I don't think it's quite a roulette wheel though. This guy claims he can predict, with great accuracy, which couples will get divorced after observing them argue for three minutes. And I remember some other shrink type saying that he could tell by the way couples touch each other whether they're likely to divorce. But, of course, there are always surprises.
I dunno, ogged. Everyone seems to go through a really rough patch, often due to exogenous factors, and it's at that stage that it seems to look like a roulette wheel to me. Some soldier through, and some don't, but from the outside, hearing about some of this stuff, it looks the same to me.
I was the first one in my circle of friends to get married, the first one to have a kid, the first one to get divorced. Since then, I've been a shoulder for a huge number of friends whose marriages fell apart. Some weren't at all surprising, some were total shocks. I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble. Of all my friends who got married in the 90s, only two couples are left standing and one of them went through a year-long separation before pulling it back together.
He looked rough
I had just about the friendliest, most civil divorce imaginable, and I still had days where I (quite literally) thought I might die from heartbreak. I lost 30 pounds in six weeks because I simply couldn't bring myself to eat anything. I showed up to work, but spent days at a time doing nothing but writing despairing emails to friends and then reading them over and over again.
The only thing I can imagine that would have been worse would be having a child die, and I don't have any idea how those parents ever put themselves back together again.
10: I can't decide which would be worse. I've a friend who went through a long bad period with his wife, and they ended up staying together. Gawd, from the outside it looked like one long, multi-year, hell.
In grad school I had a friend go through a divorce, and he went through the same sort of thing. Lost a lot of weight, started looking haggard all the time, was obviously in rough shape. It was nice to see him get a little plump afterwards.
I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble.
I hear you. I see serious fault lines in all my close friends' relationships.
The year leading up to my divorce was hell on earth: I spent that year studying in Cairo, and the distance from my husband allowed me to see that something in my life was horribly, horribly wrong, but I wasn't thnking that divorce was inevitable. I came home and a week later we separated; about a week after that I was more or less fine, and the whole thing was totally amicable.
We didn't have kids, which makes it all so much easier. With kids involved, it's a whole other level of complication and heartache.
Strangely, the only person I'm close to who's divorced was my sister, who married the father of her first child when she (the baby) was 2. No one was surprised when it broke up a year later. Oh, and my good English friend, who just got divorced last year. It was awful for him, but in a way I wasn't surprised about that one, either.
But all my girl friends who got married have stayed married so far.
15: Actually, I saw it as an upside at the time. I was about 25 pounds over to start with. But even though I was at what is probably my optimal weight, losing it in that fashion doesn't make you look healthy. At all.
In my family 6 people have scored 4 divorces and 3 intact marriages, of which one is seemingly happy. My "no marriages - no relationships" policy is really just for me, but when people are being grumbly I run it past them. Usually they don't want medicine that strong.
My neighbor has been married 3 times, really 4, and he's not looking for #5.
I had just about the friendliest, most civil divorce imaginable, and I still had days where I (quite literally) thought I might die from heartbreak. I lost 30 pounds in six weeks because I simply couldn't bring myself to eat anything. I showed up to work, but spent days at a time doing nothing but writing despairing emails to friends and then reading them over and over again.
Exactly the same thing happened to me when I split up with someone with whom I'd been living for 4 years: not actual divorce, as such, obviously but I imagine it feels the same. Lost a ton of weight really quickly.
It totally sucks. Luckily, within two or three months I felt pretty much back to normal.
I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble.
I am astounded by all the divorces around me, as people hit their early thirties. I could understand if the divorcing couples married ridiculously young. but these people married out of undergrad. Are they so different now? If the marriage didn't involve abuse, why do they think another person will be better than someone they have been in love with already? Why are they so willing to risk solitude (which is a fine choice for some, but I bet more lonely and demanding than people who have been coupled for many years remember)?
I have to remind myself that I can't know what it is like inside a marriage in general and their marriage in particular, otherwise I end up pissed that they are ending something I want so fucking badly.
I lost 30 pounds in six weeks
35 pounds in a couple months, when the seven-year ex decided not to marry me.
I'm pretty sure that the break-up with the five-year ex would have resulted in significant weight gain had I not been extremely hawkish about it. Sadness or depression makes my metabolism slow to a crawl, and cooking goes right out the window.
