This was a small blog that, as I wrote it, expanded into a multi-part series. In this series I'll attempt to explain my personal philosophy of marriage and parenthood. As with most philosophies, mine is based on observations from my life and the lives of others.
In this installment, I'm going to talk about the reasons not to get married. In my opinion those reasons are
- Your Parents
- Your Friends
- Yourself
If you marry young, the primary example you have of how a marriage should work is your parents. Your gut, visceral reactions to marriage stimuli will be that of one or both parents. It is only calm and reason that will overcome this ( or a lot of therapy ). Therefor, if your parents had a bad marriage, you should enter into the institution carefully. By way of explanation, I'll give you some of my history.
I was raised in a house with parents that fought constantly. I was told from an early age the only reason my father was still in the house was to see the children graduate high school. After that, we were informed, he was gone.
I'm the third of four children. My parents had two children and decided that was enough. They had their boy and girl and therefor the perfect 1950s nuclear family. On top of that, my brother Chris was a hellion. He brought stress and trouble weekly, if not daily. His antics had my mom near a breaking point.
So, seven years after Chris arrived, mom discovered she was pregnant with me. She insisted it was only appendicitis (that had gone on for five months) and went to the doctor to be diagnosed. I'm not sure what the doctor said or how he said it. I'm sure he was happy and expected mom to be happy as well. She wasn't.
She came home and threw her purse at my father who, more than likely, was reclining in that old red nagahide chair drinking beer from a tupperware 'glass'. When the purse missed my father my mom yelled for all the neighbors to hear, "You bastard. You got me pregnant!"
Dad just smiled.
Worse, on the day I arrived, Doctor Shelton brought me in all bundled in baby blue and told mom, "Congratulations, its a boy."
"Not another boy!" my mom screamed and began crying. Then as the doctor laid me on my mom she began another kind of tears. I'm told they were tears of joy. "He's so beautiful," she said.
I'm told I was the perfect baby and easy to raise. When my younger sister came three years later it wasn't such a shock. Mom had already resigned herself to a middle age of raising children.
God, my friends, always has the last laugh.
As time wore on, my mother changed from the perfect wife of the fifties to a liberate (in a sense) woman of the sixties and seventies. I'm told by my older siblings, that one day mom had had enough. It was almost as if she carried any slight or insult my father gave in a bag on her back. When she exploded, the bag was flung at my father and it was the gift that kept on giving. Unfortunately, this occurred when I was a pre-teen and kept going until dad have his first heart attack.
Something about my father's brush with mortality changed the relationship between my father and mother. Its as if father understood he could die soon and mother pondered a life without my dad and decided things should change. They had a happy marriage after that (more or less). Unfortunately that didn't happen until after I graduated high school.
Entering college, my opinion of marriage was a low one and that opinion remained until my thirties due to the second reason not to get married; your friends.
I had two close friends whose marriages failed. One married his high school sweet heart and stayed married for seven years. The other, married at the end of a whirlwind romance. Both friends were miserable at the time of divorce. I'd known each of them for a long time and had never known anyone as sad as friends when they lost their wife.
Now I'll be the first to say I had a low opinion of both of these women. It was that they were horrible people, it was just that they made my friends sad or treated my friends poorly during their marriage. It was always odd going to their house. I always felt as though I was intruding. In fact, you could tell that any time spent with a 'single friend' was considered bad by the wives.
So, my overall impression of the union of my friends was that marriage was a horrid institution to be avoided at all costs. In the interest of full disclosure, they both did much better on their second marriage.
The third reason not to get married is yourself. Maybe your parents were always happy. Maybe your friend are still unmarried or have happy unions. But deep inside, you know, you aren't ready.
If you're thinking this, my opinion is, you're probably right. If you haven't met someone you're willing to be with for the rest of your life or you don't want to give up your life as it is then don't get married.
When you meet the right person, it will be as if you didn't have a life before. You want to spend every waking hour with them and think nothing of giving up Friday Night Poker. When you find THAT person, then you're ready to make the leap.
In the next installment, I'll detail how I found Zack's mom and how we fell in love.
Until then....
