February 13th--a glimpse into a modern marriage

     I got a job working for a company that organizes people's lives. Well, their stuff. Moving and packing, downsizing and up-sizing. Newly weds and squabbling adult children of deceased parents. Even though I only get a glimpse, people and their things, their precious things, tell surprising stories.

      For two days this week, I spent 16 hours packing and later unpacking the lives of a newly wed couple, married less than a year. Her things were everywhere: her old yearbooks and literary journals, pictures of her debut and reign as a Mardi Gras queen, 3 closets of clothes, artwork of cute puppys, photos of her parents and grand parents. He was practically non-existent: 1 small closet of clothes, 15 ps3 games, a few posters, a set of decorative samurai swords, and a box of ammunition. As I was packing, I kept wondering about how they got together, what had they seen in each other. This was just a starter house anyway. Sorting and packing up their now tandem single lives ultimately meant very little. Moving into their new home would be akin to moving from a room with two twin beds pushed together into a room with a true king size. The new home would be the true evidence of their collective lives, the place of they, them, us, where referring to oneself more often comes out as the royal We. 

     Unpacking their new house, as it turned out, was very much like a grown up version of moving her into a new dorm room. Now everything would be done according to her specifications, and the last remnants of him were promptly and flippantly even jokingly banished to the garage. I was told to "lose" things that belonged to him because they were so "horrible." She bounced and bubbled between the rooms, showing off her numerous keepsakes and photos, bursting with the pride of a woman who has won at life: well educated and married well (clearly by the size and location of her new house) to a man with no clear will of his own easily overwhelmed by the strength and presence of a New Orleans princess. She gushed over sweet things that he had done for her during their courtship in anecdotes around various art or trinkets she kept in places of honor while he moped sullenly around. 

     Is this marriage? I wonder if this man, merely in his 30's, feels himself being erased by a woman of exceptional breeding and unscrupulous training as a southern woman-wife. Or, will he wake up one day in his 50s, after their children are grown and realize that he doesn't remember who he is? Does she see that she is erasing him? Or, does she see her direction as a positive, that he needs her, and that she is helping him to become better? What becomes of a couple in which one person is assumed into the other? 

        These are the questions I have as I carefully stack her initialed picnic plates and monogrammed towels, looking out the window at his lonely box of boyhood, slouched at the back of the garage.