Two divorces should be the max. After the second divorce people should be denied marriage licenses.
These sound like words of wisdom, but there are models to the contrary. My dad married twice before he married my mom, and they're still happily married with three children to show for it.
Two divorces should be the max. After the second divorce people should be denied marriage licenses.
I'm on my third marriage. It has lasted over 13 years now. So things can work out. On the other hand, there certainly are plenty of days when I think 19 gets it exactly right. What are you gonna do?
The combination of despair, anger and hopelessness generated by divorce is difficult to overcome. I did it only by appreciating the absurdity of my situation: giving up everything was not enough, I had to want to give it up.
That Buddhism class in college came in handy after all.
Science says that Armsmasher should never have been born.
Around here (Lake Wobegon) no one ever used to get divorced. People didn't expect to be rich, either, and they didn't believe they deserved much. Marriages were conventions and duties, not ways toward happiness. Everyone preferred happiness, but no one demanded it, and if things got rough the whole town worked together to save the marriage.
Beyond not being happy per se, among hip folk an unhappy marriage is a kind of failure or abnormality. "I deserve more than this". This makes the unhappiness worse. If people realized that happiness is not what marriages are normally about, and that it's perfectly normal and OK to be unhappily married, then at least the surplus unhappiness derived from perceived failure and abnormality would be much less. No one gets down on themself if they buy a losing lottery ticket -- losing lottery tickets are the rule.
Twenty years ago, I was honestly predicting many more divorces in my extended family...a half dozen blood aunts and uncles, a couple dozen cousins...that didn't happen. Different era and environment, of course. Upper mid-west, lower-middle to middle-class.
I once told a friend that the ultimate value I grew up with, the purpose and mark of a successful life, was ensuring that your grandkids did not divorce. Money and other achievement was considered a vice that cut into family time. Most weekends, many evenings, were spent within the extended family as I grewup. Takes a village to preserve a marriage.
My parents got divorced. I left all that behind twenty years ago. But all my cousin's children live within fifty miles of each other.
I did it only by appreciating the absurdity of my situation
I pulled out of my tailspin through the time-honored tradition of the ill-advised rebound relationship (TheCrazyBlonde™). It does work to stop the overt manifestations of the depression but, of course, you're still squarely in the middle of CrazyTime even if it feels all better and in no condition to hold up your end of a relationship properly. Also, anybody that finds you an attractive prospect while you're in that state should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
I have a tendency to look at people getting married and be convinced they're all nuts -- so many of the people I know seem to have gotten married when they already knew they had real problems. I can't imagine why people do that.
Emerson's remarks about happiness in marriage seem exactly right. The sense of entitlement in this country has no bounds. Next, we're going to have people putting up their kids for adoption when they turn out to be sarcastic and acne-pocked in their teenage years.
Labs, I think it'd be best for you to wait to get married until after you're tenured. That way, you aren't in danger of losing your job due to the post-divorce depression.
Eh. I don't know that we're entitled to be happy, but I'm glad that we generally believe we're not required to live an unhappy life whose only end is to comfort our community with our conformity.
No divorces in my family tree. They do have that sort of 'a good marriage is one that stays together' mentality, so a fair amount of miserable people married, but no divorces.
This is something that I've wondered about. As a kid, divorce seemed pretty normal -- lots of people's parents were divorced, mine weren't but I thought they probably should have been, it was an ordinary part of life. As a married adult, and looking at friends getting divorced, it seems much less normal and much more like having your liver ripped out by wild dogs. I don't understand why people put themselves in positions where it happens -- I would think that they would protect themselves better than that, either staying single in the first place, or managing to stay married.
I'm more on SCMT's side. You don't have to live with a losing lottery ticket day in and day out. People should have reasonable expectations of their marriages, but it doesn't mean resigning themselves to unhappiness in the marriage.
I also think that it's reasonable to expect a full-time job to yield a middle-class standard of living, for values of "middle class" that don't include "subject to estate tax." Better than Wal-Mart jobs, anyway.
(The first divorce I know of in my family was I think four generations before me, when my great^n-grandfather came to the U.S. and his mother-in-law told his wife [my great^n-grandmother] not to go with him because she'd be his slave.)
