“Love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds…”

So said Shakespeare. But does love not alter, when the altar it finds? Must not love, through alterations wind, to reach the version of itself that then persists through time?

Love is, if anything, an education. A journey, not a destination, as the cliché goes.[1] Albeit a journey where every rest-stop feels like the final destination. Who amongst us has not felt they knew everything there was to know about love from the very first time struck by Cupid’s bow? Then, upon the second shaft, when we are beaten and beleaguered but wise and wary, we may think we know a thing or two about love, and perhaps we even do. After another arrow, the disabusing dart teaches you that you know nothing. But this dearth itself becomes your base, and in this lacking you believe you are finally ready to ascend Socrates’ ladder of love; once informed of your ignorance, you are initiated into enlightenment.

Reaching a rung, another reveals itself. And so it will always be. But no bother! Copying Cupid, we now walk around with a quiver of our own: our lessons in love.  They are our past experiences and anecdotes, the memorized quotes and aphorisms, and the worldly wisdom and cultural clichés through which we approach our love lives. We polish up their points and admire their sharpness, we furnish their ends with fine feathers plucked from books, movies, or commonplace conversation, and then having tested the tautness of our beloved bow, we aim our amorous arrows of advice and anecdote alike at those few who asked, and the countless more who didn’t. Here are mine.

Like a smitten teenager running to their diary after a first date, I sit down to write about marriage a mere month after the wedding (or a couple years, depending on how you count). But whereas the teen has the good sense to lock and hide their scribbles, I shamelessly share mine. I do so not to dispense any potential wisdom they may hold, any of which is borrowed and unearned; nor for the humour of their certain foolishness, all of which is hard-won, and held to with Stockholm-esque sympathy. Rather, I write this more as a missive to my future self, to be read again, in ten or fifteen years. How different may my mature musings on marriage be? Which ideas might I still have and hold, or which have been parted with, and for better or for worse?

“Don’t worry about the colour of the elbow patches?!”

Our first wedding was planned in just a few weeks. Breann had received a promotion at work, and her father, John, discovered that, if she were to get married before the end of the year, it might save her ~$7000 in taxes.[2] Somehow, I found this pragmatic proposal incredibly romantic, and so a wedding was thrown together in late December, like a last-minute salad before dinner. Breann ordered a dress online that arrived with two days to spare; one friend made flower arrangements while another agreed to play photographer; guests were invited with a week’s notice to the reception, which was to be hosted in the local pub; and both our families had dinner for the first time with the group of strangers who, after a few choice words and signatures, would become their in-laws tomorrow.

We were wed in the cold, in a field, under a solitary tree, before a handful of friends and family, all standing inside a perfect cross that Bre and I shovelled into the snow the day before; our wedding certificate lists the location as Ta Ta Creek, Lost Dog Road. For the price of a few hundred dollars, we fed our guests pizza and chicken wings; our wedding cake was two Dairy Queen ice cream cakes, stacked upon each other. It was all quick, quaint, and quirky. But, it was not without its quibbles.

A week before the wedding, we still didn’t have a location. My sister and her husband drove us to two possible locations, while in the back seat, the wheels of planning turned in Bre’s head. “I hope my wedding dress arrives any day now. But have you got your suit yet?” / “Well, I have a suit.” / “Wait, what?” / “My nice tweed jacket” / Authoritatively: “No. You need something else.” / Defensively: “It’s fancy! I bought it in NYC at Macy’s 9 years ago for $300… US!” / “You have to get something new for the wedding.” / “There’s no time!” / “Because you procrastinated, like you always do! You could have ordered a suit when I ordered my dress, but you didn’t!” / “Because I have my jacket…” / “Doesn’t it even have fucking elbow patches?,” exasperated. / “Yes,” offended.  A silence ensued. “Well, what colour are the elbow patches then? I don’t want it to clash with the overall palate” / “Don’t worry about the colour of the elbow patches! We’re planning a wedding in 2 weeks—if we start worrying about the colour of elbow patches, we’re only going to be disappointed.”  Another silence followed, in the midst of which Marisa and Chris sat still in their seats staring straight ahead at the road, wondering—I can only assume— if there would indeed be a wedding at all. But, of course there was. And Breann held my hand, and said ‘I do’, accepting me tweed, patches, and all.

