Ejecta

There are several unforeseeable side-effects of marrying young. I mean besides the practical wisdom of going into the marriage with the warm statistical certainty of the union's ultimate failure. That's something you can only pick up with age and a very specific type of scrotum-crushing experience, which, ironically, marrying young is the A-number-one most surefire way to get.

It turns out, for hetero dudes, you miss out on the mid-twenties dating scene where liberated American girls, the kind jihadis really love to hate and/or convert then marry, have seized control of their sex-positive, self-constructed senses of worth to the point where they've reached a level of actualization and agency where they are capable of emotionally handling the serial and crescendo disappointment of fucking twenty-something American men.

At least that's what I've heard. Mostly in telenovelas. I think. I don't really speak Spanish. I think "crescendo" is the same in both languages.

When I was finally escorted out of my youthfully arrived at marriage, there was also something unusual about me compared to my peers: I had no adult ex-girlfriends.

American English being the subtle and deceptive thing it is, I think I should probably point out that in that phrasing, I'm not implying I had any underage ex-girlfriends either.* What I mean is I had no ex-girlfriends from relationships in which we were both adults when they began. As much of a crater divorce following a marriage you'd devoted your entire adult life to can be, craters, as emotional landscapes go, are pretty straightforward terrain to negotiate. Smooth, even ground, nice level, parabolic sides, no hedges for monsters to hide behind... No obstacles or ankle-twisting trick steps about it really, just a slow, steady climb back to sea-level, up to the land of the living, where Jesus keeps all the poontang.

Having kids when wandering back out there amongst the uncoupled masses makes you have to step a bit more carefully, even with a fair assessment of the topography. You're forced to be aware that your own footprints are magnifying into crevasses the little ones trailing you are going to have to negotiate. So my main goal in my dating-life adventure(s), as I have acquired for myself an appropriately modest register of paramours former, is to seize upon another opportunity to model behavior for my kids. This usually happens in two parts:

1) Deny everything. If the kids ask, dad's a monk who's only devotion is to them and them alone. All suggestions that their father may have at any time divided his attention with a woman-not-their-mother is a brazen and preposterous smear campaign incubated and hatched by his enemies. This is complicated by the fact that, in normal circumstances, dad's only actual enemy is likely to be Ex-Wife. Their mother. On to:

2) More a contingency that a complement to 1: admit fallibility at every step. Look, you don't want your kids thinking you're perfect anyway. Think of the disappointment the first time they see you eat dropped cake frosting off your own shirt. "Perpetually underwhelming" counts as a behavior model too, you know. Not only to you spare them the agony of watching you fall from any kind of pedestal, eventually they'll develop a sense of human empathy as they watch you hop and flail and hopefully, one day, they'll just give you credit for trying. If I have to present them with the prospect of more than one partnership in my life, better for them to see me as a doofus than a womanizer.

And life is always easiest when the image you're attempting to project lines up with the truth of your existence. The corners have already been cut, and not just romantically. We've already accepted the fact that maybe we won't ever get our Dream Job** or even our Fallback First Runner-Up Dream Job*** or even our Third-Choice Full-Retreat Safety Part-Time Adjunct Occasional Daydream Dream Job.****

The good news is that being non-twentysomething is old enough to realize fallibility is more interesting anyway. "Ex-girlfriends" is a category of people I know now, but none of them get eyerolls or shudders or headshakes, not really. They're all fully realized humans. Young enough still to be quickening and striving, but lived-in people who have known darkness and grief, both giving and taking. So when one of them gets married, as happened just this week, knowing that person and their struggle and self-doubt, all you can really do (if you're doing it right) is count it as a collective win for the species.*****


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*This is where I reference you to your particular state's age-of-consent laws, probably mostly for comedic effect.
**Ninja-Pirate
***Pirate-Ninja
****Unemployed single mother in Scotland circa 1993
*****This may only be possible if/when you currently have an awesome girlfriend. Perspective is often quite literally about where you happen to be standing at the moment.