Marriage Warning: Side Effects May Occur

No, I don't mean anything to do with eggs being fertilised.

I've already talked a lot about the lies married people feed soon-to-be-married people: That marriage is hard [when it's actually impossible], the wedding night is magical [depends on who you are, I guess], and resolving arguments before bed is the only way to make a marriage last [there are lots of other ways], just to name a few.

I am now going to expound on my previous sentiments by shedding the light on another batch of lies. Well I suppose they can't actually be called lies, per say...more like concealments of the truth. See, I heard a lot of garbage before I got married...garbage about being married [see above]. But there were a lot of things I didn't hear--things I've had to learn the hard way, since nobody thought to clue me in.


Take my newfound sappiness, for example. Nobody told me that after I got married, my brain would become an emotional minefield, daring thoughts to cross, only to set off a land mine--no, a mind mine--with the slightest unpleasant notion. And the consequences are grave: I can explode into hysterical bouts of...feeling...at any given moment, now that I'm married.

It takes very little to set off one of my mind mines--very little. Suddenly now that I am married, the thought of going skydiving (which I have done pre-maritally) fills me with terror beyond reason; I can't fathom jumping out of a plane anymore--not when I have so much to live for.

Nobody told me that watching movies--even [especially] immensely cheesy movies like P.S. I Love You--would send me into a dangerously depressing spiral of "What if that happens to me?" and "We've only been married six months but already I know that if Poor Kyle dies young, I will never be the same," and "How can life be so hard?? Things are just...so...sad." Nobody warned me that getting married would cause me to value life--my life, Poor Kyle's life, our nonexistent children's lives, my immediate family's lives, even the little-one-legged-bird-at-Sonic's life--more than I ever thought I could.

I lived 21 years sleeping in a lovely double bed all alone, but now that I've been married (for six months, only), the thought of Poor Kyle leaving me for a two-day road trip to Oregon gives me chills. He left this week (alone this time, so I could stay home and volunteer at the museum), and I stayed up 'till 4 a.m. every night he was gone, just so I could sleep in the next day and make the time go faster.

Pathetic. Not to mention the fact that I gave myself an ulcer worrying that he would die alone, young (dying young seems to be my latest obsessive fear these days), while he was on the road, leaving me to live my life in solitude. So consumed was I with the fear of my husband dying on his way to Oregon, that I could not even carry on a phone conversation without professing to him my infinite love, just in case it turned out to be our last conversation. Again...pathetic.

And now I'm mad (just another emotional mind mine blowing up...pay no attention), because I never agreed to be so sensitive. I didn't sign up for this kind of co-dependent psycho-babble "I love you I love you I love you" nonsense. I never wanted to care this much.

But I do and it's done and of course I can't even bring myself to regret any of it, because that would mean I regret being married, which I do not. And the thought that Poor Kyle might be under the false impression that I regret my life how it is...well, it's a thought that I cannot bear, in lieu of my recent uncontrollable sappiness.