From snow to sand, one and a half years later, we had a second wedding, in Santa Barbara. Breann threw herself into planning—and pulling off—a fantastic wedding. This time, I rented a suit. “Now, what will your grooms people wear,” Breann asked? I’d forgotten about that, admittedly. But with only a precious few wedding duties delegated to me, I rose to the occasion (once reminded), and an immediate solution presented itself: tweed jackets of course, preferably with elbow patches—whatever colour.

Looking back at the pictures now, from both weddings, neither of us would change a thing, even (or especially) the things we were so worried about beforehand. In the labour of love, I don’t sweat the small stuff. Somewhere here surely are some more strained, mixed metaphors, about putting in the elbow grease, or covering small tears in the marriage fabric with sturdy patches, but I’ll leave them for now. Just don’t ask me the colour of the elbow patches, I’m sure I don’t know.

*Sniffle, sniffle,* “Slug-bug blue,” *sniffle*…

Early on in our dating, Breann re-introduced me to the slug-bug game (you may know it as punch-buggy): see a Volkswagen Beetle, call out its colour, and hit your companion. A fistful-of-fun, childhood past-time, which, on the congested SoCal freeways, affords its LA players many more opportunities for punching than when played in the BC Rockies. Breann seemed to take the game pretty seriously, which I both appreciated and reciprocated. Soon we had rules, as well as punishments for their violation: e.g., if both people notice and call out the colour at the same time, then it comes down to whoever punches first; you can’t call the same car twice within a 24-hour period; if you prematurely call out a slug-bug, but it turns out to be, say, a Fiat, you get pinched. We indulged in the ridiculousness of the game, taking the play seriously. Our friends laughing at us.

In his book Homo Ludens, historian Johan Huizinga argues that play is not only an essential aspect of human nature, but primary to, and constitutive of, human culture and civilization. Like lion and wolf cubs, our play prepares us for the shape of ‘ordinary’ life to come. With its rules and roles, goals and teams, positions and rewards, much of our society is structured like big a game, albeit with varying degrees of serious consequences, but often no less ridiculous. When you look at cops, judges or pilots, and more, you see that many of us even wear uniforms when we show up to play our part. I probably won’t convince anyone that even marriage is a type of game, but everyone understands that marriage needs subgames unfolding within it.[3] Slug-bug became one of ours. Here’s why:

Again, we are driving in a car; again, we’ve had an argument. I can’t remember about what (long-distance, finances, not knowing where we’ll live in the near future—pick one), but I remember Breann was crying. This time I was the one looking straight ahead, perhaps wondering myself if there would ever be a wedding. But I should have been looking to the side, because all of a sudden I hear from Bre, in the midst of her post-crying sniffling, “Slug-bug blue,” and I am quickly punched.

I was momentarily astounded. In an instant, this told me everything I needed to know, about Breann, and about us: even in the pits, she was ready for play, and we would always leave room for play to poke through, at any moment, and bring us back to each other.

To our Santa Barbara wedding, we arrived in a white VW Bug, which was then the centre piece of our photo booth, where a pink neon sign read, “Slug-bug for the Love-bugs”. From Snow to Sand, from Sniffles to Smiles, silly games are our connecting threads of sentiment.

Every couple develops its own language. Not their own grammar or syntax, but a common and collaborative form of communication composed of certain gestures, particular looks, perhaps mispronounced words, or even certain sounds; each of which are insignificant in themselves, but all of which have been imbued, over the years, with their shared-but-private meanings and associations. Nabokov, remarks that, “Proust makes much of these little family traditions, of those capricious patterns of domestic customs that cheerfully isolate one family from another”. The most primitive but primal form of constructing an “us” is to be distinguished from a “them”. And so we always say “heller” instead of “hello”, and we have our own way of holding hands: phrases and rituals, each with their own founding myths, all clung to like a peoples’ origin story. These are the cloth of custom, worn like a second skin, which make the game of marriage fun. What is marriage but one big inside joke, and what is its dissolution but no longer wanting to play along?         

