I don’t know whether to love or hate this week. It’s taken a lot of energy but I feel rather engaged and I could handle just a little bit more if the week brings it on. I guess I didn’t know this was the week that would take that level of commitment. Today’s topic is about marriage.
Marriage has three components I can easily identify: romance, commitment, and tradition. Romance can also include chemistry and I boil it down to how compatible two people are in small spaces together. Commitment is the choice of the partners to stick it out along with a slightly fuzzy factor that rates their capability of actually doing that. Tradition is the motherfucking beast upon which marriage is warped into an unusable form. Ha. Each partner comes from a culture and your region may impose a culture and these culture’s give you models for what a marriage should be. Tradition is the sum of those examples in the lives of the partners.
Short term romance is easy. The shortest term romance is almost a relief experience because we’re used to balancing our sexual/intimate interests with our respect and one person is feeling the energy of the other person and you determine mutually that you don’t know each other but it’s okay to get intimate and it’s like a dam coming down and you’re swept with it for the moment. Middle term romance happens at a different time relative to the partners but it’s more grounded in the environment of the partners and their actual ways. Middle term and longer romances are slightly, perhaps positively, hijacked by throw backs to the short term romance. If you had sex on a civil war statue, then civil war statues might infiltrate your romance in the future because one way to play with romance is to use continuity. I don’t know much about long term romance. There are people I’ve known for a long time that are excellent people all around and with no reason to say “no” to their advances, I would definitely engage them in romance. The safety and security have all been well established but maybe it’s just middle term romance after all.
Commitment is important because everybody goes crazy for different reasons. Once we panic, humans don’t stay very rational in my opinion. If I’m scared (does that happen?), hungry, worn out, fighting infection, dealing with many issues that are all different and hard to deal with one at a time, I can fail to appreciate the actual things my girlfriend is saying. Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t listening. I wanted to yesterday but I don’t want to now and it’s nobody’s fault. She returns the favor for having moments when she’s not as reasonable. It’s obvious. There are months and months and months of solid, grounded, relaxing, adult interactions and then there’s a week of the crazies. It’s like her memory card is broken then too because the issues don’t go away until her crazies go away. Failure to save. It’s easy for me to see her crazies and hard to see my own. I think I have them too and commitment is that decision made in advance to allow partners to get beyond the crazies.
Our crazies have been harmless. But I think crazies can have people having sex with the wrong people. It can have people spending or signing away fortunes for stupid things. It can have people breaking their diet or even suicidal in some tragic cases. There is a distinction I would like to make though. Crazies are phases that are the minority of the experiences. Unfortunately, I can’t just babysit crazy partners who are full blown, never stop crazy. I mean I could but I’d get a partner on the side that slept in the same master bedroom. I would need the support.
Tradition seems obvious because its hallmarks rest in the rituals of the individuals coming together. Some traditions relate to holidays. But some traditions relate to the valuation of roles that the partners assume. Some traditions sabotage the relationship speed by suggesting that once you’ve had sex you are in some way immediately on the path to marriage. Some traditions turn all that male romance off and tell the bitch to get back in the fucking kitchen and cook when she’s not squeezing out a newborn. What’s worse is that some people won’t tell you that’s what is running through their mind. They’ll figure you knew or else you wouldn’t have hung around because with the exception of your dumb-ass they have only dated mind-readers in the past (and look how well that worked).
My girlfriend reading this will be asking an honest question about this blog and if it’s related to her. Yes and no. Yes because I think she’s marriage material and I’m still going to be patient with getting a few life variables like debt and living circumstances worked out before I go planning the method of dropping the question. No because even though my soon to be exwife doesn’t read this, it kind of relates to my experiences and these dudes she dates that are like “We’ve had sex, let’s marry”. I know other women currently that seem like they get on that fast track easily as well but whom I’m not going to out on this blog and it’s about them too. My girlfriend brought up the topic a few days ago, but other things kept to the theme resulting in this post.
Here’s the point and you can just start reading here if you’ve been glazing over reading the earlier portions. Tradition will kill you and sleep in your guts to stay warm if you are not careful to find out the cultural markings of your partner AND to figure out the tendencies of your partner when your partner is not with you i.e. when my girlfriend actually doesn’t have to give a shit about my opinion, what are her preferences. Because I can meaninglessly list a sequence of girls who can vouch for the fact that they catered quite excessively to me at their expense and right now only my current girlfriend is in the running for getting anything good as a result. I expect people to also represent their own needs so I can be supportive. They don’t because they ask me my opinion, “Do you want to do this or that?” I want to do that. I always prefer that. But she wouldn’t have offered to do “this” if she hadn’t wanted too and if she really wants to do this one day she needs to be willing to say “I want to do this, will you come with me?” Hell yes I will, I was waiting for you to ask.
And those things are cute and frustrating and sometimes relationship breakers. These elements are those markings of traditional elements brewed into these people. They won’t explain their traditions to me because traditions that we carry forward can feel very invisible and natural. And previous to me they only dated mind-readers. You’ll know what I mean because it’ll happen to you too.
Fuck tradition. Fuck yours and fuck mine. I do stupid things on occasion out of habit. But I’m not going to ever be so stupid as to walk into marriage with an expectation of who we are after marriage. Day 1 of being married next time should feel like being day 2075 of knowing you and it just happened to have a rather awesome party and then you kissed me with cake all over your mouth. It’s gonna be like that or it’s not going to happen. The traditional elements that I carry are going to have to do a damn good job of hiding because I’m throwing them all away.
