Last week my younger brother and I were talking about love and marriage. He's currently waiting for his divorce to be finalized, and has already started another relationship with someone else he feels he would like to marry. Personally I think that he should take the time to get himself centered and grounded before he decides to jump headlong into another committed relationship. During our conversation I told him that I'm not sure if marriage works for our generation. We are the first of the instant gratification generations. We live in very much of a throw-away society. If it's not working for us, we get rid of it and get another one. Although you should never treat people like that, we do. Of course I mean "we" in the metaphorical sense. I, personally, am someone who will stay until the bitter end as long as I have someone to hang in there with me.
Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries' 72 day marriage is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. They knew each other for all of two seconds and then decided to make the biggest commitment that two people can make to each other. "I barely know anything about you, yet I'll pledge to spend the rest of my life with you until death do us part. Or at least until we have our first major disagreement." My parents have been married for 44 years and I think there are very few couples from my generation that will be able to say the same years from now. I've said it before and I'll say it again, people don't take marriage vows seriously anymore. They're just the words that people have to say in order to get married. They've lost their meaning. Most people think I'm anti-marriage because I don't rhapsodize about getting married someday. I'm not anti-marriage. I'm anti-bullshit. There's a huge difference.
My younger brother is someone that jumps into a situation with both feet, and sees the situation as being colored with sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. When the clouds, rain, and unicorn shit show up he always tries to find an excuse to bolt. We live a life of duality, and must take the good with the bad because without the bad the good would be nowhere near as good. How boring would it be if things were good all the time? I'm not saying that there should always be tragic or dramatic circumstances in your life, but a little adversity shows us what we're truly made of.
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Evolution (or Devolution, More Like) of Marriage
Last week I was tweeting with one of my friends about marriage. It's nowhere on her radar screen and she's okay with that. She's from Norway, and it's culturally acceptable there to not care about marriage at all. Here in the United States, it's the end all be all of every relationship. Been seeing a guy for a year? Time to start thinking about when he might propose...Those of you who know me well, know that marriage is something that I can take or leave. If I get married, that's cool; and if I don't, that's cool, too. I can already hear the voices in the background murmurring, "What about kids? Doesn't she want kids?" As we all know, you don't have to be married to have a baby. You also don't need to be at the age of consent. I'm not someone who advocates teen pregnancy or having children out of wedlock, but I am someone who knows the ritual of giving birth isn't something I need to partake in
for my life to feel complete.
I was in a serious relatinship for almost five years and within a year of us being together, my boyfriend had already picked out our wedding date, 10/20/2010. He liked the fact that the numbers were a palindrome and he also liked the fact that it would fall on our fifth anniversary. Well folks, we never made it to that fifth anniversary. We broke up about three months before it. Although he had some baggage that he needed to take care of before it was even possible for us to marry, that date loomed large in my future. He was constantly bringing it up, like it was some kind of deadline. A deadline for what? Every marriage that I've had first-hand experience with is one that either: A. should've never happened, or B. should've been dissolved long ago. As for the ones that I've only had a minor brush with, it seems that marriage is very rarely taken seriously. Vows are just words to be spoken in a ceremony that officially says "We're married". Divorce is used as an easy out because nowadays people either get married for the wrong reasons or they don't think it through, which is almost the same thing. The concept of the "starter husband or starter wife" (the same, in concept, as the starter home) has become popular. I know the images of marriage in the 50s and 60s were a sham. There wasn't much for a woman to do but get married and have babies. Any woman that wasn't married by a certain age was considered an old maid. If word got out that a woman had sex out of wedlock, she was considered damaged goods. In no way would I ever want to revert back to that time in history.