‘Marriage is an agreement to keep arguing.’[4]

Perhaps it sounds like Breann and I spend a lot of time arguing. Perhaps we do, but no more than any couple (which every couple tells themselves). Being married to somebody means loving them enough to be willing to argue again in the future—to keep arguing again and again, forever, until one of you dies. (Hopefully for reasons unconnected to the arguments.)

No healthy marriage is pleasantly harmonious; show me a marriage that seems to have such a placid surface, and I will show you an undercurrent of the despotism by one, or the despair of both. If the marriage is successful, then it will never reach a point after which you will never argue again. So long as you love each other enough, you can always be sure to argue again. But if you don’t love each other enough, any fight could be your last. Marriage entails an implicit agreement to keep fighting into the future.

Once we took a trip to Las Vegas for the weekend with a mutual friend. The first night in our shared hotel room, Breann and I had an argument, which unfolded in front of our friend. Later that night, I apologize to him, “I’m sorry you had to see us fight like that.” To which he chuckled, replying, “Hey, if that’s how you guys fight, then I’m jealous—you’re gonna have a happy life together.” This was two years before we got married, and I often fondly remember his observation and prediction. Ironically, though, we are no longer close friends with him—as it happens, we had our last argument.

In Genesis, God makes a woman for Adam, after God says, “It is not good for the human to be alone” (2:18). That may be my favourite sentence in the Bible; after repeatedly looking upon His creation, and pronouncing it “good” (and even “very good”), the first shortcoming God admits is that his human is alone, without a true companion. This speaks not only to humanity’s essential sociality and our need for an other, but also gives us a sense of the kind of other we need: an equal. God finds that none of the other animals are a suitable companion, and so He makes Adam what is often translated as ‘a helper’ (with all the misogynistic, patriarchal connotations that term holds). But the Hebrew term is ezer kenegdo: ezer meaning ‘to be strong’, ‘to rescue/save’, ‘to shield’ (often applied to God Himself, and used consistently in military contexts); kenegdo meaning ‘opposite to’, or ‘corresponding to’. In other words, in making a woman, God aims to provide a strength, corresponding and adequate to that of man’s own. An other that can push back, hold one’s own, shield, guide, disagree, and correct—something none of the other animals can comparably do.[5] Humans need an ezer kenegdo.

If love is an education in the shaping and smoothing of the stubborn snags of one’s sense of selfhood, then marriage whips out the whittling knife. No man can be a rock, I know, but marriage makes sand of a man. It’s the ultimate mirror—everything about you, each grain of your self, is now up for debate. Do I blink too much? (Apparently I do). Are my yawns performative? (I’m informed they often are.) What does it say about me if I don’t believe in making the bed each morning? (Nothing good).

Approached correctly these can be fascinating ‘fights’, and I relish them. At the outset of this marriage, still fresh upon the threshold, perhaps I’m merely still naïve enough to actually believe there is a better, more interesting, version of ourselves on the other side of many of these kind of clashes. From the small (e.g., my adamant refusal to organize our books according to colour), to the big, (e.g., my lack of concern for making money[6]). That we will be transformed through them, becoming stronger, wiser. After all, what is sand but rock made indestructible.

“In friendship and love, we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to an other, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves.”

Now, this may not sound like a very romantic quote to you, and you may not think of Hegel as an insightful thinker on the topic of love. But you’d be wrong on both counts: this sentence is deeply—painfully—romantic, and the concept of love goes to the very heart of Hegel’s philosophy. For Hegel, to love is to be with oneself in the other. That is, to experience the limitations that are placed upon one’s own desires and choices, by virtue of being in a relationship with another person, not as constraints and restrictions on oneself, but instead as enlargements or fulfillments of one’s own self. For instance, you may have found that if you love someone, it is quite difficult to feel happy when they are feeling miserable. Although the alternative entails being a psychopath, this is nonetheless a severe limitation of one’s emotional autonomy: one’s happiness is no longer one’s own, but intimately intertwined with, and dependent upon, the emotions of another.

