This dinner is identical to every other time your parents have come to town and picked up the tab at Canoe Club. We deadpan about Dartmouth plans over appetizers. Entrees arrive and we grin and bare it down memory lane -- Webster Ave. in the 80s -- and yes, we testify that, believe it or not, nothing has changed!
But on this particular evening, there's an elephant in the room, in the form of your mother's friend, a full-blown glamazon I'll call Gwyneth.
"Oh, that yuppie Psi U I slapped when he said my friend was from the wrong side of the tracks? He's still on Wall Street, huh? Tragic," she says.
I know, Gwyneth. I also sometimes wonder if the college I attend is in fact a living history museum.
"That's what you get for living with a bunch of bitches," Gwyneth purrs under her breath, while your mother reminisces about the annoyances of sorority-life.
But more on Gwyneth later -- this is about your parents.
The New York Times Sunday Styles section would say: "The bride and bridegroom met at Dartmouth, from which they graduated, she magna cum laude and he cum laude."
I say: "On their mantle, there's a picture of them on the lawn in front of a frat, in togas. They raised you and your siblings to near-perfection and sent you off to the alma mater, and now beam happily at you, glowing dutifully back at them across the table at Canoe Club where we all appear to be in a tanning bed of our own radiance."
Purge. The preponderance of Dartmouth families and marriages can just as easily be a shadow -- one under which we all must live. The ever-looming reality of the Dartmouth marriage is an essential motivating factor in our wacko campus-kissing culture, leading to the extremes bemoaned repeatedly (like everything) at our living history museum.
Exhibit A: We've all been cackling at the wedding web site blitzed around for that '07 who met his bride-to-be at Tuck Bridge, just a few days into his junior summer. The web site's "Our Story" section reveals the touching moments of their early romance.
"[Christopher was] sipping whiskey at AD in the evenings, and systematically ignoring the 'crazy girl' he had observed," the web site said.
You see, crazy girls? That guy at the frat is systematically ignoring you for one of two reasons: He is either petrified of you, or hoping to marry you.
Run for your life. Or cling! Those are your only options. Clearly. Have a cocktail. Have seven.
Black-in and find yourself looking around the basement thinking: Thanks to the admissions office, these people are all intelligent and wealthy, or enough of one to make up for the other. It's shooting fish in a barrel. If I can't find someone to marry here...
This panic stems from your parents. We know that in order to continue the generational escalator up the socio-economic ladder, our responsibility is to at least meet our parents' standards of living -- despite how impossibly high those standards might be.
In a broader sense, the panic stems from the pressure to construct significance out of the chaos of our lives. Despite all our surface notions of sexual freedom, we still consider a committed relationship to be more meaningful than a rotating set of slam pieces.
Gwyneth returns! This woman, who is so beautiful (and so beautifully botoxed), who lives in Italy, whose career is even more impressive than her legs and her cheekbones -- even this woman puts herself on the offense against bitterness and would prefer not to show her perfect face at reunions because she is unmarried and has no children.
But the thing is, neither serial monogamists nor big-time 'stitutes have a lock-down on the upper hand. In different ways, both are using sexual relationships as a springboard to self-definition -- neither will be entirely satisfied wherever they land. Is a life without marriage a masquerade to cover that absence? Or, if you marry that college clone of yourself, will you always wonder what life could have been?
This much I've realized: Constructing a mirror of me in "you" will prove impossible. This wasn't about your parents, at all. It was about mine: They romantically married immediately after graduation (though not Dartmouth) and divorced after 13 years together. They were silly in love, but they couldn't make it work.
My mother sometimes tells the story of my dad scrambling up the tree outside her dorm window, in the pouring rain, to convince her to come out with him. Despite everything, I know she doesn't regret opening her window that first night, sliding out on a limb when the stairs would've been fine.
These days, it seems you and I work in reverse: climbing into love, rarely falling. Overly conscious of our parents' quixotic precedents, and skeptical of modern Dartmouth marriages, while so many of our own college relationships have proven to be constructions and self-fulfilling prophecies. The bride and bridegroom met at Dartmouth. Isn't that where I met you?
