The Cynic Express(ed) 2.24: Don't Fear the Preacher

     Some men do not know what end awaits them, but I do. In approximately twenty days, sixteen hours, and four minutes from the time of this writing, the Groom Preacher will find me and strike my bachelorhood down before its time. Some impending grooms, with the weight of the rest of their lives bearing down upon their shoulders, feel a little nervous. To save time, I have gone straight to terrified.

     In this, the year of our lord nineteen hundred and ninety nine, sixty percent of all spouses cheat on their significant others. Watch anything on television, including C-Span, and the normalization of adultery slithers forward into our culture just like the little bug things into Checkov's ear in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Politicians rote their firmest fundraising belief in family values after imploding one or two families of their own. Media prototypes for behaviour, available in every flavor of untrue, hop beds nightly. Hardly the reassuring hair-stroking I could use right about now.

     Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. I suspect the difference between the adultery rate and the divorce rate results in ten percent self-loathing. My parents divorced after eleven or twelve years of marriage (I cannot remember the exact number-I was rather young). All of my friends' mothers and fathers have divorced. Only a handful of people in my family and social circle have retained the husband or wife that they started out with. Our world, largely without heroes, is almost as bereft of inspirational and potentially mentoring couples.

     So here I go, ploughing into the biggest decision and lifestyle change in my life, and statistically the odds are better than shooting craps, but not enough when I consider the stakes to make me feel any better. Odds are even that we will divorce and better than even that we will eventually behave in a manner befitting a Country and Western song. Even if we don't, we can start arguing about money, or about who gets a new car, or about whose mean black cat we should get rid of because it does not get along with the others, or all of the above, eventually breeding mutual coldness and contempt. We might not even get divorced on principle, staying together for the kids, for the tax breaks, out of habit, or simply because we've grown too sadistic and masochistic to care. Statistically, I am betting my entire future on a coin toss, but I have enough imagination to recognize that it could be much worse.

     But when I go beyond the palpable, shallow, and thoughtless fear, I remember I love her. Greatly, widely, and abundantly. I have projected the course of my own life with her as a great part of it. I have seen the potential in the future wherein we sit together in a living room before a fireless fireplace. She crochets and I read, stopping occasionally to rant about how the young people those days are making a mess of the world even worse than the mess made by the young and the old these days. Maybe she'll laugh, maybe she will tell me I am as full of foolishness as ever, but she is there.

     After all, she does not belong to the bottom fifty percent of women nor the bottom ninety-eight percent of women. Likewise, I am not in those bottom percentiles of men. We both have solid morals, foresight, and have no particular agenda going into the marriage. We're only doing it because we are compatible, star-straight, young, and in love.

     I have nothing to fear but the fear itself. So sometime after one a.m., after thinking for hours and then missing her, I can go to sleep. Maybe I'm cynical, but sometimes I get past it.