I Do, I Do, I Do. Now Leave Me Alone!

Menopause is really kind of cool, if you disregard the raging hissy, red-faced parts and concentrate on the depth of the emotions you can plumb in, oh, four minutes or less.

Marriage is really kind of cool, too, if you disregard the raging hissy, red-faced parts and concentrate on the depth of the emotions you can plumb in, oh, four minutes or less.

The parallels between these two poignant and panic-inducing stages of life came to me, along with a bad case of the “Oh craps,” as I helped my nephew, Tony, and his then-fiancée, Kara, write their wedding ceremony.

I don’t know if they asked me to pen their vows because I have been with Doug since Boy George was cool, or because I’m sappy but not sickeningly so, or because I’m a writer who’s a) cheap and b) can quote the hell out of a slew of dead great thinkers. I choose to believe they picked me because they know I love being married, that I like the person I am after more than two dozen years with this smart, kind, hot guy beside me, and because I know, since I have lived other lives, that anyone who says their marriage is perfect lies like a dog.

I used to read anniversary notices and wonder how one person could stay married to another person – hell, how anyone could do anything other than breathe and eat Reese Cups – for 25 or 40 or 50 years. Then I married Doug, the man who cooks for me, rides herd on our pets, sings to me and calls me baby (and it doesn't sound creepy). We swear we stay married so as not to screw up two other people's lives. Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe more than that, we’re still a team because it’s real and it’s raw and damn, we’re good together even in the throes of my assorted hissy histrionics.

If, for example, Doug misses one of my calls during the day, I have planned an elaborate, Viking-style funeral before he has time to retrieve my voice mail. In my head, my Dougster is sprawled at the bottom of the basement stairs a la murder-scene chalk-outline, looking like a cross between Jeri Blank’s frozen-faced dad in “Strangers with Candy” and a broken marionette. In less time than it takes to type “I Am An Ignorant Ass,” because that’s what my dad called people who borrowed trouble for themselves, I envision myself draped over my sweet baboo’s tube-entwined body in the hospital, stroking his face and swearing I’ll meet him at Rainbow Bridge, the place where dead pet friends wait for their owners.

Thirty seconds later, I’m on the phone with Doug, reminding him that I need to lose 17 pounds in the next three weeks and that he’s not helping by buying me truffles. And then I cry, because I want to curl up on Doug’s lap, press my head against his hair and smell the warm spot below his left ear and thank him for the chocolate. And then I cry some more, because I remember when we were both so cute it was silly.

So, called upon to write a wedding ceremony for cute people who don’t want any mention of blessed unions, something not pagan enough to make their grandmas faint dead away but spiritual enough to embrace their joy, I spring into estrogen-challenged action.

“It’s really as simple as this,” I tell the kids between sobs and a quick stop at “The Young and The Restless,” where I am going to live with Jack Abbott if Doug doesn’t make it.

“The two of you found each other, love each other and now, cannot imagine life without your best friend. You believe in marriage and its immortal possibilities.”

And I do, I do, I do believe. I really and truly, down to the tips of my come-you-know-what-me shoes I still love wearing, do. At its best, I’ve learned, marriage can, in one afternoon, be wilder and more exciting than living through Mr. Toad's Ride, a Category 5 hurricane and a Spielberg movie in one afternoon. At the worst, those who enter this oh-so-demanding venture with little concept of commitment or unselfishness are most often disillusioned and disappointed.

But Doug and I did it. We persevered. Somewhere between the breathless “I love you’s” and the words that wounded us to the core, between moving in together and my ruptured spleen that left us $20,000 in debt? That’s where we discovered the everyday miracles that sustain and enrich a relationship, the keen and abiding oneness that only two people whose lives intersect from the pillow to the kitchen to the grave can envision.

And in that very special place is where Doug and I figured out what our marriage means, and where we’ve defined and redefined our expectations. That’s where we’ve celebrated individual and shared successes, found pet names and inside jokes -- and the courage to say “I can” when saying “I can’t” would be perfectly understandable, too.

So I write about all that, my popsicle dripping onto the comforter in the dark: "You will find yourself thinking, whether you're walking the dog or spotting each other in the airport after days away from each other: "This is the person I believe in. This is my best friend. I do not live just for you, but I would die for you." Doug said that to me one time after we'd been married several years and I swear to God, my heart almost stopped.

But I tell them, too, that to think they will complete each other through marriage would be selling them, and the infinite possibilities of their marriage, very short indeed. That would imply they would not continue to grow, or that they were not strong, wonderful people before they shared these vows. And of course they were those people, and of course they will blossom, as will the strength of the promises they make in front of their weepy moms and one slightly tipsy aunt.

"That’s because the marriage of the spirit will take you to places you cannot imagine, and most of all, will always bring you home to each other," I write, watching Doug fall asleep and wondering if he knows that he looks like the love child of Bea Arthur and Eric Clapton.

"Everything will change, and grow, from here on out, and so will Kara and Tony Moore. Not because you say “I do” – but because for now and forever, the two of you can say with the assurance that loving marriages bring: “We want to. We choose to. We will.”

And then, because I need to suck down another pint of sorbet and find the painkiller I hid from myself one day when I wanted 27 of them, I call it a night. I have nothing else to tell these two, I mutter to myself, except that it’s not nice to call the other person an ignorant ass. And for God’s sake, who’ll feed the pets when Doug is taking a dirt nap?