In love, these are not limitations or constraints on ourselves that we would want removed. Rather, we willingly limit ourselves to this other, and we would be horrified to wake up one day, and find our independence returned, our beloved’s tears no hindrance to our smile. In Hegel’s terms, this is because “we are not one-sidedly within ourselves”, which means that love teaches us that a part of ourselves is now in another. Eventually, “knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves”, we come to believe that to be alone—the supposedly self sufficient sovereign self—would be the true limitation. My happiness is not complete without their happiness, and vice versa; losing this ‘limiting’ link would mean losing a vital part of ourself. For Hegel, it is the psychic destiny of humans to learn how to identify with otherness in this autonomous way. This is not a limitation on oneself, but a fulfillment of oneself; not one’s fetters, but one’s freedom.

At least once a day, Breann and I find ourselves saying to each other some variation of “I knew you were going to say that!”, in response to a remark, or “O.K., I know what you’re going to say…” in anticipation of some remark. We’re not only feeling along with each other, but, inevitably, thinking together too. In the intimate mind meld of marriage, our own inner monologues are always already voicing the other’s presumed pronouncements.

When Milton’s Lucifer boasts “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”, he partly reveals that the solitary and sovereign mind can only exist in these extremes: it either rules or serves. But between heaven and hell, lies Earth, and more precisely east of Eden, the place we all figuratively reside, and where we live together with others who are not only bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, but also mood of my mood and mind of my mind.

‘Acts of Sacrifice’   

A couple years ago, someone asked me, “do you know what your love language is?” I remembered having taken the silly test years before: “Ah yes, I think I got ‘acts of sacrifice’ as mine.” They pointed out my mistake, and we laughed. But years later, I stand by my slip up. Acts of service might feed and sweeten a relationship, but acts of sacrifice forge and strengthen it. On my view, successful relationships can require sacrifice right from the start—before they’re even genuine ‘relationships’. Indeed, they often require sacrifice so that they might successfully become relationships.

Before we started dating, Breann had her dating-apps set to ~3mile radius. In LA traffic, dating someone on the other side of the city, or in a different county, was too big a sacrifice. She ended up with a boyfriend on the other side of the continent, in a different country. This demanded sacrifice.

Over the years, we’ve both spent many months living with each other’s families. Most parents watch their child meet someone, fall in love, get married, and move away, but our parents watched us move in. At times, it all felt as if we were all living on top of each other—especially when Bre and I were trying to be on top of each other. Again, all this took sacrifice. From everyone. And luckily, everyone’s relationships were left stronger, because we showed what we were willing to do for each other. It’s these types of acts of sacrifice that, reflecting upon them, leave me so heavy with gratitude that I feel can hardly manage to stand.

As I look over the five so-called love languages now, I see that they are: words of affirmation; quality time; receiving gifts; physical touch; and acts of service. Personally, these modes of “expressing heartfelt commitment to your mate” seem more appropriate for describing one’s relationship with a pet. Scratches behind the ear, little tasty treats, “Such a good boy!”, going for walks, cleaning up their shit.

If I were to provide a new set of love languages for adults in adult-like relationships, it might be: words of acuity (keen insights, honestly shared); quality humour (appreciating the absurdity of the human condition); receiving grace (to grant and receive forgiveness and compassion); physical solace (to fulfill the ends of the soul, through attention to the body); and, of course, acts of sacrifice (acts of service that actually cost something and so mean more).  

By now, everyone in my close circle has been privileged with a ‘Breann surprise’, whether it’s a party to celebrate a personal milestone, or a perfect gift that shows she was really listening last you talked. These are her sweet acts of service that we all savour, that make us feel seen. But when I look back, and cast my gaze forward, I will always be most grateful for the acts of sacrifice that made us persist and prosper.         

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”

It is in the pages of her great book Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called “one of the few English novels written for grown up people”, that George Eliot writes this. I think about it often.

