Time and tone

In the past few years I’ve developed a strenuous mistrust of the institution of marriage. This skepticism I feel has a healthy justification in a variety of reasons that I often have difficulty articulating, and whenever I discuss the issue with anyone else, I’m usually met with a negative response. This is most likely the result of my tendencies towards hyperbole, and I’m usually forced to retreat to the fundamentals of how I feel about the world and its operation in terms of relationships: the acceptance of impermanence and the fleeting character of existence. I wrote before about the association between meaning and death, and I feel like this plays out in interesting ways in my relationships. One, they cannot outlast themselves; each relationship I have with another person necessarily dissolves along with us, or with the dissolution of particular needs and desires. Also, relationships can easily become crimes of convenience, topical anesthetic to painful situations that perhaps need confrontation or deeper resolutions. This is a function of their situatedness: as with all forms of thought and experience, physical relationships and structural inequalities often determine our approach to what we may consider more cerebral or abstract relationships. Prioritizing the cerebral experience of relationships in shifting physical and experiential situations sometimes means an inability to confront forms of experience which may need changing. The commitment of relationships to legal contracts, in a permanent, written sense, writes off (pun) the forms of experience which we may find in indescribable, unspeakable, and fleeting emotions, such as that of intimate, quiet moments in love. This is the peril I feel in writing letters of love, and the skepticism I feel towards human relationships played out in a legalistic tone.

Duncan