Although attitudes have changed in the 21st century, there is still a bit of a stigma to being unmarried. It's more prevalent in some regions of the United States than it is in others. I grew up in the South, so, many times when I've been down for a visit I've been asked when I'm getting married; or people assume that I already am. It's almost as if that should be the defining characteristic of my life. The changing of the times hasn't made most couples any happier in their marriages than their parents or grandparents were. Adultery continues to run rampant. Children are born into toxic households. Work takes precedence over everything. Most wives are expected to go to work outisde the home and still keep house like they've been at home all day. Yep, that's exactly what I wanna sign up for.
Another thing that I struggle with is the whole name-change thing. I actually like being Michelle Stringer. I think it's a great name and it's symmetrical: eight letters in my first name and eight letters in my last name. I have a thing about symmetry. It may have to do with my being a Libra and constantly striving to maintain balance. There are men out there that don't have a problem with their wives keeping their maiden names, but I didn't happen to be in a relationship with one. I may have been persuaded to re-think my stance on changing my last name if his had been a bit more interesting. It wasn't...It was Smith...No disrepect to those of you with the last name Smith. If that's the last name I had been born with, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
As you may have already figured out, I'm an independent woman and very much of an independent thinker. I just wanna be free to be me. The constraints of the average marriage would stifle that. If I could find someone who doesn't mind that all of my official documents will say Michelle Stringer for as long as I live, and doesn't have a problem with me not birthing his babies then we can talk, hahaha!!!!
for my life to feel complete.
I was in a serious relatinship for almost five years and within a year of us being together, my boyfriend had already picked out our wedding date, 10/20/2010. He liked the fact that the numbers were a palindrome and he also liked the fact that it would fall on our fifth anniversary. Well folks, we never made it to that fifth anniversary. We broke up about three months before it. Although he had some baggage that he needed to take care of before it was even possible for us to marry, that date loomed large in my future. He was constantly bringing it up, like it was some kind of deadline. A deadline for what? Every marriage that I've had first-hand experience with is one that either: A. should've never happened, or B. should've been dissolved long ago. As for the ones that I've only had a minor brush with, it seems that marriage is very rarely taken seriously. Vows are just words to be spoken in a ceremony that officially says "We're married". Divorce is used as an easy out because nowadays people either get married for the wrong reasons or they don't think it through, which is almost the same thing. The concept of the "starter husband or starter wife" (the same, in concept, as the starter home) has become popular. I know the images of marriage in the 50s and 60s were a sham. There wasn't much for a woman to do but get married and have babies. Any woman that wasn't married by a certain age was considered an old maid. If word got out that a woman had sex out of wedlock, she was considered damaged goods. In no way would I ever want to revert back to that time in history.
Although attitudes have changed in the 21st century, there is still a bit of a stigma to being unmarried. It's more prevalent in some regions of the United States than it is in others. I grew up in the South, so, many times when I've been down for a visit I've been asked when I'm getting married; or people assume that I already am. It's almost as if that should be the defining characteristic of my life. The changing of the times hasn't made most couples any happier in their marriages than their parents or grandparents were. Adultery continues to run rampant. Children are born into toxic households. Work takes precedence over everything. Most wives are expected to go to work outisde the home and still keep house like they've been at home all day. Yep, that's exactly what I wanna sign up for.
Another thing that I struggle with is the whole name-change thing. I actually like being Michelle Stringer. I think it's a great name and it's symmetrical: eight letters in my first name and eight letters in my last name. I have a thing about symmetry. It may have to do with my being a Libra and constantly striving to maintain balance. There are men out there that don't have a problem with their wives keeping their maiden names, but I didn't happen to be in a relationship with one. I may have been persuaded to re-think my stance on changing my last name if his had been a bit more interesting. It wasn't...It was Smith...No disrepect to those of you with the last name Smith. If that's the last name I had been born with, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
As you may have already figured out, I'm an independent woman and very much of an independent thinker. I just wanna be free to be me. The constraints of the average marriage would stifle that. If I could find someone who doesn't mind that all of my official documents will say Michelle Stringer for as long as I live, and doesn't have a problem with me not birthing his babies then we can talk, hahaha!!!!
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