Twenty-Two Years Of ZZ Marriage

Circumstances used to demand the ZZ marriage from everybody. You couldn’t run around assembling and disassembling your affairs all over the landscape over and over. You placed your bets and you took your chances and you stuck to it. Sometimes the chances were pretty slim. You always stayed until closing even if your chips were gone in the first five minutes.

I’ve got a ZZ marriage. It is not required any more. No one would much bat an eye socially or otherwise if we parted. There is no disapprobation, even on purely practical grounds, to keep us together.

I do not understand my wife, and have no desire to. I am not a vivisectionist of her personality. The patient always dies in that situation, after all. I am not explaining my situation here; I am simply observing it. I can tell you that I have an enormously defective personality, and she don’t seem to care. I don’t know why that is, either.

Poor people, dumb people, sick people, interesting or dull people, all sorts of people, no matter how straitened their circumstances, no matter how hard-hammered by life they were, got a chance to do something sublime in their life. For many, it is the only really transcendent thing they will ever be allowed to attempt; opportunities to win a Congressional Medal of Honor or a Pulitzer Prize or something aren’t just lying around, never mind the actual article.

I’ve had an interesting life so far, I guess. It’s not over yet. I could tell you wild tales, many of them true. Nothing compares to my ZZ marriage. It’s made all the more piquant by the fact that no one is making us do it.