I teach English for Speakers of Other Languages. This morning I was making copies from a grammar book for my students, and saw a profile on the Wright brothers, and this text in the margin: “Did You Know: Neither of the Wright brothers ever married. Their only love was aviation.”
For me, marriage is the ‘other language.’
The trivia fact made me smile until tonight while I was doing research on the brothers. I saw them described several times as ‘eccentric geniuses’; what if I end up having traded companionship for faithfulness to my ideas when I die? What if I end up being an eccentric genius whom no one ever knows? Or, worse, if I simply end eccentric and alone?
Understanding how two people could be happy in a “marriage” is like learning a foreign language for me. Sometimes I feel like I am daily moving into acquisition of the grammar of interpersonal intimacy. Other times, a whisper of the topic of commitment enters conversation, and I effuse to anyone who will listen about freedom in self-sufficiency.
Then I usually have an inner reprobation about how helpful it is to have a safety net in being a rugged individual. I think of the multiple times that I left my headlights on, draining my car of batteries and requiring a jumpstart - multiple times in a week. Or the time when I got lost driving on the backroads of my hometown trying to find a new way home after a New Year’s party.
And the absolute thrill I get every time I step onto an airplane for a journey alone into a new part of the world. This pull between independence and security is exhausting. How liberating it might be to say, once and for all, “My only love is ____________.”
Aside from the Wright brothers profile, another piece of text that caught my eye recently was in an article about a female astronaut. It was a profile of her rise to a brilliant career as one of the first African American women in space exploration. The article detailed her early passion for science, her start at Harvard, the mentorships that shaped her path, and finally her groundbreaking achievements as a successful space traveler and technician. Then, near the end of the article: “Smith, who is single and lives near Houston’s Johnson Space Center, says her next goal is a long-duration stay on the space station.”
What is up with these people who like to fly? Can marriage - or even partnership beyond the point of brotherhood or settling down long-term with a space station, coexist with passionate career genius?
One of the two Wright brothers, Orville, stopped speaking to his younger sister Katharine when she got married. My grandmother often tells me the story of a distant cousin who didn’t get married until she was in her fifties, and doesn’t regret waiting. A part of me detests marriage as the door behind which no wonder, no surprise, no spontaneous discovery lives.
I love ideas. I love to travel. I love learning from my own mistakes. A part of me loves marriage as a language whose grammar channels selfless abandon into the ideal of sharing life. A language of freedom. Freedom from thinking, from ideas harassing me as an inner itch to question even the most mundane facts of daily experience; from doubting that I am not leaving a piece of my heart designed for partnership as an orphan, cold and without mercy; from weird, harsh vowels and consonants crocked together in a way that hurts my ears but feeds my mind with dreams of a deeper, unmet harmony in the realization of profound ideas.
When I wake up in the morning, however, I see the Wright brothers, brilliant ‘til death did from them their curiosity part, and I love them more than I love marriage.
Like the brothers, I want an open contract with my intellect. I want to experience partnership as something constantly moving away from emotional certainty, rather than into it, over the course of a lifetime. Be that with aviation, outer space, an idea or a living, imperfect human being, I’ll take it when I find it.
