Nor when we raise a couple of generations of young women so ungratefully narcississtic that such advice would find an audience.
Worldly cynicism doesn't recognize gender boundaries, and all of us are the poorer for it.
Posted on 07/01/2002 6:42:54 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Were a young man to ask me, "To marry perchance, or remain forever single?" I would, given the hostile circumstances today of law and love, urge caution. "Marriage is a commitment of several years of your life, plus child support," I would say. "Do not make it rashly."
The question is simply, "Why marry?" As a young man full of dangerous steroids, your answer will probably be, "Ah, because her hair is like corn silk under an August moon; her lips are as rubies and her teeth, pearls; and her smile would make a dead man cry." This amounts to, "I'm horny," with elaborations. It is as it ought to be. The race continues because maidens are glorious, and striplings both desperate and unwise.
Note, incidentally, that by the time October rolls around, corn silk is shriveled and brown.
Why marry, indeed? In times past, marriage occasionally made sense. Life on a farm required two people, a woman to work herself ragged in the cabin while the man carried heavy lumpish things and shot Indians. Later, come suburbia, the man did something tedious in an office and the woman did two hours housework and stayed bored for six. It worked, tolerably. In the Fifties, nobody expected much of life. It generally met their expectations.
And there was sex, though not enough of it – the scarcity being the propellant behind matrimony. Back then, before the miracle of feminism, women had not yet commoditized themselves. A lad had to pop the question before he got laid regular. Women controlled the carnal economy and, in a world that was going to be boring anyway, that was probably a good thing. At least kids had parents.
Times change. Some advice to young fellows setting forth:
First, forget that her lips are sweet as honeydew melon (though not, of course, green). It doesn't last. One of nature's more disagreeable tricks is that while men are far uglier than women, they age better. Remember this. It is useful to reflect in moments of unguided passion that, beneath the skin, we are all wet bags of unpleasant organs.
Soon you will be a balding sofa ornament and she will look like a fireplug with cellulite. Once the packaging deteriorates, there had better be something to get you through the next thirty years. Usually there isn't.
Prospects have improved for the single of both genders. Sex is nowadays always available. If you don't marry Moon Pie, which would be wise, you may get another chance when she comes back on the market with the first wave of divorcees. It's never now-or-never. Getting older doesn't diminish your opportunities. As you gain experience, you will recognize the tides, the eddies, the whirlpools of coupling – the urgency of the biological clock, the lunacy of menopause. Men by comparison embody a wonderful clod-like simplicity.
As you ponder snuggling forever with Moon Pie, compare the lives of your bachelor and your married friends. The bachelors come and go as the mood strikes them, order their apartments with squalid abandon, drive Miatas or Harleys if they choose, and live in such pleasant dissolution as is consonant with continued employment. The married guy lives in a vast echoing mortgage beyond his means, drives sensible cars he doesn't like, and loses his old friends because he isn't allowed to hang out with them.
Self-help books to the contrary, marriage does not rest on compromises, but on concessions. You will make all of them. Perhaps it doesn't have to be this way. But it is this way.
Moon Pie has only one reason for marriage: to get her legal hooks into you. She doesn't think of it in these terms, yet, and she has no evil intentions. She just wants a nice quiet home in the remote suburbs where she can live uneventfully, raise progeny, and keep her eye on you.
If you think surveillance isn't part of the contract, try going out late with your old buddies. Marriage is an institution founded on mistrust. If she thought you would stick around if not compelled, she wouldn't need marriage. She wants monogamy, at least for you and, with some frequency, for herself. She knows viscerally that you would prefer the amorous insouciance of an oversexed alley cat. You know it consciously. Marriage exists to control the male, until recently a good idea. Now, however, she can support herself, and doesn't need protection. She doesn't need you, or you, her.
She will, however, want to have children. Women do. At which point, G-d help you.
Given the schools, drugs, latch-keyism consequent first to working parents and then to divorce, and the cultural pressure on children to be slatterns and dope-dealers, reproduction is a gamble. You may not even particularly like them, or they, you. Nobody talks about this, but how many people do you know who hardly talk to their grown children?
And you've just tied yourself into twenty years of raising them.
The moment Junior enters wherever it is that we are, Moon Pie will have you screwed to the wall. She won't think of it this way, yet. She'll be delighted with the cooing bundle of joy, his little fingers, his little toes, etc. But divorce usually comes. The chances are two to one that she will file: Women are more eager than men to enter marriage, and more eager to leave it – with the kids, the house, and the child support. It won't be amicable, not after seven years. You will be astonished at how ruthless she will be, how well she knows the law, and how utterly hostile to divorcing fathers the law is.