Its most obvious interpretation points towards all the ways in which a marriage, and the special kind of nearness it demands, wreaks misery. And why not? Our dearest friends may be quite near to us, and they may even have a front-row seat to all our faults and foibles we put on display, but it’s our partners who have the back-stage pass. Perhaps we do come to have this lifelong backstage pass with some of our friends or siblings, but we never have to always clean their laundry, continually getting a peek at the streaks and stains in their underwear, all the while continuing to somehow see them as this erotic being. And then you share a bank account, yoke yourselves to a mortgage, watch your waistlines get wider as your tempers get taut, hold petty grudges, betray trust. This is the kind of unparalleled nearness—emotional, intellectual, financial, spiritual—that marriage brings. The only thing more miraculous then the likelihood that this nearness might go well for some select few is that so many believe that the happy marriage will be their lucky lot.

But awful also has another meaning, as Eliot well knew: not just disagreeable, unpleasant, and bad, but also inspiring of awe, arousing wonder, feelings of reverential respect. And the special kind of nearness that marriage brings can certainly be awful in this sense too. The kindness and patience that I have witnessed Breann extend to my family and friends has often left me in awe. I have come to see just how much I can count and depend upon her, and I hope she has learned the same about me. Her devotion and support inspires within me a reverential respect; her spontaneity, wonder. I hope a happy marriage will be our lucky lot, but I’m happy with an aweful one if not.  

“Familiarity breeds contempt—and children”

There is an expected path: when you’re dating, people ask when you’ll propose; once engaged, when will the wedding be; once married, how long until children? Likewise, there is an acknowledged hierarchy: singles are seen as a sorry or silly sight to successful couples; those dating are considered uninitiated amongst the somber married; and above them all, looking down on all deemed less serious, are they who took it all the way, those married with children. But is there good reason behind this path and hierarchy?

In her book on motherhood, A Life’s Work, author Rachel Cusk muses, “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like, and I wonder whether as a gender we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of the subject”. If this is true, once in a while some truth pokes through.

A couple weeks ago we went for a hike to a hot springs with a group of friends, amongst whom was a couple with kids. On that day, they’d decided not to bring their boys. After a couple hours of all of us laughing together in the hot pools, she turned to him and said: “This is so nice, I feel bad that we didn’t bring the boys along. Maybe we should have. It would have been OK, but everything would have been worse.” Sometimes that’s what life with kids seems like: it is OK, but everything is worse.

But what of the alternatives? A marriage seems to demand children: if you don’t make it children, it will make children out of you. You either put someone above your own needs and desires, or you’ll become a slave to your own. We’ve all seen these couples, with nothing to spend their time and income on besides themselves, gallivanting around the world and renovating their kitchens. They’re looked at with terrible envy. ‘They took the easy way out,’ we say. But I’m not so sure: it can take a lot of grit to push against the expectations of others in this way, and chose yourselves.

Or maybe having children is not putting another above your needs and desires, as much as filling another with those of your own. The way many go about parenting, it seems as if a new tributary has opened up in the world, into which they now pour their anxieties, fears, hopes. If we have our children out of a deep sense of neediness, we risk imposing ourselves upon them. I do think that raising children represents an incomparable life-long project, the most universally accessible pathway to experiencing true transcendence. But just because little else might compare to it, does not mean that nothing else can compensate for it. (You just need to find an arduous, self-effacing, progressive, life-long project to dedicate yourself to–nay: to wholly identify yourself with!)

If a marriage is successful, in the end, you end up with just each other. Your kids go off, they ignore phone calls, they find other roofs under which to celebrate holidays, and you are left alone again with the person you once chose all those years ago. In Breann, I’ve married someone with whom I could potentially raise children, but alongside whom I’m also prepared to be abandoned by them.  

When people ask me now if I want kids, I answer that I no longer bother to think about it enough to form an opinion. Not because I think it is an inconsequential matter, but precisely because parenthood is so transformational. As it tilts your world upon a new axis, it changes your beliefs, desires, needs. You find that what you once thought to be important now seems irrelevant. People who swore they’d never have children a couple years ago end up being indulging parents who wouldn’t change a thing. We don’t know ourselves half as well as we think, in no small part because our ‘self’ is often a work in progress. And so, like Mark Twain above, I approach the idea of children flippantly–one is never ready anyways.

As a way of finishing, I will end at a beginning, with my wedding vows:

“Breann… We have a way of returning to meaningful places: When I decided to propose to you, we returned to Nashville, the first place we ever met; When we decide to go on a romantic getaway, we return to Carlsbad, the first place we ever had sex; And when we decided to have another wedding, we returned back to Barbara—the first place I ever declared my love for you. But the most meaningful thing I’ve ever returned to is not any place, but a person, when I somehow returned to you.

