As I’ve already mentioned if you read this website from time to time: I am in a reflective mood lately due to aging. There’s really no telling how long this will last, but I turn 30 in February and it’s a persistent feeling for me at the moment. I can’t stop thinking about my past, where I am now, and what lies ahead for me (and for us all with regards to climate change, and the upcoming collapse of civilization).
One of the main things I’ve given a lot of thought about lately is the prospect of marriage. Or companionship. I am now at a point where it seems like a lot of guys my age seem to be settling down and getting married to their girlfriends. And if they have no girlfriends they’re making more of an effort and trying to get one to hurry things along and secure someone to share the rest of their lives with. Just the other day a childhood friend of mine posted a bunch of wedding photos to social media in which he was marrying a girl he’s known for the last few years now. It wasn’t a complete surprise to me, because he comes from one of those backward ass brown families where they find someone for you by a certain time and make you marry them regardless of if you’re ready to get married or not. Thank god my folks are not like that.
I guess 29-early 30s is when most people start to get antsy about losing their youthful glow or whatever. It’s understandable, especially when you take into consideration just how grim things are for the world currently. In my opinion, if you have a partner in your life and you have absolutely zero doubts, now is the perfect time to settle down with them because shit is getting worse every year and a partner for emotional support when the grocery stores start running out of bread and shit like that might be a good thing to have. At the very least, you will have someone to commiserate with.
Personally, I have no one. I never have. Although I have had various girls in my life at different points I have never actually been in love with any of them. That sounds downright sociopathic to say, admittedly, but it’s unfortunately the truth. It is also, by the way, not something I consciously chose for myself. I have just simply never met anyone I felt all that strongly about. This is a realization I’ve only recently made; it dawned on me while watching that epic Peter Jackson Beatles documentary (Get Back). The Beatles are a very important part of my life, and I think their love songs are some of the greatest works of art in the world. They were so goddamn talented they made love songs that spoke to me for my entire life, and yet it’s only now as a late 20s adult man I’m understanding that I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about at all, I only thought I did. I’ve literally never been in love before, and their songs about falling in love and breaking up etc, have always spoken to me somehow.
Now that I’m older and there’s been a bit of distance between when I first heard all those great Beatles songs and what I now know about life, I can comment on this stuff with a bit more clarity. What I have learned about this companionship stuff is that you will never find the perfect person. You might find someone that you’re about 70% compatible with, but the rest will involve you having to make a tremendous amount of effort. It means having to listen to the other person’s uninteresting stories and feigning interest. It means having to go out and doing shit when you don’t want to. And it probably means having to introduce a bunch of other people in your life you probably don’t want to, like the girl’s family or friends, etc, etc, etc. It’s a giant compromise, and the more annoying the person you end up with is, the more of yourself you have to give up.
The scary thing about entering a relationship with someone is that you are no longer your own person. I have seen this happen time and time again with some of my friends, and I fear it happening to myself. I’ve seen formerly cool dudes get loser girlfriends who force them to bring her everywhere they go, and then our whole friendship ends up getting ruined. When you become a boyfriend or husband, at that point you enter an agreement that you are then, at least partially, someone else’s person. As much as you might fight it and claim your little individuality for yourself with the little bit of free time you have leftover, you are not really a singular guy walking the earth and being a philosopher anymore. You are no longer a dude, but someone else’s dude. That means you might be in the middle of some great, profound insight while walking around in a park somewhere, and then you’ll get a text message telling you to go pick up some eggs or some shit when you get the chance. Or it means you probably won’t even get to walk around parks alone anymore, you’ll have to do that shit with someone ruining it for you.
Then there is the issue of what will occur if the damn thing doesn’t end up working out. You then have to walk around with the knowledge that someone has seen you naked and knows all your weaknesses and character defects. Someone who has seen the absolute worst of you is now out there and probably talking shit about you to the same people you were forced to meet and pretend to like for the sake of your partner in the past. And of course your heart might be broken and you’ll be depressed for awhile, and that’s gonna be a real bummer.
I guess it’s immature or selfish to say, but I am probably not ready to take on all that responsibility at this point in my life. I haven’t met anyone that would make it worth giving up my free time and personal space yet. I wish I could find someone for which doing stuff like picking them up at the airport and such didn’t feel like a chore, but I haven’t found ‘em. I’ve never found anyone I could talk to until 3 in the morning: most people eventually annoy me after awhile. I’ve never met a girl that is cool enough to risk ruining my whole life over. And I doubt I ever will, to be honest. I find it difficult to connect with most people unfortunately. I’m not saying any of this stuff to sound cooler than I am, this is just how I am. In fact, like I already said, I wish I could be like other guys and I think it’s a really good thing to settle down with someone at this point in time and start building a meaningful relationship as we head towards the collapse of civilization we’re facing in 2030. Companionship in dark times would be a very valuable, beautiful thing to have. Congratulations to you if you’ve got it, I am jealous. If you have someone bothering you about picking something up at the grocery store for her, you’re probably luckier than half the general population right now.
I think the right time to get married is probably 35. If I don’t find anyone by then I probably just won’t do it, period. I have various projects I still need to work on and probably can’t give up the half of myself required to seriously work on something as important to me as another screenplay or novel. Unless I somehow found someone that understood my need for my own personal space and time, I don’t logically see how I could ever settle down with a long-term partner. I know this all sounds quite silly and pompous for a guy who isn’t even a successful novelist or screenwriter to say he needs his personal space to create work no one even cares about, but it’s the truth. The only way I’d succumb to the couple lifestyle is if the woman in question was cool, listened, and we had some kind of understanding. Or if she looked like Farrah Fawcett in 1976 — in that case all the cynical stuff I said earlier can be ignored! Haha🤣🤣🤣🤣