The marryin' kind

Remember the 1950s Western-genre movies - the kind that were all put in a blender in the 1980s and came out as "Silverado" - where the good guy in the white hat roams and rambles for a spell before settling down on his own spread with a few head of beeves, a white picket fence, and a good woman? Not the dance-hall floozy he took a shine to in his footloose days, but a nice girl who likes to plant flowers, bake pies, and slop hogs. You know, the marryin' kind.

Which proves to the impressionable audience that our hero (John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart) is also the marryin' kind. Unlike his ne'er-do-well friend in the black hat (Montgomery Clift, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson), with whom he has shared many a rough ride, but who always moves on to the next town, the next cattle drive, the next saloon, the next card game, and the next floozy. He just ain't the marryin' kind.

I've known since I was like five years old that I was the marryin' kind. Don't ask me how, probably some very early and very effective socialization/indoctrination by my very responsible Methodist parents, Chas and Ellen Golly. In my case, that sense of stability and commitment came with an equal dose of judgmental possessiveness, egocentric machismo, and all kinds of other baggage. Being the marryin' kind is not an unmixed blessing, but I am what I am, and a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

What brings up the subject at all is the recent spate of divorces in my small, insular world. There are three in the last few months, just among my co-workers, in some stage of working their way through the excruciating process of dismantling a marriage. These life-changing events for the people involved affect me only tangentially, but since the parties in question are my friends and colleagues, their trials and tribulations make me shudder, even from a certain distance. Each person and situation is, of course, different from all others, a unique story with it's own peculiar causes and circumstances, so each twist and turn has its own particular hurting and healing possibility.

My good buddy Esterhazy and his wife recently split up, and I guess this one is a little closer to home. I got to know him in graduate school, and we were both members of an exclusive secret society called the Physical Club (named after a circle of friends in Boston that included William James, C.S. Peirce, Chauncy Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, called the Metaphysical Club, but that's another story). In our small circle, three of us were already married, two of had kids, and one had a step-child in his second marriage.

We went running together, we went drinking together. We did seminars together, we went to conferences together. Our wives knew each other, our kids knew each other. The Physical Club babysat Jessi and Helga as toddlers.

California Esterhazy met his wife, Wilderness Woman, in the Ph.D. program at Swingstate Megaversity, and everyone saw it as the perfect match. They both graduated on schedule, worked hard and found tenure-track jobs, had two beautiful little girls and everything to be happy about. So it was a shock find out this year that they had gone their separate ways after 17 years. Of our Physical clubmates, Chicago Ransom is now on his third marriage, and London John is still hitched, as far as I know. Two out of four ain't too bad, I guess.

Looking further back to undergrad days, there were four of us in my freshman dorm who became fast friends. Fremont Frank got married first, had two great kids, and moved back to his hometown with his high school sweetheart. Elyria Jack has left a trail of girlfriends in his wake, but last I heard he'd never married, and therefore never divorced. Cleveland Jon went to New York and sadly died in his forties. Again two out of four. About the national average.

Not sure where I'm going with this difficult tale. If I looked up my high school friends, I think I would get similar results. But I'm pretty sure where I'm NOT going - I'm not going to see a lawyer. It's not that I'm too wholesome for all that, and it's not that I'm totally ecstatic with everything about my marriage, and it's not a desire to stay together "for the kids." I reckon I'm just not the divorcin' kind.