The first time we were wed, you wanted us to write our own personal and romantic vows, but I argued against that. I said such silliness was too indulgently sentimental for such a solemn moment of orthodoxy and tradition. I won that argument. This time, you won. And I see now that I was mistaken before.

The reason that people want to exchange personal vows is because they want to say specifically why they are willing & choosing their love; and there is wisdom in this. Because love, properly understood, is an act of the will, and not of passion. We speak of falling in love, but all adults know the truth: you have to climb into love—constantly. Love is a continual climb of conscious choice, a dual dogged-determination of daily decisions, to both hold to that human hubris needed to scale the Himalayan heights of a shared life. That’s love.

Our relationship reflects this truth of love very well. Nothing—almost nothing—helped our love along the way to its eventual fulfillment. Not our geography, not the timing, not our friend groups or family networks—all the things that most people are able to rely upon, to help their love along its way—much of this was against us, and we had to will our love every step of the way.

Now, am I saying that this means we are more deeply in love than people with more normal, perhaps easier love stories? No, of course not. There is no way I could possibly know that for sure… But, it does seem possible. If not likely. If getting married is loving somebody so much that you want to tell the government, then I have been telling the government how much I love you since 2021, when I had to legally sponsor you, just so that you could come over to my house. That’s love.

And so if love is a choice, then marriage is about the couple created by that choice, twisting together through all the time left to them, until 35 years later, looking across the table at each other, you gaze at that person who you once met by chance in a bar in Nashville, even prophetically joking, ‘we’d have a good story to tell our children if we ever got married’; the person on whom you then decided to take a chance and book a flight to visit, and then once there, to whom you foolishly declared, at the end of that week, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ while sitting on the beach in Santa Barbara; the person you were then fortunate enough to marry on that same beach, just a few years later, but all those years ago, when you stood in front of loved ones and exchanged vows; vows that were perhaps too long, and certainly too strange; vows that should have been more romantic, like she wanted them to be, that talked about how much you’re always laughing together, how cared for and complete she makes you feel, how you’re so hopelessly in love; but when you sat down to write those vows, all that you could think of was now,  40 years later, and all of the choices that defined your love and marriage, like the choices to change your countries and to both change your surnames; and you even remember imagining this very moment, now, over 45 years later, as potential parents, perhaps pathetically abandoned by your children, but still laughing together, still choosing each other, still somehow in love, or whatever word is most appropriate to describe the bond between two old people whose beings have become fully melded, like those old fused trees that can be found deep in the forest, their bound bark hiding the place where one ends and the other begins.

This is the way I know we will continue to grow together, as one; and how I will return, always, to you.”

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[1] Alas, it is impossible to think about love while avoiding clichés—indeed it may be unwise to even try.

[2] Only after we exchanged vows did we learn that in order for her to claim me on her income tax, I needed an International Tax Identification Number—something that, two and a half years later, I still do not have.

[3] As John remarked in his touching wedding speech, “Kieran always wants to play, and will make a game out of anything”. He then told the story of how, when Breann wanted to remove a long, rouge eyebrow of mine, I turned this into a game: she could attempt to pluck it from my brow, only using with her fingers, and just one attempt per day. This proved harder than it sounds, and eventually the game of a daily pluck attempt spread to include her brother and mother, the latter of whom eventually got it after a few days.   

[4] Is this sentence really mine? I have a character in one of my stories say it, but part of me feels that I must have heard it somewhere… If you know where from, let me know.  

[5] This is why having an animal companion is so nice: they can never push back against you in the intimately infuriating but integral ways that human companions do. Sure, they might hop up on the counter and lick your buttered toast, or continue to bark at the neighbours, but Fido won’t point out how you’ve become just like your parents when you promised not to, and Felix will never convince you that you owe it to yourself to work harder for your goals.

[6] To paraphrase Paul Auster, I am happy being a mere medium for money: it only passes through me, temporarily, on its way to somewhere else, more permanent.