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.
I am in TOTAL agreement with you on this one. Thankfully, due to a bit of blackmailing on my part - this is exactly how my first marriage turned out. He left, I filed (after waiting over 1 year to be able to come up with the money while still keeping the children fed and clothed), the 'legal system' told me that 'he' had all these 'rights' (never mind that he moved in with a woman with four teenaged boys, one already an alcoholic and one a drug user while he and I had a teenaged son and 12 year old daughter) to visitation, etc., etc. Well - I had a problem with my daughter being in that atmosphere and got VERY lucky that he did something HIGHLY illegal and I found out about it. He has never paid any child support (even though it was court ordered with a host of other things), has never even tried to contact the children (even during Christmas and their birthdays) even though they used to call him (with my blessings) fairly regularly. I did not have a problem with them seeing their father whenever they wished AS LONG as they were not subjected to being around these two particular sons of his new "??". Anyway, point is - with the legal system the way it is - our children would have been FORCED into a VERY bad situation and the only recourse I could have had to legally stop it would have been AFTER something had already happened to one of our children!!! And to really add insult to injury - according to all these statistics, everything is MY fault because I'm the one who filed the papers!! Outrageous!
Sorry to ramble - but there ARE examples that do not bear out this article.
Thank God above that now the children have an EXCELLENT father figure that they are friends with and look up to and we are all stronger for having weathered the bad times. They also have a new little brother to play with and spoil and we all enjoy one another's company and get along very well.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
We've been crazy about each other since we met thirty years ago in 1972 at ages 15 and 17. Part of that is because we were determined to make it -- just to prove all the naysayers wrong. My heart still skips a beat when he comes through the door at night, mud and sweat and all.
Another reason we're still together is because he is a genuinely kind and good person, and we try to consider each other's opinions and feelings on given issues, and we forgive each other. We had a slight argument about 2 weeks ago, and couldn't stand being upset with each other so we both apologized and both tried to take the blame.
I agree with you that society -- feminism -- have demonized men. These same feminists will insist that there is no difference between the sexes. If men are so terrible, wouldn't you think they would claim that there is a difference? (Viva la difference!)
I think men are wonderful, especially mine, and I tell him so all the time.
Statistically that would require thousands of unprotected contacts. For AIDS you'll need an IV drug habit, thousands of contacts with homomsexuals, an amyl nitrate habit or some AZT.
The way I've heard it phrased is: "Instead of getting married, just find some woman you don't like and buy her a house."
Well said! Some people are quick to scoff at this kind of cynisism and put down the cynic for how he views the world. What they don't take into account is that the fathers put through this system were not always cynical. Most were not always cynical. I should know, I am one. People like me aren't born cynical....we're made that way by the industry and it's patrons....and they make more of us everyday.
On a lighter note, maybe I should start my own movement. I'll call it "The New Cynicism." The new cynics will point out that we are not bitterly paranoid, as some call us. Paranoia is the irrational fear that the world is out to get you. the new cynicism will be based on the foundation that the world IS out to get us, but we've accepted that and, as any 12-step program will tell you, acceptance IS the key! Okay, I'll stop now. I just wanted to show the board that not all cynics are bitter and humorless ;)
There are a number of different forms of "no-fault" divorce. The ones which require both parties to agree that there are irreconcilable differences but no particular wrongdoing and which allow either party to contest either statement I don't have a major problem with. The ones that allow one party to unilaterally dissolve a marriage without declaration of "fault" are just plain evil. IMHO, any partner who seeks to unilaterally dissolve a marriage without demonstrating specific wrongdoing on the part of the other should be deemed entirely at fault for the breakup and thus get the bare minimum from any resulting divorce settlement. To make a 50% division of assets when one partner is seeking to preserve the relationship and the other to dissolve it is just plain wrong.
I was married for 22 years and the wife suddenly needed to expand her whorizions. Because Kids and dogs like me, I got custody of my daughter, put her through school, helped her out after she got married and still act as an emotional stabalizer in her life. The cost, 1/2 Million bucks and a tramatatized daughter. The wife has a very nice place in Fla and is hated by her kids.
Sad but oh so true. Part of the problem is that marriage is both too easy to enter and far too easy to leave these days
I had the good fortune to see the damages that quick marriages caused in my family before I married. The result being that I waited until God brought exactly the right woman to me to be my wife. We are both in agreement that marriage is forever and that we had better make it as good as it can be because (short of adultery) there is no way out. So far (15 years this August) life has been pretty good. Did I mention that she makes beautiful babies too?
(I'll post pictures later if requested)
GSA(P)
While I agree with the rest of what you said I don't agree with this. If they are still talking amiably enough that neither has committed adultery then the differences are not irreconcilable. Marriage is forever and is only ended by adultery or jury provable abuse.
If people would take more time to learn their spouse before they marry, and decide to make the marriage work, every marriage would succeed.
If someone want's out of the marriage badly enough that they see the differences as irreconcilable then they need to forfit the proceeds of the marriage as they are abandoning their spouse (Which I believe is close to adultery). If they want out then they should leave with nothing. Otherwise they can buckle down and work to make the marriage work.
GSA(P)
Under what I proposed, if either party wants out while the other party wants in, the party who wants out has to forfeit essentially everything. If neither party wants in, though, to whom should everything be given?
If neither party is willing to make even a token effort to save a marriage (especially given that such effort would put them in the position above of the party who wants "in") I don't think there's any hope for it. Saying both parties are to blame is all very well, but unless you would have the state confiscate the people's assets it matters little whether both or neither are at fault.
And I enjoy sharing in their families.
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