I Bid You Stand, Men of the West

Never listen to anyone who tells you "it's just a piece of paper." It's so much more than that, and it's a true testament to the trials we go through in life and how we choose to show up for one another daily. A marriage cannot be sustained without forgiveness and effort.

Not every day is a perfect fairytale. Some days are hard and some days you just won't see eye to eye. But if you're with the right person, you will always come together at the end of the day to figure it out. You just have to keep choosing that person and show up for them, and understand that we are all unique individuals with our own perspectives and life experiences.

Marriage requires commitment, patience, forgiveness, but most of all selfless love. Sometimes you have to go beyond your own personal comfort because life is no longer just about you. Our culture is so heavy around doing what makes YOU happy all the time that we fail to show up for one another if it means personal inconvenience. I hate to break it to you, but life is full of inconveniences. We can either choose to work around them for the sake of those we love, or we can self-isolate and never pursue meaningful, intimate relationships with others. Human beings are social creatures and we were NEVER meant to be alone.

This is the crux of it. The concept of self-sacrifice - even the aim of finding someone you care for and love as much or even more than yourself - has been entirely absent, especially from any female-intended culture and media, for between 20 to 50 years now. When I look around, I don't see any women and girls in my life I interact with ever speak of wanting to take care of a man and make him happy, to build a life with someone whose happiness means as much or more than their own. That impulse seems to have been entirely eradicated, and replaced by relentless 24/7 appeals to selfishness, greed and narcissism.

Of course, on the other, male side of the aisle there are the Pick-up Artist subcultures and Hip-Hop pimp/thug culture and all the rest, but it really does seem to me there is much less of that in recent years; it isn't positively represented at all in mainstream culture today in 2026, and the men and boys in my own life just talk of wanting to find a good woman, but there seemingly not being any left out there anymore.

"Life and death of a meteorite." Compton's pictured encyclopedia. v.6. 1922. 

They're now saying they're indigenous to Spain. You can't make this up.

"Ah, well," he says, a brief look of disappointment crossing his face. "That would have made this case entirely too easy to solve. It is perhaps for the best you have reconsidered, no?"

You ask if he's going to turn you in. He looks genuinely shocked.

"Turn you in for a crime you didn't even commit? Mon Dieu! Not even Hercule Poirot could be successfully doing this!"

"Truly?" you say, your hands shaking slightly. "But...you know I fully intended to kill him. If I hadn't seen you on the train, I would have gone through with it."

"But you did not," he says precisely. "And you will not ever, now that you know the eye of Hercule Poirot will forever be upon you. There is no crime in anger. There is no crime in hatred. There is even no crime in wishing to do the murder. The only crime is in the doing. And Hercule Poirot only concerns himself with crimes."

He looks you in the eye, then. And now you can see it, the truth of this silly little man. Past the little body and the prissy outfits, past the ostentatious moustaches and egg shaped bald pate. You thought yourself so smart, so clever, so righteous in your anger. And he saw through you in an instant. This silly little man who wears his own vainglory like a polished, perfectly straight tie pin would have sent you to the gallows without a second thought.

He didn't need one. He'd figured you out with the first.

"You have chosen not to do. You have done so for the best of reasons, because you recognize the folly of trying to outsmart Hercule Poirot. But even if your reason was not so great, I would celebrate your choice all the same. There is no such thing as the bad reason to choose against staining your soul with murder."

With a polite smile, he pays for your meal and leaves before you can say anything else. You never see him again. The next morning you book passage back home. You see the man you were going to kill occasionally, out and about. But for some reason the old anger you always felt in his presence, the righteous fury that burned in your breast at the very whiff of his cologne, the pain that tore through your body every time you thought of how he has wronged you, never returns.

He is just a person, you realize. A loathsome person, but a person nevertheless. In the end, it is not your place to judge him. It had never been your place. His judgement rests in the hands of someone much wiser and more just than you could ever be. Than even the great Hercule Poirot could hope to be.

You never see that silly little man again. But you keep him in your prayers for the rest of your life.