"Next, we're going to have people putting up their kids for adoption when they turn out to be sarcastic and acne-pocked in their teenage years."
There's an opening there for a political entrepreneur: state foster homes for incorrigible kids from 12 up. Uniforms, gruel, hard work, and prayer, (with the option for unbelievers of solitary confinement in a dark room shackled to the floor).
37--Conversely, when I was young, I thought that divorce was the most horrible thing that could happen to a family and didn't understand how people could be so stupid and immoral as to allow it to happen. Now, I think it's more normal, and, while heartbreaking, it doesn't need to be as horrible as many people make it.
The only sad thing about my divorce was that I spent seven years being married. Every day I give thanks that I will never again get yelled at for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste.
I don't understand why people put themselves in positions where it happens
This sounds really, really callous when I look at it, and I didn't mean it that way. I can completely understand not being able to avoid divorce at some point -- what confuses me more is that the prospect doesn't scare people away from marriage, or generally seem like more of a worry to people than it is.
I'm 21, and my parents, in their 40s, are finally getting a divorce after about 20-21 years married. (I'm the oldest.) It was unhappy pretty much from the time I was born. I gather I was the cause of much of the unhappiness (unwanted and always resented by my father, very wanted by my mother). I see the divorce as a very good thing, and while I haven't been too involved (don't live around my parents anymore) it hasn't seemed like a very bad process for either of them. My perspective may not be completely shared by my parents or brothers, though.
43- Everyone thinks they are the exception, that's why. All those other people are married to knob ends, but I am marrying a wonderful person who will never hurt my feelings or eat icing straight out of the can! It's part of all the stupid gauzy expectations we drape around it.
Hrm. Mine followed a similar pattern (well, ten years later. I'm younger than my sister, and they waited until I was 23 or so, so they were married twenty-seven years.) While at the time I thought it was the best thing for them, ten years later they really haven't bounced back all that much. Dad's pretty happy, but in a weird monastic kind of way -- he lives in a house with basically no furniture in it. Mom, who wanted out of the marriage much more, really isn't very happy at all.
But they probably would have been less happy had they stayed together.
43--I know (and have dated) a lot of children of divorced parents; they seem to be rather leery of marriage. I think, however, that there were some statistical findings showing that they got married pretty much as often as children of parents who stayed together.
What I'm worried about is that although I have the long-suffering values that Emerson and Jackmormon describe, many other people don't -- thus I could end up doing all this work to keep together a relationship with some woman with a hugely exaggerated sense of entitlement and still end up divorced simply because of her ridiculous expectations. Surely I deserve better than that!
51: Yes, Kotsko, it's important to get it on the record now that any future divorce should be considered the fault of that spoiled bitch you'll marry sometime in the future.
Wow. This discussion is doing nothing for my desire to get married, for the first time or ever. Not that it was that positive anyway; I think I'm definitely one of the leery-of-marriage types. It's going to have to do a serious brainwashing job on me to think that it's a good idea.
My parents and their siblings are 7 people, with at least 8 divorces among them (Only one person got married and stayed that way. Another never married, but was in a long-term partnership, had a kid, and may be undergoing a not-divorce from his not-marriage now that the kid is in college). My parents divorced when I was 17, after a few years of obvious unhappiness. And my father's parents themselves divorced when he was a kid, back in the 1950s.
Among my friends, I have seen many more divorces than "successful" marriages, and they've only been seriously at it for perhaps five years.
Mismatched ideas about what marriage represents is surely a contributing factor in divorces. Which is why you talk a lot about it with your partner, to see if your values are reconcilable, before you get married.
I'm watching the marriage of one of my friends break up over precisely this sort of problem. She's from a similar background as mine, he's very much not (broken family that he rejected to immigrate to the US). She did all of the work to keep it together, and now that she's sick of trying so hard, I think it's just about over. Just about everyone saw this coming. But she doesn't regret having gotten married, and of course there aren't any kids, so I can't say they were wrong to have given it a shot, even though the odds were against them.
Singledom is a perfectly ducky yet often overlooked option for people.
Why are they so willing to risk solitude (which is a fine choice for some, but I bet more lonely and demanding than people who have been coupled for many years remember)?
