I’ve been thinking about marriage a lot lately. i guess it’s really been brought on by the fact that i am now married and there are times where i wonder why we do it. why some women (me included) stress so much about that moment when your boyfriend asks you to be his wife? as if it’s the absolute defining moment. and once married, why do some women use it as a rule of authority over other women who aren’t? are some married women ‘better’ if they have been married longer than the others? do they perhaps know some kind of secret about it all, that we are yet to discover?
yes, there are really people like this in my life. one of these women is actually younger than me and she seems to think i am immature compared to her because she’s was married before me. as if being married at 22 is something that i would be jealous of (i wouldn’t). she does this by giving me unwanted advice. she takes something i say about my husband, no matter the subject, and twists it into a problem (when it may be something as simple as ‘my husband likes to play this video game’) and then gives me advice about it (‘maybe you’re having communication issues because he spends too much time playing computer games. why don’t you set aside time to talk about yourselves. go back to that moment that you first started dating.’) i mean, come the fuck on.
and then there is marriage itself. if you think about it, we know some of our friends longer than we’ve known our significant others. i’ve known my best friends for not even a decade. my husband has known his best friend since he was 2. and yet there are still some things i don’t know about my girlfriends. but i know them well enough. and it’s always a day of discovery. however, some women will meet a guy and in 2 months will know that she wants to “be with him for the rest of her life”. such was my line of thinking when i met my husband. how is that so? and then of course, when marriages break down we wonder why.
in the same vein as “never say never” why not “never say forever”?. How do we really know that we will be with that person for the rest of our lives? And how did I know that at the age of 21 when I had barely even begun to live my life? why are we so comfortable to take a gamble on something that we believe is destiny with someone who we may have only known for a short amount of time? “i will, till death do us part” seems like it should be rewritten to say “i will until we fall out of love or things go bad or i find someone else or i can’t take your crap no mo’”.
i don’t believe in happily ever after. and i don’t see marriage as a title to hold over others. i never think that love is enough. love itself should not be enough. if people believe that everything is greener on the other side when you finish saying “i do” - it’s just not the truth. it’s against our nature to be monogamous. we are meant to have multiple partners and continue to feel a ‘spark’ with new people. so saying ‘i do’ for what should be forever with one person requires work.
but of course, if you really love that person and you really want to stay with them until death do you part, then you would have no problem working at it. even if it means you have to work until the end because it’s worth it, after all. for me, anyway.
