Memorable Stories: Porter on marriage

After all these years, I just cannot imagine Mickey Porter writing a sensitive,
heart-warming piece, but here it is straight from Tower Topics Jan-Feb 1973:

Getting on the marriage go-round

The bride-to-be, as they say about those on the precipice, was radiant.

She smiled t-h-i-s wide as she filled out the wedding form a recent Saturday afternoon in the Life/Style Department.

Her future husband, a youngster in a dark suit, stood along the wall, seemingly a bit misplaced and baffled.

It was a picture we see here often - young folks planning their weddings, as giddy as they will scarcely ever be again, and with so much to learn.

They have courted and are about to be wed and they are blissfully together now. Their problems, they believe, are all behind them.

Which only shows, of course, their youth and inexperience, for they still believe, you see, that marriage is an endless idyll of moonlight and roses.

We who have lived longer know better, but if we told them, they would not listen. They are too rapt, too transfixed by their emotions, and what we have to say does not apply to them.

And marrige, they are convinced, consists mostly of hugs and kisses and the Hollywood fadeout, and living happily ever after in a Shangri-la sort of place.

It's not, of course, it's vastly more than that, and the love between a man and a woman must be strong and sinewy to endure.

Marriage is morning sickness and midnight colic, and an asth-matic car that often will not start.

Marriage is furnaces that break and teeth that need fixing and an outbreak of ants in the kitchen.

Marriage is dirty dishes and dirty diapers and stubborn lawn mowers and bills, eternally, that must be paid.

Marriage is never having quite enough money to go around, and seeing something pretty in the store window that you cannot buy for your wife or children because the mortgage payment is due.

Marriage, too often, is living in the bargain basement - and buying your own luxuries with savings stamps.

Marriage is slowly saving - a dollar at a time, or a quarter - for something you really want. Only then the car breaks down, or the water heater develops a fatal illness, or the refrigerator gasps its last - and all the savings are gone in a twinkling.

Marriage is no simple thing, and there are no schools to teach you. But marriage is more than all of this - much more - else it wouldn't be so popular.
There is such a thing as true love, but it is an unknown to the kids who come in to fill out those forms, smitten with romance as they are; it is something that can be tempered only by the fires of time and hardship.

Marriage is dreaming together - sitting propped up in bed, late at night, excitedly planning ways and means of buying something - a color television set, say, or a fancy stereo - that you cannot afford.

Maybe you will never buy it; maybe the harsh light of day will absorb the illusions and sweep away the grand excitement.

But at least you have dreamed a common dream; the wondrous mirage was there for you both to see.

Marriage is standing shoulder to shoulder with your mate and facing the adversities of life together, and laughing together, and sometimes crying.

Marriage is having somebody you love above all others - and, just as important, somebody you like - always at your side, so that if you awaken from a bad dream deep in the night, you can reach across and there she is, and you realize with relief that you have only dreamed a bad dream.

And sometimes you can snarl at her, because you are in a bad mood, and she will understand and not be mad. And it's all something the youngsters with their bridal forms cannot yet realize, for theirs is the merest beginning of the fairytale, and not its end.