You don't understand how bad the divorce courts are. You probably don't know what "imputed income" is. You think that "joint custody" means "joint custody." Think again. Quite possibly you will have to support her while she moves with your kids to Fukuoka with an Air Force colonel she met in a meat bar.
In short, marriage often means turning twenty-five years of your life into smoking wreckage. Yes, happy marriages exist (I personally know of one) and there are the somnolent marriages of habitual contentment or, perhaps, of quiet resignation. But the odds aren't good.
Permit me an heretical thought. In an age when neither sex economically needs the other, in which women do not need protection from wild bears and marauding savages, not in the suburbs anyway, perhaps marriage doesn't make sense, at least for men. The divorce courts remove all doubt. A young fellow might do well to stay single, keep his DNA to himself, pick such flowers as he might find along the way, and live his life as he likes.
There are many reasons why this won't happen within our lifetimes. The biggest reason being the 4 billion dollars that the feds give the states every year maintain the Orwellian child support industry. If any state does anything that drops the amount of child support collected, those states could lose out on that money. Women are hardly ever ordered to pay child support in the rare cases where the father has custody, and when they are, the awards are smaller and not enforced as vigorously as they are for men. The states would not only lose out on the federal money, but the percentage that they keep in poundage and processing fees. On top of that, they would also lose what the system craves the most: Power and control over millions of fathers and their earnings.
The systems goes to great lengths through apathy toward visitation and instigating a hostile environment to portray these situations as normal to the children and that this is just the way things are done with grown-ups, thus cultivating the next generation of clients to feed the machine when it is their turn.
Probably not. But if you don't get married or have any children, then the industry will not be able to get their hooks into you. The divorce industry is and always will be about two things above everything else....money and control.
That's Right! Paul advises men NOT to marry!
One lives for the benefit of God, his wife and children, not for himself. It is a matter of choosing one way or the other. One leads to life eternal, the other to eternal damnation.
Umm.. Paul said that the only good reason to marry was to not burn with lust. Nothing about living for wife and children, or avoiding eternal damnation.
Correction: "but if you have sex with different MEN, you might go to your grave due to AIDS. "
Or, " but if you have sex with different women IN PLACES YOUR SHOULDN'T, you might go to your grave due to AIDS"
Most eloquently stated, John O.
You may have inadvertently hit a nail on the head here. Everyone always wants to air that statistic about how women are the ones who do the files but generally neglect to mention that in quite a few cases, the women file because the man started (shall we say) wandering after children come along. There are, I know, women who break the marriage vows but, from what I've seen, it's usually the men. Just FWIW.
Some of us learn this the hard way. And today, thanks to the feminists, many young women are incredibly selfish.
The point however is that it doesn't matter who is at fault as long as the one at fault is the one who pays. In my experience it has always been the woman who strayed (three divorces in my family and a few in my circle of friends). In an ideal world they should have lost all claim to the assets of the marriage including the kids.
Let me expand this into a related field by stating that only scumbag women get child support (usually). If the divorce was the woman's fault then she's a scumbag. If her husband was a good man then she'll get paid support because he's a good man. If her husband wasn't a good man she'll not get support because he's a scumbag just like her. If the divorce was the man's fault then he is a scumbag. Scumbag men seldom if ever pay child support. If both the man and the woman were good then they wouldn't be divorced, they'd be working to improve their marriage.
This is why the one at fault should lose the kids, obviously they are a scumbag and a poor role model for children. My wife and I have been married 15 years and are in total agreement on all of this BTW.
GSA(P)
Nor when we raise a couple of generations of young women so ungratefully narcississtic that such advice would find an audience.
Worldly cynicism doesn't recognize gender boundaries, and all of us are the poorer for it.
Thank you so much for your counterpoint to Reed's cynical, self-absorbed screed. BTW, I think your description also applies to Judaism and marriage.
Stay single, yes. Pick flowers, yes. Live life as he pleasea, yes. But, my younger brothers, please don't keep your DNA to yourselves. Give to sperm banks, and let Humanity continue to grow...
I am patiently awaiting the commercial introduction of women-androids. That would solve all my problems. (Except, perhaps, the excess weight.)
What's my deduction after 44 years of marrage?
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