Reflections from a Post-Graduate

I watched The Graduate on Turner Classic tonight. What a treat after 55 years, to see Ben and Elaine laugh at their successful escape, as the bus takes them down a Santa Barbara road and launches them on their destiny. The camera rolls just long enough for us to see them suddenly realize the fullness of what they have just done.

No couple can imagine the life experiences of millions of people that stand behind the few words of the ceremony: richer, poorer; sickness, health; love, death.

Most couples are not thinking that far into the future after a traditional wedding. Enough to look forward to the reception, the sendoff, the wedding night.

But in time each of those words will come to have profound personal meaning to each and both partners. Many times over once children join the story.

I finished a Catholic college the year the film came out. To graduate, everyone had to take a required course on Christian Marriage, even the middle aged nun who was finishing her delayed B.A. (Although she was conspicuously absent for the how-to lecture.)

The priest had been teaching this class for fifty years by then. And the absurdity of a celibate teaching a course on Marriage (to a nun, among others) was eventually overlooked. His was one of the best courses I took in terms of setting expectations.

Because the forty of us 19 year old’s in the class, in thrall to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy then, entered the course thinking Marriage was simply guiltfree sex, 24/7.

He disabused us of that in a hurry.

And watching the film again tonight I see just a glimmer of that realization coming into in their eyes, too. Coo, coo, ca-choo

© 2022 Thomas Mahon