I've always kept a diary, and it became very clear in re-reading them recently that over my lifetime I've been much happier single. My relationships have not been particularly bad and the breakups were usually pretty amicable, but still.
My only concern is who will check in on me when I'm old and feeble.
My dog genuinely enjoys singing along to The Darkness's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." He'll start howling if he hears even the first intro guitar riff. Slays at parties with that trick. The point being, someone around these parts believes.
53: Am I wrong to think that female orgasm requires clitoral stimulation and that a cock is not the ideal instrument for doing that?
Also, my comment wasn't necessarily misogynistic -- most men of my social class are horribly spoiled as well (other than me). It's just that I am primarily in the market for marrying a woman, since I want to conform to God's perfect will for my life.
Which is why you talk a lot about it with your partner, to see if your values are reconcilable, before you get married.
I'm not sure I believe that. My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time. Or, if you do, you end up agreeing with your partner with the best and most honest intentions, only to find out seven years down the road that you really don't agree with her.
My maternal grandparents were divorced before I knew them; grandma was remarried and I thought of her husband as grandpa; grandpa was never remarried but had a weirdish relationship with his live-in nurse the entire time I knew him. Paternal grandparents remained married until grandpa passed on.
Parents are still married. In their generation there are 7 kids, all but one of whom are currently married, between them 5 divorces but 3 of those are my mom's serially-married brother.
In my generation, 4 kids, 3 are married, no divorces although my kid brother and his wife were separated for a couple of months. They are back together and seem to be doing really well. In my crowd of friends, the only person who got married before I did got divorced and remarried; and the person who got married after I did is back together after a longish separation. Others never married.
My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time.
True. In pre-marriage discussions, no one ever says, "After we've been married a while, I intend to have recurring episodes of deep depression which will involve me drawing the curtains shut and not leaving the bedroom for months on end. Are you sure you're okay with that?"
Dad's pretty happy, but in a weird monastic kind of way -- he lives in a house with basically no furniture in it. Mom, who wanted out of the marriage much more, really isn't very happy at all.
LB, let me level inappropriate queries in public. Why did they bother going through a divorce? Couldn't they just kind of stake out their territory in some kind of compromise?
My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time.
This is true, of course, but you can improve your odds by talking about as many of the obvious factors as possible: money, religion, kids, work, etc.
This is part of why I'm actively in favor of cohabitating before marriage, to work out some of the things that otherwise may crop up once you're bound together.
Brain fart: perhaps the rate of divorce is higher because people are delaying chldren and so there's no 'think of the children' consideration.
A conservative evangelical friend of mine thinks that the divorce rate is high among his contemporaries because many of them get married while young and in love so they don't have pre-marital sex. Knows quite a few of married-at-20, divorced-at-26 types.
66 - See, I'm against cohabitating before marriage because you can end up going into "make it work" mode prematurely when you should have just broken up. Not living together makes continuing the relationship more of a conscious choice, and not just the easier default option, which I think is important when you're dating.
"My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time."
I wonder if a good pre-marriage compatibility checklist would help with this. Surely many of the things that people don't talk about, they don't talk about because they didn't think of it beforehand, because they didn't have the foresight. But if it were brought up it might be something that could be addressed beforehand. While there are always things that can seriously strain and break relationships that can't be foreseen (your checklist couldn't ask "Will either of you develop a drug addiction or discover that you have a chronic illness?") there are plenty of things that can.
As a corollary, people who don't have such a checklist per se, but who know a lot about themselves and relationships, can do a better job of predicting how well their marriage might go, and thus avoid bad matches. If marriage counselors can do it, so can others. And I think people who are better at relating honestly and resolving conflict have very increased chances of staying happily married.
For instance, the checklist could include "Do either of you have any history of depression? How did you cope with that depression?" People who have never been depressed by the time they're 25 or older are much less likely to ever be depressed.
68 - Well, sure, I don't think you should go from third date to moving in together, but I don't see how the "make it work" pressure would any worse when living together than when married, and in fact I expect it would be less.
Moving in together is definitely a big step, and not to be undertaken lightly, because it's painful and expensive to extricate yourself, but it's somewhat less painful and expensive than divorce.
Apo, you're unusual in that the very sight of your memeber from across the room can bring a woman to orgasm. Or a man of appropriate sexuality.
