Dear Unmarried Friends,
Now that Valentine’s over, can we please get back to our senses and reattach our heads onto our shoulders?
First things first. Valentines do not represent the devastating effect of romance: Marriage.
Secondly, marriages that are based on love are doomed. Seriously, doomed. People who marry for love are buying themselves first class tickets to painful divorces.
Fact is, the time when arranged marriages gave way to love, divorce rates shot astronomically up. It’s not a preposterous thought. After all, what in the world could bring two people of different sexes together based on the flimsy, ethereal cause such as a 30 months hormonal imbalance?
Matter of (Old) Convenience
In the old days, when divorces were WAY LESS, people didn’t marry for hugs or sex or fairytale endings. They married to survive. They married the next available & healthy beau/belle, regardless to whether or not they fancied each other. They married quickly, as soon as they hit puberty, because the sooner they had children, the more hands they had helping in the farm.
Marriage, when it was a matter of survival for the group, didn’t have issues around boredom or lack of intimacy and all that anti-Valentinesque shit. People don’t die from lack of romance, back then, you see? In the old days, people married (and stayed married) because they HAD TO.
The Lost Cause
Nowadays, the function of marriage as a social, business and religious contract is losing power over the necessities. We only need to do the groceries to prepare the food. Both men and women can make their keep. We live in larger houses so that we can buy plenty of privacy from EACH OTHER.
Let me simplify all that: Who needs to be married to survive?
These days, (romantic) marriages tend to bring down more difficulties than conveniences. If romance lasts for thirty months; that barely covers the time it takes to payback the installments on the wedding expenses and dowry. [Yeah, about that, what the FUCK?!]
As soon as the romantic love evaporates (and it will), the causes for divorces start to appear. All too clearly, too. What, you didn’t know he scratched his balls in public? What, you didn’t know she had a weakness for Swarovski?
Inconveniences of Marriage
Honestly? Marriage is becoming more inconvenient than staying single. Marriage takes a lot more than showing up at your wedding, reciting moonlit serenades, and spending three months’ salary on 1 carat stones. You actually have to work every day, every minute, every breathing space on it.
For the rest of your life. If you want to be married that long.
You can’t keep opposite sex friends. You can’t think in singular terms (not in “I”, but in “We”). You cannot self-actualize without the other’s consent. You can’t even scratch your balls in public anymore. Forget staying up late to watch the ball game. Or recognizing your the reason why you married that person in the first place.
Heck, if all of the above failed to make romantic marriages look like an inconvenience, I’d expand every one of the Top 10: Reasons Not To Get Married.
But I won’t. Statistically speaking, I know that this generation knows about that too well to insult embitter their intelligence.
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