Twisty links to an undoubtedly
well-intended but somewhat inflammatory post on the notion that major changes in one's appearance after marriage constitute "false advertising," in the context of a haircut or lingering weight-gain after a pregnancy. This has kicked up some dust.
MIM is free to live her marriage as she sees fit and shouldn't be subjected to ad hominem commenter attacks, but I think she's writing from a perspective imbued with a lot of unrecognized privilege, mainly that of a cute, thin, healthy person with some disposable income who mistakes luck in those areas for personal virtue, especially with regard to weight issues. Other writers can address weight/fat-acceptance better than I, but her original idea, that partners owe it to another to consult before "major" changes, seems like a recipe for trouble, both short-term and long.
First, the notion of "false advertising" with regard to marriage troubles me with its creepy commercial connotations and its commodification of appearance. Is getting married really such a desirable thing that it's assumed that women "advertise," falsely or otherwise, to achieve bridal status? Some undoubtedly do, but I can't recommend it. When I was twelve years old and exasperated with my father for being so strict with my phone-yakking time, I asked my mom whether--if anything were to happen to Dad--she would get married again. Her response?
"Marriage is not the goal," she said, briskly. "It's the person that matters. I love your father. The institution of marriage itself is bullshit."
In college, with her words as my lodestar, I cradle-robbed a nice teenaged East Texas boy, married him the week after his college graduation and moved out of state with him two weeks after that. Hombre never had a chance.
We weren't looking to get married when we met. When I first laid eyes on him I was telling a co-worker that I was swearing off men for a year, the better to get my shit together and finish school with no further entanglements. There was no ass-wagging, no hair-flipping, nothing. In fact, I was the one traumatized when he arrived at the office one day early in our supersecret dating adventures with his awesome shoulder-length hair replaced by Beatlemania.
"You didn't tell me you were gonna do that," I gasped. And as soon as I said it, I felt like a petty asshole. I wasn't the boss of his hair. Geez. Because really, the whole notion of "false advertising" with regard to one's appearance boils down to the idea that a person loses bodily autonomy within a relationship. The idea that I should talk over with Hombre any planned changes to my hair or appearance is a nonstarter, and while there are certain looks I'd prefer him not to rock, it's his body and the choices are his. For fun, I did ask him last night what kind of physical change I'd have to undergo in order for him to feel duped.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe adding a third leg, attached to the center of your forehead."
He then fell asleep while I pondered his smartass remark. Anyone who's lived in the world for a few years learns by observation that people's bodies change all the time. Hair grows in, hair falls out, teeth come and sometimes go, joints ache, vision and hearing change, collagen fades away, skin stretches and sags and scars, alcohol is consumed and tattoos are commissioned. Some changes are voluntary, some are decidedly not. But in light of the reality of change, the empirically "false" scenario is one in which your spouse does a Dorian Gray, remaining static in appearance year after year.
And this is where we get into the next area where I'm troubled by the notion that spouses owe it to one another not to change "drastically," and I don't see how MIM's qualification that involuntary changes are okay holds water, because change is change, period. It happens, whether in the blink of an eye or over decades, and I don't see how a relationship predicated on physical stasis could survive the passage of time. A few months before my wedding I went down to the coast to visit my great-aunt L and her husband Bill. Bill was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's and a variety of other ailments, and L took the ferry to the next town over every day to see him.
At the time of the visit, a couple of my twentysomething friends and I were having an ongoing discussion about how you know you want to commit to someone. Kristin and I were of the "you just know" school, and apparently we lucked out since we're each more than a decade into happy marriages. But visiting L and Bill, I saw what commitment looks like at the other end of a lifetime, when all the personal training and lipo in the world can't mask our frailty and impending mortality. When the physical hotness, even the physical health, is gone, what remains? At some point, it boils down to the emotional bond. The notion that you or your husband should stay young, hot, thin, or even continent simply will not survive the passage of time.
That's what I thought about on the three-hour drive home after that visit. As I planned my own wedding and plotted my career arc, I ruminated on the fact that Hombre and I were taut and foxy now, but some day we were going to need the drool wiped from our chins. If I was willing to face that, I figured, I was ready to hang with Hombre for the long run.
And now I encounter the opinion that certain types of change are fraud. The last time I saw L and Bill together was at that same nursing home on the coast. It was June, hot and humid as any Texas summer, and L was prepping Bill for a "walk." Since he was bedfast, unable to speak clearly, straighten his legs or eat without a stomach tube, getting him into his wheelchair for a stroll was a challenge. L had her own issue, osteoporosis, for which she was seeing a physical therapist and working out with weights at home. They were in no appreciable physical way the teenagers they had been on their wedding day. What if Bill had packed up and left when L's varicose veins bloomed decades earlier? She had, after all, been a bad-girl flapper hottie back in the day. What if his thinning hair or squamous-cell cancer spots had been the last straw for L? What if she were to look at this (to me) heartrending husk of her husband and lover right now and decide she'd been grifted?
L punched in the escape-prevention code, and I held the door open so she could roll Bill out onto the sidewalk by the parking lot. The heat rose through the soles of my shoes and invaded my lungs. L proceeded at a brisk trot along the edge of the blacktop with Bill doing something I'd never seen my serious, quiet, surrogate grandfather do before: He was giggling. I walked behind them, not eager to keep up in the sopping heat, surprised that L had the juice to go zipping around in the afternoon sun like that.
She stopped.
"What in the world is going on here?" she yelled. She didn't know it then, but she and Bill would be in their 74th year of marriage when he died, three-quarters of a century of haircuts, dentures and surgeries, cats-eye Dior sunglasses and little gray tumor-zapping nitrogen burns on the arms.
But at that moment, as she stood hollering over her demented husband's wheelchair in a hellish Aransas Pass parking lot, she reached down and flipped a tab on the chair.
"The brake was on," she yelled to Bill. Chair now unfettered, she took off running. That was the last time I saw them together, her stooped and sun-spotted, him curled up and confused. She pushed him down the lot and around the corner of the building, both of them laughing so loudly I could hear it after they had left me behind and were out of sight.
