Furthermore, why set yourself up in narrow constraints of what you will and won’t do?

I’m educated, quirky, smart, chubby and keep odd hours. I married my best friend who I love with all my heart and built a six bedroom house – big enough for us both to have offices to ourselves, while still sharing a bedroom.

10 years later we are still really content. It has not been that hard to be happy together and live our lives – busy at times but not hard. We have better sex now than before. We travel and explore the world. We both created dream jobs and do well – not just money but really enjoying our work.

I came from a broken home too. I had a father who was a real asshole but therapy helped me learn to understand that was just his issues. My issues were my problem and I needed to fix them, so I did. I worked on healing myself but I’m still the same person basically.

We’ve adopted three kids now and we have this great family unit thing going on. I love my husband even more when he became a father. I love the man he is even more now as I watch him heal our daughter’s wounds from past abuse or show our sons how a man lives his life.

I guess my point is don’t paint yourself in a corner.

Um, thanks for the thoughts, but while my past hurts sometimes still hurt, they’ve made me the woman I am — a pretty fuckin’ cool chick with some pretty skookum-good insights on the world at large.

In my world, “God” isn’t love. Love is an emotion we put forth out of genuine interest and desire for others. Love is what we make it, and my love is made as well as it can be. I’m a great person, really ethical, really moral, but when it comes down to it — I ain’t a damned bit religious, and I won’t apologize for it. Spiritual yes, but radically not religious. Not even sure I believe in god.

So, there ya go. Apparently hell has a seat waiting for me, according to some people I’ve spoken with in the past. Que sera sera. :)

My daughter says now she enjoys seeing me happier. That makes me feel better about ending the marriage. Learn from the past but look to the future.

Regards..

Connection – sex, love and body contact are the most important ones. It brings you as a couple closer, and you can be lovers, not just two people who live in the same house and have some kids and have some jobs. If you don’t manage to keep the love and the lust, everything is lost. Sex and cuddeling keeps the passion alive.

Respct – respect and trust is essential to make it. I just read an interesting article about a prostitute who’s giving women advices on how to keep their husbands. She says that the woman has to understand that she’s number 2. That her needs aren’t as important. That you shouldn’t bitch. Just say that your husband is right and not fight over small things. I say bullshit! I say that bitch around as much as you want if you have a good reason. It’s like constructive criticism. But if you say something out of the line or speak to me in a disrespectful manner or try to master me (didn’t find a better synonym, hope you understand – I’m foreign), I’ll say stop. And that goes both ways. I also need to be able to trust her – I have my secret notes and diary, she has her’s. And we know where it’s kept, but we don’t read.

Communication – if you have something to say, say it. If you have a problem with me, tell me, so I know what is bothering you. Don’t just turn away and refuse to have sex and be mad, because if I don’t know what’s wrong, I can’t do anything about it. Men always wants to DO SOMETHING, while women always talk. That goes for us too. So she handles most of the talking, at least starts it if she feels we have a problem. Either if she’s mad at me or I’m mad at her. And then I always comes up with a good solution to fix things. Either it is because she wants me to take more responisbillity and care of the children or if we have a sexproblem. We are usually sexually intimate 3 times a week. But say, if se turns me down one, I think “ok, fine”, but twice I get a little irritated, and if it happens three times in a row, we talk about it. And then we can fix it. So, as Steff has said many times; communication, communication, communication!

I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I guess I’ll leve it like this for now. Just don’t lose faith in marriage. soem of us make it, and you can too if you just know how.

(No, I’m not christian, nor is my wife. I think marrige is good because it’s more difficult to break out of. I don’t think marriage is more holy than a long-term relationship. I’m jus a hopeless romantical guy who loved the idea of showing everone I know my love for this beautiful, wonderful woman.)

If we look thru the other end of the telescope, we are reminded that we are programmed to pair-bond for the purposes of making children. Our instincts are to crave sex and to love what comes as a result of it (though not, interestingly, to connect these two things). The “seven year itch” has been explained (posited) as our having been programmed to keep our need for the new & exciting at bay for approx. the length of time the man is needed to assist with childrearing.

This doesn’t help to fix marriage, but it reminds us that what we call marrige is just a thin topcoat put over the dense flesh & bone over which we have no control (and less understanding). I think “marriage” deserves only provisional reverence.

One of the things that drives me crazy about the conservative opposition to gay marriage is the claim that they are just “protecting” the institution of marriage. That may well be, but there’s nothing that less needs protection than male-female pair bonding. Their artificial construction of marriage may need help, but that’s a totally different thing to me.

