foxhole

Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash

Here’s the thing about marriage: It’s just two people. It’s meant to be more than that, obviously and in ways it is. A bond, an institution, ‘the royal We,’ a contract, a world unto its own… but at bottom the main defining characteristic of all marriages is the quantity of humans it involves and that number is two.

And look, have you met people?

Because I have, and at the risk of generalising it’s fair to say they run the gamut from lovely to awful and everything in between. I mean, the variety of humans you will meet in a lifetime is truly remarkable. And marriage is just two of these people stuck in a foxhole.

What are they getting up to down there, I wonder? Clasping hands for dear life, whispering tenderly, giggling or clawing at each other’s throats? Could be all or none of the above. You can’t know unless you’re in there with them but the foxhole only fits two. There is really nothing universally true you can say about ‘marriage’ anymore than there is anything true you can say about ‘women’ or ‘men.’ Women and men are just people. Have you met people? Because I have. (You see where I’m going with this.)

Two can be the most astonishing and joyful story ever told but it can also be a terrifying number. This is especially true if you happen to find yourself in a foxhole with the wrong person. A person who will not meet your eye. A person who has somehow forgotten that the foxhole is not the war zone but it’s opposite. The foxhole is the place where we hurl ourselves hastily in pairs, to escape the real war, raging outside.

If you have ever found yourself in the wrong foxhole you will know that the only thing you can do to save yourself is get out. But getting out is tricky because battle rages on above ground, sprawling and oblivious. The greedy, greedy mechanism, as D.H. Lawrence called it. The vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the ruling and running of iron.

The greedy mechanism that makes us forget our children, who are also beautiful, too beautiful to look at or think about unlike the wedding silver, the chattels, the emails from lawyers.

After I left my marriage and my life fell apart, a mother from the school said to me, ‘But he’s your husband.’ She was sitting in my kitchen extension the yellow sofa, sipping a cup of ginger tea, waiting to collect her son who was upstairs playing with mine. She said the word ‘husband’ as if it meant something beyond ‘man,’ beyond ‘person,’ but it doesn’t.