The Scrolls

Posts Tagged ‘marriage’

The Institution of Marriage

I must admit that when people talk about banning gay marriage to preserve the institution of marriage, I am entirely confused as to what the hell that means. It’s not like the one man-one woman ideal has exactly helped the institution. Society has come to a point where people view marriage as something as fleeting. Divorce is seen as an acceptable answer to every little problem. People quit instead of facing the facts: marriage is not for the faint of heart but with a little elbow grease, most problems are fixable.

And if you take a look at why people are getting married, you see that many times the intentions are not what can be considered good. They’re selfish or manipulative. People are marrying for money, legal status, because there is nothing better to do or for power. Sure, some people marry for love but society doesn’t seem to have a bone to pick with those reasons. I mean really, it’s like society has made a mockery of marriage anyway so wouldn’t letting people who want to marry because they love each others and their families actually help preserve this institution? Could just be me, though..

Speaking of families, procreation is often listed as a reason why gay marriage is a bad idea. As if gay people don’t want families? It’s not like they haven’t or won’t jump through hoops to have children and manage parental rights. No straight person would stand for that kind of legal red tape so why is it fair to ask that of gay people? And if procreation is so damned important, then shouldn’t we ban people from marrying who have no plans to or are not able to conceive children?

None of these arguments just make any sense when viewed from a logical perspective.

I Do

A decade (or even shorter) ago, I didn’t put much faith in marriage. I couldn’t blame me. At that time, all of my family members who had ever been married had also been divorced, often several times each. I didn’t have anyone to look up to. I had no example that marriage can really work. And, as a teen, I was rebellious enough to not understand what a piece of paper meant. I’d been in love a few times by the time I decided you didn’t need to get married. It didn’t mean anything more than if you were seriously committed to dating. I certainly never saw myself marrying.

And then I met a boy. I fell in love with that boy and, for the first time in my life, experienced happiness the way princesses do in fairy tales. Despite the fact that my every experience screamed that true love doesn’t exist and it’s useless being romantic, I found myself becoming romantic and believing in true love. When that boy proposed, I said yes, like I knew I would. I had known for some time because the idea that I wanted to spend my life with that boy had snuck up on me and planted itself firmly. I had hope.

As I re-evaluate my marriage, and face the idea that I may not be married “until death do us part” (even though, those words were not in our vows), it’s hard to hold on to that hope. Divorce is, if not entirely a start over, at least dramatically life altering. My husband and I share a home, possessions and pets. We share insurance and cell phone plans. While all those things are material and I can ultimately rebuild, they only signify the fact that we share a life together. All the material things serve to represent the emotional things we have come to share: love, trust, confidences, strengths, weaknesses and deepest, darkest secrets. Not to mention the sheer amount of time we have dedicated to one another.

The fall seems so much further, now. Being married has changed my perception about marriage. It’s not just a piece of paper and divorce is not just breaking up. In fact, I’m not sure if I can think of anything more appalling at this moment than the idea of divorce. If the idea of divorce is appalling, the idea of no longer being married to my husband is heart stopping. Perhaps the reason marriage has transformed in my mind, is simple because I do love him so much that, while I may not always remember it, I cannot imagine not spending every day of the rest of my life married to him.

Perhaps if I had remembered that all along, we would not be where we are now and I could simply be celebrating marriage and love and commitment. Instead, I am contemplating my life without those things and nothing could be more difficult.

Leaving Well Enough Alone

Of course, this post on my shopping blog would be one that Ashe disagrees with. Of course, I had to post it when I was already annoyed with her. Of course, it kind of has to do with one of the reasons I am frustrated with her. Of course, we had to talk about it. Had to. How could we not?! Of course, I couldn’t stop when she said she was getting angry because, by that time, I was, too, and I wanted to be.

The result of all this?

I now realize I don’t believe in dating as a ‘permanent’ station in life. I simply view it as a temporary move between singledom and marriage – neither of which are any better than the other, by the way. It’s generally necessary (unless you’re Dharma and Greg) and, hopefully, enjoyable but it’s not a place I ever desired to stay in for more than a couple of years because, at that point, dating becomes a road block on my journey to marriage. I view dating as something you do until you figure out whether or not you can marry this person and then you stop. You either stop dating and become engaged or stop dating a douche and become single again. If I were to date for years and my partner were unable to show me commitment, I would feel strung along angry, if you couldn’t tell.

It just reeks of indecision to me. Indecision wastes time. Indecision goes hand in hand with confusion. Grey areas in relationships are never a good sign. If you can’t at least loosely define what the hell it is you’re doing, then I think you need to reconsider. It’s not that I think people should push for marriage to the point of being miserable but if that’s what you want, then you should go for it sooner rather than later. Because marriage is clearly defined. Singledom is clearly defined. Dating is not. I thrive on that definition. I have even less respect for casual dating, for the same reasons, but casual sex is A-okay by me.

