Horse and Carriage
In most families the birds and the bees talk is a conversation dreaded by parents and offspring alike, but as is often the case, my slightly unconventional brood had no struggle with the traditional and sailed through addressing reproduction issues. Being of the "divorced" status, marriage was our tabooboo subject...
Out of the blue one day my daughter looked me squarely in the eyes and asked, "Mum, is marriage something I should try?" I didn't think it'd be addressed quite like that!
Out of the blue one day my daughter looked me squarely in the eyes and asked, "Mum, is marriage something I should try?" I didn't think it'd be addressed quite like that!
Did I "try" marriage? What happened to the fairytale fantasy of all little girls to grow up and get betrothed in a big white cloud of meringue?
Oh that's right...I destroyed it.
Marriage, I can't quite decide if I'm for it or against it...I've done it twice already so I must like it right? Well I think I did once anyway.
I did some research to try and help me decide on how I felt about marriage now that I'd got a couple under my belt, and my daughter needed to plan her future.
The statistics don't look great in the good old US of A...50% divorce rate on first marriages, 67% on seconds, and a whopping 74% if you're brave enough to try the "third time lucky!" claim.
I wonder if I count in those statistics, having married Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb (a French man and a Hungarian) in England.
If anything else had a failure rate of 50% it'd be banned...if cigarettes killed 50% of smokers they'd be off the market in a flash, if anti-depressant drugs rendered 50% of users suicidal, there'd be lawsuit after lawsuit, if Toyota accelerators got stuck 50% of the time...well you get it! So why then is marriage still legal? Why do we keep on trying to get it right?
Love, love, love, and health insurance.
Seriously though, a lifetime union based on love? Pretty fragile tie I'd say. Such a union based on financial support, or health coverage, or a death threat, might work but that flimsy unpredictable thing called love? I don't know!
Could I look my baby in the eyes and tell her no? Of course not! Life is a journey, filled with dreams, some of them turn out to be nightmares, but all hearts need exercise and the best way to get a heart pumping is a good old dose of love, followed by as long of a transfusion of marriage as we can possibly bear...until we get it right...or accept that it's OK if we don't.
So I told her yes darling...it's worth a try...or two!
posted by Cat Mayer at
7:56 PM
1 Comments:
Well, marriage didn't always have a lowly 50/50 shot of working out.
We were told that we would fall in love and get married, so we try to do it as quickly as possible - because if we wait, we might miss it. But we are so anxious to to do it, we don't give ourselves time to learn what love actually is. We confuse it with sex, with compatibility, with mutual interest. While all those things are a part of love, they are not the whole of it.
Of course, I'm a 46 year old bachelor, so what do I know about it? But it does place me outside, where I can see it, perhaps more objectively than some. I've seen the divorces. I've also seen the pairings that last. They can happen.
From where I stand, the good marriages have something in common; patience. The couple didn't rush into it. They dated a long time, they were engaged for a long time. They gave love a chance to solidify, instead of trying to grab the first whisp of it.
Your children will marry one day. And perhaps those bonds will be stronger because they will know that they can be broken if you're not careful.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home