Goodbye To Bacherlorhood.

She kept saying this, as we walked out of the Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara’s (National Registration Board) Marriage Registration Office, “This is the second phase of your life.” That’s my future wife, Linda Marina Fernandez, who’s going to be part of my “second phase”.

I brushed it aside, saying that we have just applied and the actual registration is a month away. Chances are someone can object to the marriage, like the stuffed chicken, Chickie, that my fiancé, Linda, is attached to. That damn puff pillow wants to move in with us, it seems. I need to check with my lawyer on that.

Anyway, the thing is I am finally surrendering myself to married life after 16 years of subjecting myself to bachelorhood which includes cruelty such as inability to fry egg sunny side up. It’s true. Only last Sunday I managed to fry one successfully. I text messaged to a pal of mine, “After a gruelling 35 years, I finally manage to fry an egg sunny side up”. To which she replied something like, “As the saying goes, one is never too old to learn something new. Congrats!”

A sunny side up egg finally after all these years. And yes, I also need to remind myself that if it’s too long on skillet you also get dark side of the moon. Okay, back to my impending…I mean, upcoming married life and I must say the route towards it has been interesting.

You see, we are both of different faith, Linda and I. While she goes to church, I sit at home and watch DVD of my choice. While she prays, I bitch about the lack of quality of onscreen performances and that they have way too much CGI. While goes on her knees worshipping, I am on my knees cursing the disc that got stuck in the DVD player. We certainly belong to two different sets of faith.

So, in order to get to know her belief system better, my future father-in-law got me into these weekend class that introduces the religion to those intending to convert. Though I know very well I am not going to convert, I did sit through them with interest, particularly as I made my own interpretation as it moved on.

The class is interesting because it opens up the window as to how my future in-laws line of thoughts and predispositions are. My future father in-law is fiercely religious. When in meeting with my parents, rather than a casual chat, he looked and sounded like he was giving sermon. But to have accepted me shows that he has an open mind. Plus, girls these days would do stupid thing for love and he, having lived a good 70 years of healthy life and can text message his daughter on what time she is coming back home and that its getting late, he knows that the old school inter-faith antagonism is a thing of the past. Plus it’s not cool.

After the faith class, the last two months, we were sent to a marriage course. It’s compulsory as the certificate would allow us to get married in the house of the lord. And though it was a regular preachy routine that you can get in many help books, there were some interesting moments. One of the revealing one was when I learned that the recent economic turmoil was caused by masturbating.

No, I am not kidding. The one half of the counselling couple, an elderly crochety geezer who had counselled many couples in trouble (only success stories are shared as usual), said men used to be strong, powerful those days. “During the caveman era, they used to hunt, protect their family, had sex only with his wife.” But then, he said, men started practising masturbation instead of actual sex and the act of self-man handling has made these macho posturers into wieners. “In fact, the economic crisis began because of these weak men who masturbate,” he said. Again, I am not kidding. They shouldn’t have rushed in the Madoff case.

Anyway, the next step is the official registration, and followed by weddings at the holy place of our individual faith (okay, technically mine should be a movie theatre, but my parents insist on Hindu temple). And two months down the road, I am a married man.

And that reminded me of something else. When his bachelorhood ended at the age of 40, Ian Fleming, to overcome his “shock” of getting into married life, wrote the first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale”. It is indeed worth pondering that in the very novel that kicked off a billion dollar franchise, Fleming killed off Bond’s lover. Yeah. After getting married. Riiiight.

In my case, yeah it would lovely if I can get that novel that I’ve been working for one full decade out. Otherwise, nothing out of extraordinary. Life goes on. I will be a good husband, and in future, a great father. Most importantly, continue to be the person that I am now, mildly annoying but not a threat to mankind. Saying this, I am now looking forward to a blissful married life…and it also means you have to send that dang stuffed chicken to some orphanage, sweetheart!