The Chris Moeller Archives

A Moeller takes a wife

If you're a friend and/or you have a Facebook account, you probably already know that my twin brother, Aaron, the Ozzie Canseco to my Jose, is getting married, quite likely by year's end. Even though it was in rather poor form, I felt, to buy an engagement ring and make a formal announcement to everyone the same week that eight-time loser Elizabeth Taylor was being laid to rest, I'm terribly excited about the union. His fiancee is really terrific-- fun, funny, and smart, and I think he'll be quite good at marriage as he's easygoing and he's already used to being bossed around his whole life-- by me. It's a great development for me also because it looks better if both of us-- at 35-- aren't still living like college students. Now with the wedding toast audition out of the way, let's probe my psyche just a little more.

I've never really been marriage-minded to this point in my life. For stretches, I haven't even been relationship-minded. I'm not opposed to marriage-- in fact, Aaron and I are the products (prodigies?) of several successful marriages, still I recognize that getting married is not for everyone, that it can exist within radically-different, yet still-acceptable structures and outlines, and also that each one deserves the utmost integrity as long as it has the solid foundation of two or more consenting adults.

Even though my role models in marriage are formidable in the family, it dawned on me this week that my heroes of fiction and entertainment (and Aaron's, too) have been overwhelmingly unmarried through the years. Since I live my life with one foot always in the realm of fantasy (this is not a gaming reference), perhaps this is why I've been traipsing happily through life thus far without even the mildest flirtation with the institution. The major players on "Seinfeld" were all single, same with "Newsradio," and most of the cast of characters on "Cheers." The few "M*A*S*H" spouses were necessarily absent, only images in photos and on film reels. Latka and Simka got hitched midway through the run of "Taxi," but everybody else on that show was what I would call even "soulfully" single. Only Mr. Carlson and Herb Tarlek had spouses on "WKRP," and they were two of the "suits." Among my newer favorites, Liz Lemon is a single woman and super awesome ("I want to go to there"), and only Shirley is married on "Community." Going back to even my earliest days in the mid-'70s, Alvy Singer and Annie Hall made being single fashionable, as did Mary Richards, and Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca were all single a long time ago, far, far away. David Letterman (who is non-fiction) was unmarried from 1977 to 2009. These figures have all been sympathetically single. Only the unmarried cast of characters on "Entourage" seem like dicks.

Perhaps it's just that good marriages make for dull storytelling on the screen. Tony Soprano and the "Mad Men" ad execs are terrible husbands, Larry David could be described as 'so-so' at best. On TV, only characters played by Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Roseanne Barr, and their spouses seem to be very good at it.

So what's my point? Maybe only that I've internalized these characters to such a degree-- and I have deeply internalized them, you must know-- that their lives have kind of become my own. Ours is the first generation in the American experience to be raised with the idea that it's permissible to have friends and co-workers stand in as life partners. It's a pragmatic form of living, as demonstrated by television's finest shows, that also helps to elevate dramatic tension, and better allows for the introduction of additional or visiting characters. Marriage can be a beautiful, fulfilling thing, but let's call it out for what it also can be. Married people often wind up quickly or gradually closing themselves off from the other people in their lives. We've all witnessed this phenomenon. A spouse-- by design and intent-- comes to take on many of the roles in their partner's life that may have been previously held by multiple people-- friend, counselor, confidente, caretaker, role model, sex partner, etc., and let's face it, marriage is very nearly the mortal enemy of baseball road trips and television festivals.

The reason I'm so excited for Aaron-- and Alex, his wife-to-be-- is not that they're going to be entering into the social contract that is considered incorrectly by many to be fundamentally superior to otherwise equally-valid and substantive styles of living. It's that they seem to have found something that, combined with what they already possess, promises almost complete fulfillment. They've both landed in a place where no other life scenario seems to make sense, and that turn of events should be an inspiration to anybody out there who wonders what potential fulfillment, whatever it might be, waits around the corner.

posted by CM @ 4:53 PM