but you never hear about a marriage based on conversation. you hear about "a marriage based on a solid foundation of trust," or respect, or something. with all due respect, this doesn't seem very notable to me. i trust a lot of people. i respect a lot of people. maybe their talk about moral trust and respect, which is what i've always taken those cliches to mean, translates into intellectual trust in my world. it's true that there are only a few people who i would trust to make rational decisions for me, but i would never mention this as a primary criterion as far as long-term relationships go.
i'm starting to think, though, that there is something fundamental about a marriage that is different from a relationship, or perhaps something that is different about a real-world relationship as opposed to a college- or high school-relationship. the inherent nature of the crucible of college (and, to a greater degree, high school) means that there is always lots of drama floating around, if not with you then with your friends. there's always stuff to talk about and analyze to death. there are always new people to form opinions of, always new choices to debate which are not so important as to render disagreement fundamental but not so irrelevant as to feel transparent.
here in the so-called real world, the number of people whose lives i see and relate to and the ratio of drama per person have both gone down. i sure would like to have a special someone in my life, but i miss the specific absence of someone to analyze with less than ever before. things in the world around me develop slower (perhaps part of it is the californian nature of things) than they did before, slower than i think. i don't mean to say that i understand everything, but i guess what i mean to say is that few enough things baffle me that i don't feel i need a partner to help me make sense of all of it.
a large component of this is that few things in my life baffle me. as i've become more sure about both my vocation and my friends, i have had less to evaluate. i do it anyway, as much to stay in practice as for any other reason i think, but i don't need to do it and i end up going around in circles for lack of material anyway. the big decision in my life right now is where i'm going to go at the end of 2002, and when i do make that decision i will have had ten months to do so (after two, i'm already pretty sure.) i'm not bombarded with potential friends from every direction; when i was, i got so used to making snap judgments on people that i do it now by instinct, even if i perhaps have more time to evaluate what i think of people.
this lifestyle is probably causing my intuition and my conversation to atrophy, but i'm not sure it's a bad thing. what's taking its place, of course, is activities; i have a much wider range of things i do than i did a few years ago, when my life basically consisted of going to class and hanging around in dorm rooms with people and taking sunset walks and going to physics society dinner powwows once a week and various other campus activities (improv comedy, plays, this sort of thing.) okay, maybe not the going to class part. but now, certainly physically and i believe in fundamental scope as well, my life is all over the map. i go to daly city to bowl at 1 am. i go to tahoe to snowboard. i go to yosemite for a weekend. i go to oakland for baseball games. i go to roberts park for ultimate. i don't do any of these a lot, but the point is that each one feels like part of my life instead of a big excursion that needs to be planned and planned around.
and maybe that versatility is a good thing. maybe my mother was right, and the first eighteen or whatever years of my life were a case study, in a controlled environment where the subjects couldn't get too out of control. it's hard to judge from here, still in the middle of it, but in retrospect my ideal relationship filled with life-turning conversations every night might be just a bit implausible (even though it happened for eighteen months.) on the other hand, i have to admit that (in the far future, don't worry) the experience of raising a child is something i'm very much looking forward to, since i can't imagine that this won't be a subject of fast-moving intuitive analysis to undertake with my presumptive superintelligent life partner.
so, in a sense, it all comes back to the same thing. the superintelligent, perceptive, versatile, vibrant special someone. the someone who i have that confidence, that i guess intellectual trust in, who i know will understand the things i say and do and always be ready with an intuitive, wild-ass spontaneous devil's advocate counterpoint to whatever i think.
no. not always. at the right times. because there's that other aspect to life, the joy of just being in the same room together, fluently living, whether it be lying in bed reading or cooking dinner or playing set or what have you. the joy of the shared activities. the aspect of my life which is emerging upon my exodus from the parochial cocoon of the integrated life of a collegian. [note: i don't mean to indicate that this is a necessary part of the college experience; for instance, it certainly isn't here at berkeley. but it happened to be an aspect of my undergraduate life, where 98% of people lived in dorms and derived most of their life from on-campus ongoings.]