But tell everyone about the time in the farmer's market when you were briefly mistaken for ahttp://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:hB5zwJ1wW6IyDM:troyandgay.com/pix/Geoduck06240520001.jpg">geoduck
no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time
Because, among other things, people change. You can talk all you like at twenty-five, but at thirty-five, you'll be different people.
And another thing. The marriage issue is complicated by the delaying of what we can call economic or professional maturity. Now that college education is understood to be necessary for more jobs, people often are still preparing for life until the age of 21. For those of us with post-graduate degrees, we're doing it till our mid-twenties. For those of us in careers with long apprenticeships, like tenure-track academics or big-firm lawyers, we're still making professional progress into our mid- to late-30s.
In other words, it's getting to be later and late in life that you look up and say, Oh. This is my life, for the next n decades. Then I'll retire, then I'll die. And if you got married sometime before then---which is reasonable to do, considering how late it now comes for a lot of people---your marriage is going to get inflected by that realization, but seriously.
I'm imagining the divorce settlement: "You weren't charitable according to this set of rules that we mapped out at age 20!"
I'm sorry. It was just hanging there.
Seriously, though, I think pre-marital counselling is wise, but I'm not sure of the success of a rigorous checklist. (And really, who is going to break up with the love of their life because she was depressed before they met?)
None of the minor factors which lead to a divorce are in and of themselves obvious dealbreakers (setting aside abuse,e.g.) or the sort of thing one is going to know in advance. Depression *can* pop up later in life, but so can lots of other, minor annoying habits, and I get the sense that most marriages collapse not due to one big thing but under the weight of small daily annoyances.
69: My wife and I had exactly such a checklist, and we scored off the charts, compatabililty-wise. Like 99 percent. Our marriage has been less rosy than that would have led us to believe (though we've made it work for six years). People and situations change, especially when kids enter the picture.
"Seriously, though, I think pre-marital counselling is wise, but I'm not sure of the success of a rigorous checklist"
First, I meant it to be a checklist of things to make sure that you know and have talked about with your partner, to make sure you've covered as much ground as you need to before committing to marriage, not a list of requirements by any stretch. Second, yes, by the time a couple starts to talk about marriage, they're likely to be too infatuated to be in the emotional state where they could call things off if some major incompatibility comes up. But it'd be better than nothing.
And counselling would be good, but I imagine a lot of people would say "What, we're not even married yet and you want marriage counseling?" There's a bit of a stigma to that sort of thing still, because of the association with mental illness and therapy.
Nobody ever realizes how big the changes involved in childraising really are. It's impossible to prepare for. It's probably only easy for already-domestic women who go from taking care of their younger siblings and cousins to taking care of their own child, which is probably easier.
As for marriage, it's sort of metaphysical. What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married? There must be something, or else they wouldn't do it. But often, whatever the new thing is (long-term thinking? "getting serious"? taking for granted? being treated as a couple by everyone?) makes things worse, and the couple breaks up.
Also, I fully accept "things change", and I don't really think a checklist could even start to help with that. Though, I imagine there could be a checklist of things you could evaluate *yourself* with, that would give you an estimation of how likely you are to want to change directions in life at some point, rather than sticking to one path. And if you're the wandering type, you might want to consider not marrying, or at least not having kids.
To continue the train of thought I started in 64, if anyone were to ask a question like that in a pre-marriage talk, the answer would likely be "Yes, of course! I'll love you no matter what." Because you're young and in love and think you can survive anything. And you know what? Maybe you can. Maybe you can't. The only way to find out is to go through it.
For the curious, the depression example in 64 is true to life. And we are still married.
82: Granted. I wonder how this would be affected by living in a tight community of people, where you really get to see up close how friends grow up and deal with marriage. In this situation (which seems to be pretty rare) you might have a better idea what marriage and childrearing is really about.
Of course, being in love, as a factor of confusion, makes marriages more likely while making them less bearable once the euphoria wears off.
Trivia: Blue states like NJ, NY, and Massachusetts have lower divorce rates than the Red states where people talk family values. Remember, there's nothing hotter than a Christian chick, especially if her marriage isn't working.
84: Though, I imagine there could be a checklist of things you could evaluate *yourself* with, that would give you an estimation of how likely you are to want to change directions in life at some point, rather than sticking to one path.