This all really exemplifies my dislike for wasting time and not knowing where I stand, so if the goal of dating is marriage, then dating for an extended length of time is wasting it. Of course, I realize that not everyone dates for reasons of getting married but I honestly don’t understand other purposes. You may date many people in the search of someone but once you do find that person, shouldn’t you make the next logical step sooner rather than later? It’s just that, if you love someone and you’re happy with them and you want to be with them for a good long time and you can see that happening, why wouldn’t you get married? Why wouldn’t you want to show that to the world? And if you’re not all of those things, why are you still in the relaitonship? Furthermore, while it may never ne an issue, as soon it becomes one being married in the eyes of the law becomes a huge issue.

You can lead a horse to water..

But you can’t make it drink. Just like you can’t make a person do something. And you can’t open their eyes to the truth of they don’t want to see it. And a million other related cliches.

It’s been a while since I posted anything really personal in here. For a while, I guess I was worried that I might say something about someone I know in the real world ™ and they’re be angry. I also worried that I might say something which someone would use as ammunition against Ryan and/or myself. So I stopped talking even when it might have done me well to speak. In the process, my blog lost its cathartic tendencies and I posted a whole lot less but, truthfully, I miss it. And, truthfully, sometimes there are things you need to get out but the person who needs to hear them isn’t ready or willing or even able to listen. But my blog will.

We fight, like any normal couple. We’re not one of those couples you see on TV who have never had a fight or who freak out because they just had their first fight. No, we fight. Not as much anymore, thank God. It was bad for a while. Sometimes it felt like our relationship was only made of the fighting and the good times were abnormal. There was a lot of other shit going on which affected it so maybe, this time last year or the year before, the fighting was necessary. Maybe we’ve moved to a point where we need to fight less. I hope so. But we still fight.

The fact that we fight is not the problem. I think, when it’s all said and done, we generally understand eachother or can at least agree to disagree. I believe neither of us intentionally wants to hurt the other but we are both sensitive in our own ways, sometimes oversensitive.

The problem is the way we fight. It’s the same every time. We go about discussing the issues in the wrong way and, before you know it, we’re fighting just to fight. We’re fighting about the fight. Except, I think that sometimes I’m the only one who knows it. There are certain triggers and in my mind I think “Oh shit. This is going to set us back 3 months” and then I try everything in my power to avoid the fight which becomes increasingly difficult as I find myself frustrated at the fact that we have let this happen again. That we have not changed.

That he has not changed. I feel guilty typing that because I know I am not perfect. I know I contributed to last night’s fight. I know I am not selfless. If I were, I’d glad want children. I wouldn’t care about school for myself or what kind of job I work. I wouldn’t tell Ryan I want him out of the military or that I don’t like his family. I would grin and bare it and maybe earn myself some just rewards in the afterlife.

No, I am not selfless but I do think I am more selfless than he is when we fight. Except, he doesn’t see it. He can’t see it. It’s like he has some sort of filter that interprets everything I do as selfish no matter how contradictory that may be to the truth. If I tell him to calm down because I know it does no one any good for him to be so upset, he thinks I am defending whatever offense I have committed, rather than trying to keep the fight in check. If I try to explain this, he thinks I am just saying “I am always right and you are wrong.” But how can I say that is not what I am saying? Wouldn’t that just enforce his mindset that I am implying that? I’m not saying you’re wrong or that I’m right. I’m saying what we are doing, what you are doing is hurtful to us? It’s not my pride I’m worried about. I don’t care about saving face, I care about us!

So you see my dilemma. I cannot explain to him that maybe he isn’t seeing things clearly without damaging my platform, without “proving” to him that he is right and I am just being stubborn, stupid or selfish. But I’m not.

Faced with a lose-lose situation, I took the easier route. And by “easier,” I mean that I gave up on trying to explain to him and I told him it didn’t matter despite the fact that it does matter. We have this gigantic issue that he can’t even understand and I cannot possibly explain but I know that it could easily make or break us. The nature of the beast makes it seemingly impossible to tame but fighting like this cannot go unchecked. Because even if the subject of the fight can be resolved, resolution can only come if we can work together and we can’t as long as he sees things this way.

I choked back tears because I don’t know how I can show him the way I see things, how detrimental his thought process and behaviours can be to us. And instead of talking to him, which I knew would do no good, I told him good bye which did us no good anyway. What choice do I have?

It was a shitty answer, I know. Fighting is a stupid waste of time even in the best conditions. It’s even stupider when you fight like we do. It’s absolutely ridiculous when you are separated by thousands of miles of ocean and several time zones. And even as we fight I cannot help but think of how we are squandering time. His internet might decide to act up any minute, as we in the middle of our fight. Or even worse. We shouldn’t be fighting when there is a possibility that he might not even come home.

