Love in COVID Times: Life Going On

Seven months into this physically-distanced, socially removed COVID world, I married Karen (not the vapid “Karen” of media notoriety, rather her anti-type), my Karen, just hours before the moon entered Scorpio, which I understand to be a bad thing. After a few years of live-in courtship and recent convolutions in planning a ceremony, we eloped, somewhat last minute, to the north country and, amidst full fall colors, wed on the rocks in fewer than four hundred words.

Why marry at sixty-one? Well, my father some years ago recommended it; he had enjoyed sixty-four years of married life before dying this past June. My mother, likewise, had long preferred it before dying a few months earlier in March; in her last days, she had beamed mutely at hearing news of our intentions. But I rarely followed my father’s life advice, and my mother, who may have endured sixty-four years of marriage more than she enjoyed them (I trust she had her moments), may have wanted to see my and Karen’s partnership in less problematic theological terms than living in sin. Whatever the motives behind their endorsement, I was happy to know that if in attendance, they would be pleased. Perhaps they were. And yet, I did not marry for them, though in marrying, I honored them.

Stoic philosophy, you might be surprised to learn, recommends marriage as well, for the possibility of “a community of life” and for the purpose of children. Now, of course, at our moderately advanced age, children are entirely out of the question. We’ve had ours, respectively, and simply cannot conceive of more or better—though we have, strangely, somehow acquired a rescue cat, Goob. Insofar as I can articulate a reason behind my intuition, this impulse to wed, it must be this sense of commitment to a community of life with someone, these specific creatures, Karen and Goob, mostly Karen. A community of self-sufficient introverts is no mean feat, but it offers a worthy purpose for the final phase of this man’s life.

And did I mention “love”? I did not, not because I do not feel it, or say it to my beloved on occasion, only because as a Borowicz male, one doesn’t make a public display of such things. And “love” makes a very short blog post to the query, why marry in old age? Same reason we marry in youth, really. Same reason we marry at all. Love, the inspiration of which is ageless.