I don't see how the "make it work" pressure would any worse when living together than when married, and in fact I expect it would be less.
The pressure to make it work isn't so much less (or worse), because cohabitation brings about strong commitments like marriage. But the bond implied by cohabitation is less strong than that of marriage, so the arrangement may be entered into with less apprehension or consideration. Nearly every couple I know who is currently living together and had been considering marriage is now not very much interested in staying a couple but have this obligation to one another.
In part the cohabitation makes couples realize more quickly whether they are truly suited for one another, but I'm not sure the arrangement doesn't also contribute pressure to problems that might resolve naturally with some space. I'm nearly convinced that marriages would work better without the cohabitation part.
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
Pretty much nothing in our case. She'd just defended, I was entering my third year of law school. We'd deferred probably because of her mother's death when we'd been together two years. I can remember talking about marriage and children and religion, abstractly of course, on our first date. I had an overwhelming sense of shared values very early in our relationship.
I have no idea how to turn any of my marital experiences into advice; from that first date, my relationship with her has been the most important thing in my life, I can say that without hesitation.
This was something I was not prepared for at all. There are all kinds of ways marriage changes your life that are social and that have nothing to do with your partner's personality.
I have friends who are marrying men who are totally unsuitable for them, but because my friends want kids really badly (they're in their mid-thirties), they're willing to overlook some heavy-duty potential problems.
Re: pre-marriage counseling: I'm skeptical that many couples go for pre-marriage counseling and then decide, as a result of that counseling, that maybe they weren't ready to tie the knot.
Can a gay Episcopalian priest properly counsel a heterosexual couple?
Probably about as well as a celibate Catholic priest can counsel a heterosexual couple.
pdf, I'm not undervaluing contemplation, but most of my friends are in the three-four year points in their marriages and are undergoing more stress than they could have predicted. One couple's struggled with infertility; another, with his residency and how he's never home and she's left with the new baby; another with serious illness. They're all making it, more or less, but it's not the sort of thing they could have evaluated when they decided to get married.
You can talk all you like at twenty-five, but at thirty-five, you'll be different people.
This, absolutely. I know it totally rankles folks in their mid-twenties to hear that they can't have any idea what they will or won't desire a decade in the future, but it's true true true. I tell anybody who asks that getting married before your thirties is a terribly risky proposition. Though perhaps when I'm 45, I'll say the same thing about 35.
As the child of a third marriage, according to the rules established here Armsmasher should never have born, so he has no standing to testify. Purge the record.
We got married on a bit of a whim really - we'd known each other, not well, for a few months, and then had been together for about a month when we decided. Got married a couple of months later. And 10 1/2 years later we constantly surprise ourselves with just how similarly we think about things, and how similar our tastes are. Roulette indeed.
My parents divorced, and then remarried each other. My brother and I both think we came through that with a rather optimistic view of marriage. His marriage ended after about 4 years (no kids) and his view may have changed now!
Children though - I think it takes far far longer than most people think to be back to 'normal' after a baby arrives. Most people seem to act as if about 6 months is long enough to become accustomed to this new lifestyle, whereas it's probably more like 2 or 3 years.
Though perhaps when I'm 45, I'll say the same thing about 35.
Agree with this (and slol's point) entirely. People change, especially as circumstances change (or don't). There isn't, I don't think, an "authentic" you that is unceasing in its existence. Or if there is, it's a trivial you, and won't necessarily be the deciding factor.
I really do think successful long-term marriages just actually do take a commitment to place the marriage above one's own happiness (by both partners). I don't really think ultra-LT relationships "work" in a world in which individual happiness is the highest value. You (meaing of course both partners) have to believe that the maintenance of the relationship has some independant value above that of your own personal satisfaction. Which is of course not how we like think of relationships. Perhaps I am unduly cynical, though. Perhaps this actually just says something bad about my own marriage, I don't know.
65: LB, let me level inappropriate queries in public. Why did they bother going through a divorce? Couldn't they just kind of stake out their territory in some kind of compromise?
Actually, they're not divorced, they just live apart and don't speak to each other. Neither one has showed any particular interest in remarrying, or in interacting socially with members of the opposite sex, and the hassle of splitting up assets and no longer being covered by each other's medical plans seems not worth it.
