Yes, nice dog, thanks. Now, um, can we...help you with something? Where is your dad?
I do know that he has Asperger's, so was not totally alarmed, but still, it threw me a little that he would just walk in a stranger's house without knocking or anything. Most people would take that as a given that that's not something you do. It's funny the things we take for granted.
I recently read a NYT article about a man with autism who underwent experimental treatment so that he would experience emotions. ("An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage"). He went from being "autistically even keeled" emotionally (which his wife, as a chronically depressed person, appreciated) to someone "joyfully shedding the cloak of disability" and being in tune with not only his own emotions and social cues, but others as well--something foreign to him as an autistic man.
The NYT article made me think about the question the author poses as it relates to marriage: "Normally, people change in a marriage over time. What happens when one person changes overnight?"
There has to be something deeper than what we see when we marry someone. Something at the core. I don't know because we haven't hit that, but I have to trust that it's there. If you've ever been to a wedding where people have written their own vows, sometimes you might hear things like "I love it when you laugh at my jokes; I love spending Saturday mornings with you sipping coffee and listening to the birds chipping outside out window. I will always be your partner in crime." Great stuff, no doubt. But not core material.
We took the standard vows at our wedding--you know, the "for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health..." I wanted to share the same vows that hundreds of thousands of couples before us shared with one another. I don't know why--maybe it made me feel in corporal solidarity or something with those who have gone before us down this path. But regardless, vows are vows. They are your life raft in the choppy ocean that you cling to sometimes when there is nothing else to hold on to; the mast you tie yourself to, like Odysseus, when the siren songs of temptation threaten to crash your ship into the rocks.
If I did write my own vows, though, I would hope it would be something like: I will love you when I am changing your adult diaper. I will love you after the lobotomy when you are a shell of your former self. I will be there when you are no longer the person that I married.
It's scary to think that you might wake up one day next to a stranger--same body, different mind. Same mind, different emotions. Same emotions, different spirit--when your partner in crime says to you, "I liked you better the way you were before." You see this situation (sans the preference qualifier) sometimes with those sweet old couples where one has Dementia / Alzheimers. It's a testament to the vow--the external, objective, the anchor in a choppy sea of feelings, expectations, and change--and to a love that runs deep, that drills down to the core of a person when they are in fact a shell of their former self.
We are coming up on our 6th wedding anniversary this summer, and also have a few weddings coming up we are attending this busy summer. We're babies in the game, and have a lifetime of change ahead of us. It's made me reflect on the core of my wife, what exists ephemerally beneath the beautiful skin and bones, the glowing spirit, but also to the dreadful uncertainty of a future that isn't here yet and doesn't metaphysically yet exist.
Dig your nails into those vows. Clutch them close to your breast, stake them down hard. Believe them when you don't believe anything else and everything in you is screaming to leave. Drop anchor in the storm. If you're in good times now, enjoy it, don't take it for granted, and drink it in. If you're not, if life is not happy and is in fact a living hell, for God's sake...just hold on. And don't forget your promises.
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