Plants Vs. Marriage

I was at the conservation property recently with a friend, telling her my views on marriage and how I repeatedly state, only half-joking, that marriage should be banned. “Why get the government involved in a personal relationship?”, I said.  “Why needlessly complicate a relationship you have with someone should you ever fall out of love with them or have a falling out? I love my friend Javier, he’s like a friggin’ brother to me, but I don’t feel the need to make our friendship official or recognized by law. That would be the worst possible thing we could do, if it were even possible. It’d be like turning our friendship into a contract, a work obligation. Should either one of us grow apart for whatever reason decades down the line, then we’d have to get a bunch of sleazebag family law attorneys, pay them up the ass, worry about one person ripping the other off for half their worth, etc. Further, it’d be entirely unnecessary. For this reason, I also know that my friendship with Javier will far outlast most marriages.”. Similarly, I have friends that are in romantic relationships with each other that have been together for decades and never got married. They hate marriage. Their relationship seems more durable, impervious to strife and born outta genuine love simply because of the fact that they’re not married : both are free to leave at any time. Neither is nailed – down by law – to something that they’re not otherwise fully committed to.

My friend told me that she realized she didn’t want to be married anymore when she was talking to her shrink. She had “fallen outta love” – whatever romantic “love” even means to most people in the first place is beyond me, I’m highly suspicious of their definition of it to begin with – with the guy a year before but wasn’t sure yet if it was real or what it meant. Her therapist asked her what scared her the most, what prevented her from ending it. She replied “being 65 and alone” (sounds like a dream to me, tbh). “Ok, let’s go there” her therapist replied.

So my friend closed her eyes, she told me, and imagined herself at age 65, alone, and what it would be like. She immediately thought of herself sitting down outside, on the ground, surrounded by plants that she was interacting with, either observing them or planting them or collecting seeds or something, she didn’t really know, it was just a daydream. At that moment, however, she realized that in the image she had of herself at that age that she was not, in fact, alone. She was surrounded by the plants, and the plants had a spirit. They are alive and respiring and photosynthesizing and she could feel them. “You felt surrounded and embedded into the living world.” I told her. She started crying as she told me this. She looked at the peyotes in the ground and told me how the peyote, more than anything – perhaps because of all the spirit and love that native people put towards it – embodied this connection with the living world for her. The peyote had a spirit, she said, and it made her feel held and cared for, nurtured, loved. In return, she reciprocated that love to it, and to every other element of the living world that she interacted with. 

That, to me, is a genuine love far more enduring and lasting than the love you might find in most marriages.