I Married a Teenage Eldritch Horror

Pair Bonding as Rite of Passage

Shouldn't you have to qualify for marriage? Acquire the tuition, go through the apprenticeship, pay steep prices, lose all the illusions? Shouldn't you be required to explore and experience your hatred before you get married? Engaging your capacity to hate the person that you claim to love before you enter into the bond that will eventually demand this of you anyway?

This isn't a cynical indictment of the institution of marriage. It's an honest attempt to recognize the lengths to which we as humans must go in order to unveil ourselves. Seeing what is hidden and avoided inside and between us, even at the cost of who we think we are and so much of what we believe is true. Insight and emergence only made accessible to us through the most difficult and dangerous rites of passage. Pair bonding is one such rite.

Marriage and matrimony today make feelings the occasion. But the weather of romantic love is a temporary condition. Matrimony should be the engagement with 360 degrees of the proposition, not just the parts that you love. A ritual for some massive and overhauling possibility taking place that will leave you and your community forever changed. Necessarily changed.

Being married means going through the process of hating each other and coming out the other side. Most people don't get there. Or if they do they get stuck. They hate each other in the divorce and then separate before they can excavate down into the darkness; to kneel before the terrible, sacred altars that reside in the heart of every human; to tremble before the very foundations of the species.

Our hatred, grief, and terror are sacrificial. To be broken open by these forces is a prerequisite of a deeper knowledge and relationship with the truth, meaning, and value of life and death.

Who would you link arms with to face such eldritch challenges?