now, you would think that i would abhor such a thing, but in fact i crave it. i feel this enormous social pressure to be interesting; i would argue that this is not pathological, and that in most situations there is in fact great pressure to be interesting, and i'm just more aware of it than most people. in most situations (all situations with friends) this doesn't affect me; i don't clam up, i don't have time to think about the pressure, i'm just myself. more than anything, what it does is make me exceptionally nervous about upcoming social situations, especially when i'm meeting new people, or will be hanging out with people i've met once or twice and liked.
this latter thing is a very curious situation. one of the results of my being such an intuitive person is that when i meet people, i usually know instantly whether i'm going to like them or not. so i end up in a lot of situations where i really like someone but they don't know how they feel about me yet, and often this manifests itself in my feeling like i need to impress someone. it's sort of ridiculous, but fortunately it doesn't seem to hamstring me too much, because in the heat of the moment i'm usually just myself anyway.
but anyway, the concept of marriage as boring pact would resolve all of this. i think tht at it's the one thing that would remove this stressful feeling of social pressure (which certainly is very traceable to past events in my life from a psychoanalytic perspective, but i digress as usual) -- if i knew that there was this one person whose opinion of me was already formed, a wonderful person who i was going to spend the rest of my life with. if this one person existed, i don't think i'd care too much about what anyone else thought of me (and in fact, when i've thought this one person existed in the past, i haven't cared too much about what anyone else thought of me.) now, obviously, this doesn't mean that i should just marry some random mail-order bride; i don't think the devotion of such a construct would really satisfy this role.
in practice, it's undeniable that people become more boring after they get married. for one thing, being interesting is largely a mating display; for another related thing, it's the attack/defense mode thing again. when i screw up in relationships, it's often categorized by a failure to become boring; i mean, obviously there are terrible judgment errors, and i don't mean to provide an excuse or anything like that. i screw up; i'm not good at relationships, and it's lamentable. but if i were better at being boring, at defense mode, these things wouldn't happen.
recently i've been thinking of marriage as a different kind of pact: a happiness pact. this seems like a bewilderingly impossible thing to do, but i have this feeling that if you just met someone who was right enough for you, and decided to be happy forever, it would work. i think this is the blueprint of ... i don't want to say less selective people, so let's just say catholics (that's much less offensive!). when you're locked into something, it's a natural human tendency (studies have shown) to make the best of it. i think there have been several times in my life where if we had just decided to be happy forever, things would have worked out well.
at least on my end. i guess it's never clear whether i have a correct self-prognostication on this issue, or whether things would work in this fashion for other people. but i think that it honestly could work. that we could be happy together if we just decided to be.
the other funny thing relating to marriage and pacts of various forms is that i'm extremely emotionally dependent on people i'm dating (a tragic flaw i'm trying to correct; hopefully this is something where recognizing the problem is most of the solution, but it's definitely a work in progress), but i actually don't think this would happen if i were married. in a sense, and this sounds weird but i think it's true, i don't take people for granted enough. i'm always thinking of them and wanting to spend more time around them and wanting to impress them, and that manifests itself in clinginess and emotional dependence. but if i were married to someone, i think this tendency would be reduced a great deal.
i guess i sort of see it like this. i'm trying to get the most important piece of my life in place, and to that end when i'm in a relationship i evince all sorts of unhealthy emotional behavior. but i feel like if i felt that that piece was in place, the emotional obsession thing would not be nearly as bad.
which is not to say that my problems with emotional dependence aren't very real and need to be conquered before i can have a functional relationship. (which in turn is not to say that i'm incapable of pursuing both in parallel.) maybe i should end every blog entry with this signoff: as always, work in progress.