Post-Grunge Marriage

Kathryn
Apr 10, 2016
2 min read

Jack and I started referring to our marriage as a post-grunge marriage as a joke, but the phrase stuck. The idea was that on social media like tumblr and facebook, "grunge" was one of the aesthetics people posted about with pictures of glitter, block letters, and spaceships, to the point where Jack once joked that he didn't even know what grunge was supposed to be anymore. (For reference, all the pictures in this article came from the "grunge" tag on tumblr.) Post-grunge meant "after the grunge phenomenon." It meant that we had survived the glitter-and-spaceship zeitgeist. It meant that we had escaped.

Marriage turned out not to be a big deal, at least for my husband and me. I don't want to downplay the importance of the commitment made between partners, but I do want to say that being married definitely moved my life into a place of less stress and far more support. Before I got married, I thought that I could well see where people were coming from when they talked about never wanting to get married or never seeing the point of marriage. Now, I can't imagine my life, my self, without being married, and that's because my marriage has given me the chance to grow and improve in ways I wouldn't have had if I had stayed single. This is because my marriage has challenged me to be the best version of myself and to believe in the best version of my spouse, and, in turn, has given me someone who believes in the best version of myself. Marriage is work, but it also feels easy and natural.

That's probably because, for me, being married means that there are two people to manage financial matters, two people to discuss the options of any issue that comes along, two people to hang out together. You always have someone on hand to talk with, even if that conversation is just "I can't believe someone covered their tongue in glitter just for the aesthetic." You always have a partner.

Like, hair I can understand, even though it would be a bitch to get out.

When Jack and I were moving in together last August, we drove from Arizona to Michigan to Massachusetts, and people treated it like we were facing the end of the world. "If you can survive a road trip together, you can survive anything," my grandfather told us. Other people wished us good luck. Most acted like Jack and I were embarking on a hazardous journey into the night-o-sphere -- stuck with each other for days in a car! The nightmare!

There were moments of stress, sure. Jack and I nearly died a few times, thanks to Southern drivers and a few enterprising deer. But the road trip was full of good moments. We got out to look up at the stars together in the crystal-clear desert sky somewhere in New Mexico. We shared cherry coke in a rest stop parking lot. We bonded over a discussion of UFOs and desert secrets. I remember showing Jack a picture of an empty grid that someone had labeled "grunge", which is actually pretty funny when you're tired and you've lost track of which state is which.