Wedding Anniversary

[Martin Hash]

44 Years.jpg

Congrats on my 44th wedding anniversary to the woman I met when I was 18. We went to the same junior high, high school, junior college, and university together, and our houses were within a half-mile of each other, but we didn’t meet until my second semester at California State. After all these decades, along with being both a doctor & lawyer, I consider myself an expert on marriage, and it’s nothing like the impression you get from books & movies, though it is “love at first sight.” Actually, love is a soup of neurotransmitters like any other motivation: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine; so it’s love at first drip.

Marriage is very Machiavellian, entirely based on ulterior motives and settling. Biology-based love is a fleeting thing, a year at best; then it turns into feeling more comfortable in one another’s company than being alone. Men primarily stay in a marriage for the sex: if the sex is good, he considers the marriage good; but women are looking for attention & security. That makes loyalty very tenuous: a partner will remain only as long as it benefits them. If they separate, each will miss the other for a time, but soon start looking for someone else: men for lust, women for validation.

Marriage doesn't include mea culpas, meaning neither party ever truly apologizes. They may pretend to apologize to lower the hostility level but if the same thing happened again, you can expect the same response. This is especially true of secrets: if a man unearths the secrets of his wife, the wife will not say “I'm sorry” because she already considered the ramification of her actions, hoping not to get caught but willing to endure the consequences should it occur; and continue keeping the undiscovered secrets. These revelations are only known to people who have been successfully married for a long time.