them, they’re just people with degrees.
I could have gotten that degree.
You could have gotten that degree.
My most crazy ex, the one who pointed a gun at me to prove her love (and how crazy am I to still find that wonderfully romantic), she is getting that degree.

They’re not geniuses.
Oh a few of them in this broad field, but not many. Ideally, they should all be as rare as real artists, but they’re not.

I know the limits of my therapist. I saw his weaknesses. I saw the weaknesses of his approach. I knew he wasn’t going to fix anything, not really.

He didn’t have the magic, didn’t have the touch.

You put your soul in the hands of a preacher as if he is closer to your God than you are. What rare man would that be?
That spiritual genius, that artist of the soul.

But that guy talking at you from the front of church, he just went to the seminary.
He just got trained.

Like my therapist, that unrare man.
That average joe with a degree.

…So what’s the point?

The point is, there will be a context, an office, a meeting time, when you are encouraged to say things you’ll not normally say.

To someone you forget to say things to.

This non-genius, this person who can’t save your mental health or your soul, he or she can get you talking about things.

He or she can remind you what you already known: that this person your holding hands and waging war with, she’s on your side.

That once upon a time, you believed your life could primarily be about making this person happy.
That you don’t like anything unhappy in this person.
That for crying out loud, you are the source of her misery.
And deep inside, you don’t like that.
Now what can you do differently?

And that might help you to cut it.

Maybe.

If you’re in touch with your real reasons for getting married and wanting to stay that way. If they remain valid.

…Because in the end, it will be an act of absolute will.
People say love is a choice, but that’s not true.
You love who you love and don’t who you don’t and desire which is often confused with love is also not a choice.

But marriage, remaining together, that’s a choice.
The desire to want to do so, that too might be a choice, at least to a degree.
You’ll have to make it.

…When I get married again there will be some dumb ass Kaiser office, cheap prints on the wall, some councilor sitting their rolling his pencil, and it won’t matter who he or she is, we’ll talk, we’ll do our best.

I wish us luck, the three of us.

…She’ll have to know me thoroughly eventually.

I’ll have to confess it all to her, who I am.

What is that opening attraction based on?
It’s mystery.
Oh, we say it is that men like breasts and asses and women like money and security, but that’s not it.

It’s mystery.
Men think they can solve it primarily through the flesh. None of the bull shit about getting back to the womb. He’s trying to find you in there.

And women, they think it has to be solved primarily in other ways, less tangible ways, but she’s just trying to get into you too.

All these marriages around me are going to hell.
I know what that is. It is the end for one of them or the other of mystery.

The woman, when she loses the sense of it, when she realizes there’s nothing so grand in there, she tells the man she’s lost respect. Respect she equates to love.

And the man, when he feels he’s thoroughly probed her, when he feels he absolutely knows her, what he confesses into his pillow at night is that he wants to find something new and exciting.

Sand art. You build it. You look at it for a little while. You sweep it away.

All these marriages falling apart around me, all these people who can’t survive the end of mystery.

…Female friends tell me about their affairs and I try to understand the role of the cuckold.

And at first I want to thank lucky stars that I’ve never had to play it.
And for a moment, I want to think about how great I must be at something, these women that don’t go looking.

And then it occurs to me that that’s not true. If I were so great, why the end of things?

And what I realize is that the fact we never reached that stage, it is a testament to the greatest thing wrong with me.

That thing that has fucked up all my relationships and will fuck up the ones in the future, too.

It is that the woman, even after years, she never gets to know me well enough to feel the mystery is solved.

But she never really gets to know me at all.

Rather than be disappointed in the solution, she is caught up in the frustrated investigation.

I keep her off guard. I keep her dancing. I keep her moving from foot to foot, from pose to pose, she hardly knows what to think, when to breath.

Like those cats they experiment on at some university, these cats these unethical and heartless bastards place on discs in pools of deeper water, the disc unbalanced enough to require that cat to keep conscious, careful, because if it doesn’t, if it relaxes and doesn’t constantly readjust, the disc will go completely off balance and the cat will fall in the water and drown.

That’s what I did to all those women. Unethical and heartless bastard.

Those asshole experimenters, they do this to study sleep deprivation.

And me, I’m not studying anything. I’m just indulging my fucked up nature.

…When I marry again, when I even start to work toward that in a relationship, I’m going to find a way to get her off the disc.

I’m going to find a way to put her at ease.

And I’m going to hope that when she gets there, it’ll be ok.
That somehow, we’ll work out a way to deal with the end of our mysteries.
With the idea that it is not necessary to begin a new one.

…What we all want, really really want in the end, it is to be loved for who we really really are.

And what we fear, what we really really fear, it is that won’t happen.
And it’s good fear.
There is a ghost in the dark.
A murderer beneath your bed.
A monster on the street corner.

Those people that we love and that love us, they’re poised to move on.

And yet really, finally we must accept the night; finally we must sleep; finally we must go walking that street. And hope it’s ok.

That luck and strength and preparation see us through.