It was a whole generation of us, really. All of us waiting to feel something. Well, not something, we felt things day-to-day, but we wanted The Big Momentβ’, you know? Weddings, birth, pregnancyβ¦ the generations before us, the suits, really, had figured out they could keep the economy humming if only we kept looking forward to things.
One prong of that approach became the consumerist side of things; the frittered $24.99 Amazon purchases that we didnβt need and knew we didnβt need but kept us in the sales funnel, always a little poorer. But the other prong of itβthe bigger oneβwas the inculcation of a belief that all of us had some grandiose emotion bottling up inside, percolating like hot coffee, and the steam could only be ventilated through some borderline-climatic release that finally contextualised our life.
Delayed gratification, we thought. Work one year for a ring, feel, work one year for the wedding, feel, work two years for the mortgage, feel. That was how it was supposed to go, how it had been promised to us. None of us could admit it, but that was it. You're getting married, Dave? Hey, wow, good for you and Meg. We couldn't ask whyβDave didn't know why. It was about time, yeah, and they were starting to think about kids, yeah, but that wasn't why. It was instinct at a conscious level, and sheer faith in that societal promise, one level below. None of the white collar workers liked to think of themselves as having faith, so it was best not to pry too deeply.
But that was it, nevertheless, and so we trudged along and let this anticipation build up inside us that this next Big Momentβ’ would be that emotional event of literary magnitude that we'd been waiting for. But then we got there, and... nothing happened. Nothing happened, but we had been so damn certain it would, and it would have been so damn depressing otherwise, that we simply decided something had happened. We sat back down at the marital head table, vows said, bride kissed, and set about trying to describe what we'd just felt before we'd even really felt it. We had to have something to say about it, something good, or at least some Hallmarkian permutation of words that wasn't totally played out, all so others knew we'd really felt. To prove that our lives hadn't been some strung-together sequence of multi-year buildups to infinitesimal anticlimaxes, but something really, really real.
Five of us boys, a year after my own marriageβwe stood around a wine cooler at what must have been my fortieth-attended engagement party and gabbed a bit about married life. You know what all of us said? "Good." That was it, more or less, just "good"s and a token self-deprecating nag or tooβnothing big, just customβ"good" 'till we looked back down through the necks of our IPA and at the sloshing citrine waves and hoped someone else would fill the space before we drowned in them. It's hard to say what we wanted from each other; would it have more isolating to know that others had been feeling, or that they hadn't, too? Well, it didn't matter. They hadn't. The Big Momentsβ’ were Little Momentsβ’, after all, and what we suspected to be the real Big Momentsβ’ were now a world away and a decade past and not anything you could do with kids.