If I am selfish in any way it is because I do not want to fight. I want to spend every possible moment I can loving him and being loved in return. That is what I fight for.

The funny thing about this all – and I use a very loose definition of funny – is that I understood where he was coming from one he stopped being defensive enough to explain it. And I felt bad. I was sorry. Except he can’t see that I wasn’t fighting with him about how he felt, rather how he went about telling me.

He says I don’t listen but does he realize how hard he makes it? There’s nothing to even listen to when he’s so busy being defensive and brooding and angry and, dare I say, selfish. He thinks I don’t listen but the truth is, sometimes he’s not even saying anything. He jumps to the point where he accuses me of not listening right away, without giving me the chance to listen. Had he told me right away how he felt, I would have been happy to recognize it. Instead, he immediately lets himself get angry and the first I head of how he feels comes as a shock. I’m blown away and if I don’t react maturely, it’s no wonder.

I’m so busy trying to hold everything together and he mistakes the fight in me as fighting him, instead of fighting for us. In return, he fights me. And it’s tiring. I know it won’t be any better if I stop fighting for us but I also know it can’t possibly get any better unless he stops fighting me over false perceptions. In the meantime, I’m surrounded by a rock and a hard place. I know, enough with the cliches already. But they’re so suiting.

So I lied. It does matter and it is important but I don’t know how to get through to him. He’ll read this and I want to hope that he’ll “see the light” but I know he won’t. Maybe we’ll talk about it. It’ll probably turn into a fight and I’ll lie, again, to end it. I guess I’ll just keep lying because it’s the easier difficult choice to make. In doing that, what cliche am I fulfilling?

Change of plans.

Vote on the new poll!

Today was another story, which doesn’t really matter to me because I wouldn’t have gone either. However, I’m not sure why it was a snow day because there is about 5 more inches of snow, but the roads are perfectly fine. They’re even better hype here, now, than when we have 2 or 3 inches. So my day off isn’t so special.

I actually didn’t go to the courthouse with mom and Tim because Tim told me not to. I was really tired and couldn’t drag myself out of bed. Then I decided I have nothing to wear that isn’t black, which is true. It sounds like I didn’t miss much. Liz, my aunt, and Grandpa went too and from what Mom says Liz got the car stuck in the driveway because Grandpa told her that she needed to turn around and he’s driven “for over forty years” so he should know. Then when everyone was in the mall parking lot Liz said “if he hadn’t said anything” and Grandpa said her husband deserve to beat her. So she was crying and said “Fuck you” really loudly while Mom and Tim were heading to the car and trying not to be associated. Later Grandpa was all “I still love you Lizzie.” I know he’s aging but these aren’t just personality traits. Sometimes the thing that he says are downright scary.

Mrs. Farmer said my interview went well, and that I really won people over because of my decision to go to Arizona blindly. They know that financial circumstances are a problem and we can’t really overcome them at this time, so I hope that will be a factor in what scholarships I may receive and how much. On the topic of money, Ben made me feel better the other night because he said one day I will own a house and have five cars and not have to worry about it. II <3 Ben
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I had some problems with my Lita Ford fanlisting, but now they’re fixed. We really need some people to apply to be reviewed at Adrenaline. So pretty, pretty please? -gives puppy dog eyes*

Here’s the Friday Five
What was…

1. …your first grade teacher’s name?
I think it was Mrs. Louis, but I don’t remember her at all. I don’t even remember my kindergarten teacher’s name.

2. …your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?
Garfield! dun dun dun dun (Garfield theme song!)

3. …the name of your very first best friend? Crystal

4. …your favorite breakfast cereal?
We never had anything good. Once we had to eat oatmeal for two months straight because my mom’s ex is an asshole. Needless to say, I rarely touch oatmeal anymore. I really like honeycomb now, though. Oh! Wait! I remember that I used to have cream of wheat at grandma’s house and I loved it. She always made it so perfectly and I could never master that art. Go Grandma!

5. …your favorite thing to do after school?
I used to have this Best Friends Forever club thingy. So I did that a lot. I’d call meetings on Saturdays and the like. Hum. I’d come home and play Barbies a lot. I also played house and took walks. We lived in the country so I could disappear for hours down by the creek. I didn’t watch a lot of TV, I know that. I would play with the cats and dogs and sometimes I would go out into “the shed” which is where Dan kept all his “junk” and take some inside. Dan was a “junk man;” he collected old appliances and tore them apart to sell the metal to places as scrap or to sell as parts. He kept this in the shed and out behind the shed. So the stuff I was bringing in was dirty and not very healthy.