Sex, marriage, childbirth...you know, the usual

Today marked the first day of my life as a married woman. JOKE! KIDDING! Well, kind of. Allow me to explain.

I wasn't kidding when I wrote, a few posts back, that the arrival of warm temperatures also heralded an onslaught of bizarre, inappropriate, and utterly exasperating sexual comments from the seafarers. It really is like someone flipped a switch. In the past 3 weeks, I have been hit on by what feels like 80% of the seafarers I've encountered. Did I say it was exasperating? Nay, scratch that. It has been driving me completely and utterly OUT OF MY MIND. To the extent that I dread going to work in the morning because, as I poetically ranted at my program director during a meeting last week, "I just feel like a giant, walking vagina!" (It had been a particularly bad day)

So I caved. While ambling about the East Village yesterday, I did what I should have done 9 months ago, and purchased a fake wedding ring. I'd been holding off for two reasons, really. 1) I didn't actually expect it to work - seeing as most of the perpetrators are, themselves, married men, I hardly thought they'd be deterred by a little piece of metal on my finger. And 2) I object to the idea of publicly broadcasting a false statement about myself to cater to social norms that are outdated, misogynistic, heteronormative, and FALSE. I live in the New York metro area in the 21st century, for Christ's sake! I should be able to function professionally without everyone needing to think there's a man in the background!

But getting up on my feminist soapbox isn't going to do a damn thing to change the fact that I have nearly 2 more months of climbing gangways ahead of me, and that it really would be in everyone's best interest if I made it through without murdering someone out of rage. So I forked over $12 for a plain, silver band, swallowed my pride, and entered the imaginary joys of wedded bliss.

To my utter and complete surprise, it worked.

Not only did it make me excited about going to work to see what would happen (since moving to NY, I've discovered that there's no better way to revive flagging enthusiasm than to pretend my life is a giant anthropology experiment), it deterred all but one of the forty-some seamen I interacted with from telling me I was beautiful, asking to marry me, or scolding me for being too emaciated to bear children (the latter insult, which I endured on 3 separate occasions last week, was really the straw that broke the camel's back)! Amazing!

Unsurprisingly, posing as a married woman in an international seaport yields some interesting conversations. Literally the second seafarer I spoke to this morning glanced down at my left hand, sighed despairingly, and said: "So you're already married too...I'll never find a wife..." Whereupon I was delighted to be able to nod sympathetically, reassure him that he was still quite young and would surely find the spouse of his dreams when he returned to the Philippines in a month, and all the while maintain an inner ostinato of "Not! My! Problem!" In a very pastoral way, of course :)

Many of them inquired about how many sons I had (seriously? are we living in the freaking middle ages!?), and were very concerned when I informed them I was childless. The dirty old man of a Greek cook who served me lunch (and was also the sole offender who told me I was beautiful) assured me that his beef would, "Make you very healthy! Good for babies!"

My favorite exchange about my marriage status was sneakily sandwiched into a confused discussion about the differences between Catholicism and Anglicanism. A Filipino engineer was inquiring about theological differences between the denominations and, at one point, asked: "Do you have Mary?" (as an aside, that is without any doubt my least favorite religious question to be asked, because I have an instinctive and unfounded aversion for the Virgin that alienates me from Roman and Anglo-Catholics alike) I awkwardly launched into my spiel about diversity of opinion in the Episcopal Church until he interrupted to ask, "No, you personally?" I waffled for a bit, then finally shook my head and said, "no, I'm not really so big on Mary." Whereupon he gasped, pointed to my ring, and said, "but what about your husband!?" Just in case I needed a reminder that my job rarely, if ever, makes any sense.

The ring is and isn't an improvement. It doesn't change the underlying reality that too many of the seafarers see me primarily as a baby-maker; it just shifts the focus. It will, I imagine, necessitate me spinning what threatens to be a dangerously elaborate tale of how I came to be married, who the husband is, when, where, why, etc. But these past few weeks have made me realize that every human being has a breaking point, and that I have reached mine. Not only do I get nothing out of ship-visiting if I'm constantly angry and frustrated; the seafarers certainly get little (if any) benefit from a tantalizingly unavailable chaplain who does nothing but yell at them. The ring, it seems, makes everyone's lives better.

...including yours! Because, if I'm sure of anything, it's that there will be plenty more amusing marriage stories to come. So keep reading!