i don't

a friend of mine shared an article with me from Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/11/i-don-t.html

shocking - the details in black & white. and worst of all, i'm not even someone who opposes marriage i'm all for marriage contrary to what people may assume from my behaviour.

my problem with marriage, it's what makes the modern marriage. it's the ego problems and insecurity and jealousy and immaturity that cause problems for people that lead to (according to the article) SIXTY PERCENT of married people having sex with someone else - that, on top of the better than 50% divorce rate the CDC found (sited in a previous blog).

from there, its the reasons why people get married. i've recently had someone tell me they were marrying someone because the two of them had both discussed where they were in life, and they were both in a place to marry, so they would marry each other. what? not that they were dying to spend the rest of their lives with each other - they just both wanted to be married. yeah... that's dedication.... what happens when one of them decides they don't want to be married anymore - or worse, when one decides they just don't want to be married to that other person and have that person around every single day all day for the REST OF TIME... hmm... fail.

it's hard enough for people who are looking forward to spending the rest of their lives committed to one person in particular to be around that person all the time, how are you going to do it when that person isn't the reason for the commitment?

and from there the independence, the life you want vs what they want, the little details where ego and views weigh in. where little things like the guy getting lazy and the woman putting on weight cause people who seemed SO dedicated to suddenly secretly claim to their friends that they're going to bail if things reach a certain point.

of course, there are the paranoid - the ticking clocks, one quoted as saying that a woman over 40 is more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married. i'm not sure which of those two is the worse option... i mean really, with life expectancies high, do you want to be trapped into a marriage for marriage's sake for FORTY years? thats a lot of complaining and anguish and inability to go out and get a break with your friends because the other people are insecure.

over the last few months, not 1 but SIX women in my life got engaged. My sister, my cousin, my ex, my friend, and another ex... and another friend. Two of those women had been with the guy for years and had basically resolved to stay with them forever with or without the ring without concern for having children with that person or not. Two of them are getting married for marriage sake (tick tock!). One is a woman in her mid 20's who has been with the same guy for years, and one is a woman in her mid 20's who had been dating her guy for a couple months.

we're all smart enough here to do the math and figure out where each of these is going to fall in the 60%/50%+ mish-mash. the numbers are clear, however, i'm betting they all think they're part of a pure sample set of bliss.

as the article recognizes, the feminist movement can be blamed for a lot of the problems facing marriage today. i actually think feminism on some level is a good thing, i really think women can and should be seen as equals. however, no relationship is ever purely equal, its a fact of basic life & psychology, eventually, someone has to have the upper hand and the other being has to deal with it. in that somewhere is compromise.

but that doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. everyone needs their status or their ego or to fit in with the other soccer moms and partying execs or whatever group they spend their time with.

on some level, its ironic, that in the search for independence there's still a rush to be with someone. how about we all chill out until we find someone we just want to be with - and then just be with them? the marriage, for all its excitement, is really just a one day event probably ruined when a drunken groomsman accidentally mentions the groom's ex in a toast. who cares about a party? Life isn't measured in breaths, but by the moments that take your breath away... and those are going to be hard to come by without someone really special.