What is it about marriage?

Do you ever have those times in life where you get mildly paranoid and you feel targeted for one reason or another? Or those weeks when it seems like the same subject is coming up over and over? You know what I mean - it feels like suddenly everyone wants to know why you are thinking about dying your hair blue and perfect strangers are freely offering their opinions but you hadn't even told anyone yet. Or the whole world is talking about how much they love Fritos/Paula Abdul's new haircut/sending tourists to the moon. Over the last few weeks, that has been happening to me and it is making me crazy.

My subject of paranoia lately has been marriage. I live in California, the one state in this country where you would think no one would care who married who and how they went about it. And yet, somehow, marriage has restrictions here. So, understandably, a lot of people talk about it publicly and it is difficult to spend time with anyone without the subject coming up. But I have also come across the subject in a more personal way a little too often lately and I am starting to feel persecuted.

How many of us have crystal clear memories from childhood? What is the earliest thing you remember about yourself and how young were you? I have always know three very specific things about myself for as long as I can remember: my favorite color is green, I don't want to be a parent and I don't want to marry anyone. I am sure if I sat down with some sort of psychologist and discussed my childhood and my adamant self-knowledge on children and marriage, theories could be put forth on these subjects and many of them may even be true. Personally, I am not interested in WHY I know these things about myself so certainly. I am much more interested in living my life in a way that makes me happy and I have always known that either of those two states in life would not only make me miserable, it would also ruin other people's lives. I don't believe talking to anyone about why I love the color green so much is interesting or enlightening, so let's just skip that one.

So, back to the feeling of persecution. That is a very strong, almost medieval sounding word but at times it does reflect how I feel, along with mildly guilty, frustrated, and extremely happy to be so self-aware. Last week, a man who lives in my neighborhood that I always say hello to when I see him on the street asked why he hadn't seen my husband around in a while. I was in a hurry to get somewhere, but that question brought me to a screeching halt because it was so odd. I asked what he was talking about and he said he used to see me walking with my husband once in a while but lately I am always alone. It never occurred to me that maybe he was talking about a boyfriend or a friend that he had mistaken for a husband; I was totally confused. He started describing the man and I finally realized he was talking about a friend of mine who used to live in San Francisco and about ten months ago moved away. We would occasionally hang out and must have run into this guy a few times on our way to some other place. It was strange to me that he assumed that we were married to each other. I quickly explained the situation to the man, who then proceeded to tell me that while I was a nice young lady, I should get a move on and get married and start having babies soon. Wow, ok, now I am feeling a little targeted by this guy.

I am very used to well-meaning people who think they are giving me helpful advice commenting on my personal life, but this was the first time it had come from someone who was practically a stranger. Fortunately, I really did have somewhere I needed to go and I was able to just thank him for his concern and boogie on down the street, but the whole conversation was really odd. It came completely out of the blue and I wasn't sure if I should just chalk it up to another odd experience in my neighborhood or if I should actually feel a little insulted. I know he meant well and was just offering advice (unsolicited or not) based on his own beliefs about how to live a good life, but he doesn't really know me at all and where does he get off commenting on my personal life like that?

A few days later, a woman I used to be good with friends eons ago when we were both in college found me on Facebook. I have had a Facebook account for a couple of years, but I never really kept up with it. In my recently unemployed state, I decided I might as well finally fill out my profile and update things a little and suddenly, all kinds of people are contacting me on it, including this woman. I had mixed feelings about talking to her because of a conversation we had when she got married that totally offended me, but I decided that enough time had gone by and I should just forget about it and let it go. It was time to free myself of old baggage that I had completely forgotten about anyway. I replied to her and asked how she was doing. Her response was to tell me all about her husband and kids and how well they were doing, which made me very happy to know. Then she asked me if I was married and if I wasn't, then why? Did I have any kids? Why not? I think asking if I am married and/or have children are both reasonable, normal questions. Asking why I have done neither seems a little nosy to me. Especially when she offered to set me up with some nice men she knew who were ready to settle down and get married. Time to duck and cover and in the immortal words of Graham Chapman in Monty Python's Holy Grail, RUN AWAY!

Again, I find myself asking why a person I barely know anymore gets off commenting on my personal life this way. A few other similar situations have occurred recently, all following about the same line of conversation: Why aren't you married? Don't you want to have children? What do you mean you don't think marriage is necessary? Somewhere along the way, marriage has become the new conversational hot button that is guaranteed to take normally rational people and turn them into insanely opinionated and potentially offensive monsters. So, what IS it about marriage?

Intellectually, I can understand a lot of the attractions for marriage. Hopefully, two people have found each other that want to spend the rest of their lives together. Marriage is a way to show each other and the world that these two people are committed to each other in a way that can't be guaranteed by any other sort of relationship. They are emotionally and financially bound to each other which can provide a lot of trust and security. The way most benefit structures work, married couples are also more likely to be able to share health insurance and in the case of a death, property division is much easier. Ok, I respect that, but I still don't understand why it is necessary. I mean, people grow and change and so do their lives. Why go through a religious and/or legal ceremony to prove something you already know about each other? Also, I believe that often these days people marry knowing that if it doesn't work out, they can always obtain a divorce. To me, that is backwards. Then, there are the people who are not allowed to marry because of all sorts of tangled up emotions, convictions, and inside the box thinking. Because I can understand on an intellectual level why people marry in the first place, I can also understand why EVERYONE would want to marry. Except me.

Personally, I would really like to find someone to spend the rest of my life with. I want to have that connection with a person that I don't have with anyone else on the entire planet. I want that same level of trust, security, inside jokes, shared experiences, stories, triumphs, disasters, and goals. I want to know that the way I love this person is so totally unique and necessary to my life, I cannot in a million years imagine myself ever stopping. And I want someone to feel that way about me in return. What I DON'T want is to feel that in order to have all of those things, I have to marry to get them. To me, that is putting a conditional chain around something that should just be allowed to exist.

I know that I am sensitive and paranoid about this subject, especially with the current politics on the question of marriage in this country. I do feel guilty that I totally reject for myself something that is denied to other people who want it so badly simply because our country is suffering from a lapse in understanding basic human rights. And I know that I have unintentionally hurt people who cared for me because I do not want to live life their way. But I also believe that good hearted people are sometimes nosy and insensitive and that closing themselves off to non-traditional ways of life can turn them into unkind pests who talk too much.

So, I am left with my original question - do any of you ever feel like the whole world is targeting you on a particular subject you would rather ignore or is this my personal brand of craziness?