Marriage is part of humanity. As Alain de Botton reflected, "[...] the impulse to cluster into small familial groups within which to safely propagate the next generation, is a project that has been known to the largest share of humanity since our earliest upright days in East Africa's Rift Valley." And although today Harry and Carie are engaged in this ancient tradition, they are also alternative people that create their own history. Alternative people who appreciate a form of never-ending play, which was has been so well described for myself and our couple in the book Finite and Infinite Games. I'd like to read to you it's philosophy on marriage, the family project and their choiceful natures:
Infinite lovers may or may not have a family. No family is united by natural or any other kind of necessity. Families can convene only out of choice. The family of infinite lovers has this difference, that it is self-evidently chosen. It is a progressive work of unveiling. Fathering and mothering are roles freely assumed but always with the design of showing them to be theatrical. It is the intention of parents in such families to make it plain to their children that they all play cultural and not societal roles, that they are only roles, and that they are all truly concrete persons behind them. Therefore, children also learn that they have a family only by choosing to have it, by a collective act to be a family with each other.
I feel very strongly in your relationship, Harry and Carie that you are “collectively choosing” as people. You choose to pick mushrooms. To craft together. To cook together. To go to burning man. To create a jungle of plants in your home. To find the right house. To marry. It almost seems like it couldn't be any other way. Until you consider what it can be like for another couple to pinball, jump, react, zap or wriggle into position. Your negotiations are smooth, so smooth as to be almost imperceptible. That is your magic. For people that know you, they know the way your joint decisions congeal, as if a biochemical process in nature. Saying that "you two were meant for each other" feels to me cliché, but saying "you are a natural couple" does not. Harry and Carie, congratulations on your collective act to become a family with each other.
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