Musing About Marriage

A blog that I read occasionally has been talking a bit about proposals and marriage.

I have an image of the woman who writes it as bright, forthright, and determined; not hard-nosed, but supremely realistic. She's an engineer, and I think I mentioned, a few entries back, what I think of engineers. I would have expected that if she had thoughts about pursuit, engagement, and marriage, they'd be black and white, and calibrated to several decimal places. And indeed, they are the comments of someone who has given this serious thought, and knows both what she wants and what she does not want.

To tell the truth, I was a bit daunted by it.

All other considerations aside, I doubt I would have made the cut to her standards. I'm not all that exceptional a person. Not particularly good looking, not especially fluent with words or gestures, and I can be pretty selfish, sometimes. For all of those reasons, I consider myself to be very lucky to have met someone who liked me as much as I liked her; just meeting someone like that, I think, used up a great deal of the pot of luck that we all have. That she agreed to marry me used up most of the rest, and that we've been married for a couple of decades now -- well, that required that I get a bigger pot.

I think about it on occasion as I contemplate the idea of my daughter growing up. I don't have -- not yet, anyway -- the traditional view of fathers throughout history, which can be summarized as 'If you make her cry, I'll castrate you, and then I'll hurt you". I know that the odds are good that she will cry; that she will have crushes which will feel quite real to her, and that I will have to be very careful not to suggest that their end is anything but a life-ending crisis (if that how she perceives it). One way for her to get through it, I think, is for her to have a strong sense of her own worth -- stronger than I had at her age -- and if I can help her get that, I want to do so.

That's in addition to The Other Stuff: be just a little more athletic than you want to be, learn to size up people, speak one or maybe two foreign languages, gently resist authority, learn to cook, take a defensive driving course, be playful, study one of the martial arts, sign up for tough school courses on occasion, travel, buy things of good quality.

But the self-worth thing: I think that's key. I want to help her get that.

I'm not exactly sure how, but I'm working on it.