I think only we can individually determine the nature of our commitment to another person. Surely the flush of discovery and sex that characterizes a new relationship (and which all numbers of romance novels and love stories celebrate) must be recognized as what it is: a mechanism to bond us to another person. It’s great and glorious, but it’s not the whole thing. A common criticism of marriage (tho not one that you’ve made, Steff) is that it stops one from being able to play the field. Well and good. But playing the field also involves costs, by preventing the deeper things–the different things that movies are only rarely made about–that one finds in the 25th year of marriage. I love my wife above all things, but I could give a hoot whether we were married in anyone’s eyes but our own. Our love is different now in its seventh year, but it’s still love. And we work at it every day.

I just think we must forge our own way.

Relationships are a bitch, period. They can be SO great, but usually, they fail. Almost always, really. Every now and then someone lucks out and finds the love of their lives –AND works hard enough to keep them.

I think the silly notion most folks have is that 50% of relationships fail, but that’s just marriages. I’d be interested in the real numbers for failed RELATIONSHIPS, which would have to be in the high 90s. Anyhow. That’s just depressing. And say, Valentine’s IS coming up, isn’t it? Ha. Biggest break-up day of the year. How ironic.

Professor — Yo, I ain’t gonna argue with you about society being broken. This is one fucked-up world we’re living in, and all our priorities are wrong. Maybe marriage isn’t broken, but our perception and handling of it is, absolutely. But it’s a big subject and there’s room for more than one viewpoint, obviously. :)

Anon — THAT will require intellect, something that’s not on my side on this long Sunday’s eve. I’ve worked seven days in a row now and start a new job thing tomorrow that has me utterly distracted, so maybe tomorrow night I’ll take a boo at that. Thanks for the linkage. Errrr… okay, you’re gonna be waiting on a response to that. That’s fucking long! Nice font, though, so that bodes well for me reading it.

Off the top of my head, though, I would say that love/money isn’t the point — the point is that this is a shallow, vacuous society we’re living in these days, and too few people A) know what they want before the do the asking for it and B) know how to keep it when they do the getting. Communication’s a lost art, and empathy is an illusion. There are ALWAYS people who defy these statements, who keep my hope in humanity alive, and then I get out in the world and see more vapid people who don’t have a clue how to respect people around them. Professor’s right, this society’s broken. There are so many values just absolutely absent in this continent’s daily life that it’s really starting to expose weaknesses in all areas, gaping weaknesses. Impending doom-kind of weaknesses, really.

Virgin — I can’t really argue much of that, actually. The gay marriage thing is a huge issue in my world. Sanctity of marriage, it really depends on who’s doing the marrying. I think it’s bullshit when you have friends marrying like that, though, because it makes a mockery of all the fighting and struggling done by the homosexual community for the last number of decades.

Legally, though, there are issues re: benefits/civil access, etc., that make skeptics like me feel we have to toss aside our values in order to have a voice if our lover ever needs us when they can’t vouch for them. Guys like the above, though, they’re giving ammunition for conservatives to say, “See? This flaunts EVERYTHING,” and have those rights stripped again. It’s bullshit.

Bah, I don’t know.

See, the irony for me is that the notion of marriage is a profound one. Commitment itself is profound to me. I don’t need religion, a god, a ceremony, or any of that to know what’s in my heart, to know what my thoughts for the future are, nor to know what it’s going to take in order for me to be a success at it. But the rebel’s in me pissed that I’m being told that without the church, without the paper, my love is essentially meaningless. That’s simply bullshit. I’m tired of all the laws saying when love is or isn’t enough. Law doesn’t know sweet fuck all about that.

And that’s the problem with legal marriage. It has nothing to do with relationship, sex or committment. It has everything to do with taxes and health benefits.

I still believe in the sanctity of marriage, just not the legality of it.

Steph,

Here is an interesting, rather scholarly argument by Jeanne Ouellette. http://www.rakemag.com/stories/printable.aspx?itemID=13941&catID=146&SelectCatID=146

She investigates, and concludes that the reason marriage as an intstitution is on the rocks is … of all things … love.

Only after love became a reason to marry, rather than money and such, did marriage begin to decline in importance.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on the article.

;-)

The problem is the uptight folks who live on the North American continent. Before no fault divorces appeared in the 60s and 70s many jurisdictions required “cause” for a divorce. In Georgia causes are: Adultery (includes heterosexual and homosexual relations), desertion (for at least a year), mental or physical cruel treatment, marriage between persons who are too closely related, mental incapacity at the time of marriage, impotency at the time of marriage, force or fraud in obtaining the marriage, pregnancy of the wife unknown to the husband at the time of the marriage, conviction and imprisonment for certain crimes, habitual intoxication or drug addiction, and mental illness.

Before divorces were easy to obtain people stuck it out getting there physical and emotional needs met outside of the marital union. Partners were more tolerant of such behavior (because there wasn’t an easy out). Divorce rates are high now because you spend more time in front of a judge to plead not guilty to a traffic ticket than you do to get a divorce (or that was my experience). It is an unintended consequence of the social engineering experiment of a “no fault” divorce.

I don’t believe the institution is broken, I think we as a society are broken.