Only 69 shopping days until June
by Jon Worley

The most common life-changing event for people in their twenties is a marriage. The next most-common is a divorce. So far, we've been lucky. Most of our friends are still hitched.

And last night, Barbara and I attended a party for two couples who will be married on successive weekends in September. We shot silly string on them (somehow managing to keep the affair a surprise until the moment of attack) and then began to pass the hooch. Almost all of the attendees were journalists, so prodigious quantities of processed alcohol ended up in the award-winning York wastewater treatment center.

Before the bashed ended up as a drunken free-for-all snowball fight (snow that melted at first light today, but stuck around last evening), we put the prospective couples through a fairly vicious session of the Newlywed Game. Innocent questions like "What was the most interesting location where you've screwed?" and "What movie gets you the hottest?" were asked. Unfortunately, my proffered answers of "The Atlantic Ocean" and "Anal Aviators 2" got more laughs than the actual responses. Not that the couples are dull or anything. They just got to feeling at bit like a politician caught with his pants down at a press conference. I'm sure you know what I mean.

After the game and before the snowball fight, the married sorts offered plenty of advice. The most common nugget of knowledge passed on was probably "Get your mom drunk, really, really drunk." My idea along those lines was simply to have plenty of booze and no video cameras, so that when someone inevitably got out of control, no one would remember, or the potentially offensive event would simply be recalled as a humorous moment.

The evening before and the night after our wedding, large numbers of our wedding party and friends (the bride and groom included) got naked in the Gulf of Mexico. No intimate acts, as far as I know. Lots of flesh in the moonlight, though. Ever since, I've found skinny dipping to be a more than appropriate pre-matrimonial ritual. Post, too, for that matter. Unfortunately, not many of the couples I've counseled share my opinion.

No matter. I also offered my one bit of serious advice: Don't expect things to change. Marriage doesn't, and in my opinion, shouldn't bring about a change in priorities or lifestyles. I mean, if your mate was sleeping with everyone else in town before you got married, how could you expect that behavior to change? A gold ring is just another piece of jewelry to pawn when the bill comes due for an unexpected "situation", after all.

Cynical? Not at all. I'm quite happy with my life with Barbara, even if I rarely speak of her as "my wife". I wasn't convinced we needed any paper or whatever to confirm our life, but some heavy lobbying from her parents and the piles of loot our friends bestowed upon our friends helped sway me to a new position.

Oh, one word of caution: avoid registering for crystal of any sort. We got five crystal chip and dip trays, four crystal bowls, three crystal candy dishes and two crystal pitchers. We traded in most of the chip and dip trays, but the rest of the stuff was of unknown origin, so we've got it sitting in boxes in the basement. A recently married couple told me they had four sets of eight beer mugs (a total of 32). I offered a crystal bowl for a set of mugs. They came back with a set for a candy dish and a bowl. Barbara intervened before the bargaining got serious, but I think we were on to something there.

The parties, the showers, the wedding, the reception, the gifts, hell, even the stupid questions we asked during the game, all of it missed the point of marriage. Marriage isn't about sex, or loot or good dancing music (though I could make a case for the latter). It's about two people working together on one life. Or at least, two people using two lives to make a better overall whole. Something like that.

But we kinda glossed over that idea, particularly at about one in the morning when we spilled out of the apartment, swiping snow off parked cars and hurling chunks of semi-solid water at each other. Can't forget the fun element, either.

Jon Worley needed to find something to talk about other than basketball, considering that his picks put him in the 5th percentile (that is, about 237,000 of the 250,000 or so players in the ESPNet challenge have better scores). He's still got Carolina winning it all, though.

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