Re: pre-marriage counseling: I'm skeptical that many couples go for pre-marriage counseling and then decide, as a result of that counseling, that maybe they weren't ready to tie the knot.
Case in point: the pre-marriage counselor my wife and I saw told us that we failed all the tests he gave us, that he had more serious concerns about our relationship than any of he had ever advised in his decades of pre-marital counseling, and that he strongly advised us to reconsider what we were doing. This made my now-wife (then-fiance) cry a lot but otherwise had no effect on our wedding plans. (It might have been a factor had we heard this report early on in our engagement, but this was only a month or so before the wedding and momentum was strong.)
they just live apart and don't speak to each other
But don't things like having the same health insurance and commonly held assets necessitate some minimal communication? Do they use an intermediary (I'm looking at you)?
104: Oh, they don't absolutely not speak (they both came over for cake yesterday) but they manage not to communicate much. Taxes involve two separate visits to the same accountant, and so forth.
My wife used to see a therapist who told her -- shortly after we'd moved in together, not that long before we got married -- to dump me because our relationship was not as wonderfully romantic 24/7 as that of the main characters in Titanic, which she (the therapist) had recently seen.
This woman was licensed and well over 13 years old.
My wife ditched her therapist on grounds of unbelievable idiocy, and we've done pretty well since then, marriage-wise, considering.
No need to abort me, John Emerson—I'll be the first to tell you that my opinions on the matter should be taken with a grain of salt. None of my close friends are married and none seem likely to be any time soon, for economic reasons relating to slol's 76 and for the fact that most men I know are just simply focused on the upcoming NCAA season.
I hate that I'm apparently giving the impression of being idealistic about the prospects of being able to get into and maintain happy, working, marriages over long periods of time. I'm just bringing up things that can decrease the uncertainty some. Geez, I'm someone who thinks that time-limited commitments would be a good alternative to marriage for most people.
109 -- early in my marriage I briefly saw a (female) therapist who advised me, among other things, to visit a sex worker because I was having issues at home. One of a long string of therapists I have not gotten much good out of. (Hey Bitch and Tia, y'all persuaded me -- I am having another go at it starting next week.)
I like the points made by Brock, but I might want to put them differently, and maybe more positively. There is just an incredible natural pull to become a monster of self-regard and egoism; it’s a tough fight and one that it is easy (for me at least) not just to lose, but to fail to realize one needs to be fighting. Being in a relationship raises the stakes of that battle. So rather than stipulating an opposition between “your happiness” and “marriage," I would rather say “your egoism” and “who you want to be” are in conflict, and that a marriage can increase the collateral damage.
I believe he was just blindly assuming, for comic effect, that you had followed the therapist's instructions. (Did she give you a referral to a reputable sex worker, or just tell you to drive around down by the Lincoln Tunnel?) But this comment belongs on Standpipe's joke-explaining blog.
I thought that Smasher was reading Clownae Kid's comment as saying that Bitch and Tia had persuaded him to try going to see a sex worker and that he had an appointment to see one next week.
This [101] is absolutely correct: "the maintenance of the relationship has some independant value above that of your own personal satisfaction."
But this is not universally true: "a commitment to place the marriage above one's own happiness (by both partners)."
The marital relationship must be balanced with the individual's role as "self," as mother/father, as daughter/son etc. Some may find that the marriage is above all, but others may not. Spouses who assess the balance in an uncompatible fashion will get divorced.
Was it really that cryptic? It was clear to me that Tia and B had convinced Clownæ to see a shrink again, especially since, you know, I read this blog and remember the thread in quesion, but it's funnier to presume they had convinced Clownæ to give the sex worker another try. Now that I've solved that mystery, I'll ban myself on my way out.
119 and 125 are better than 101, I think. I didn't mean to be quite so negative -- I am (happily) married after all. I plead exhaustion as an excuse for the tone. Also, for all the typos.
In his capacity as a clergyman, my grandfather did a lot of pre-marital discussions, and he apparently told his charges that they'd be all right as long as they loved God more than each other. I take this to be in line with what baa and Brock are saying.
(This is part of why the breakdown of our traditions leads to misery. I will now renew my subscription to National Review.)
Actually, on second thought, 119 and 125 are both slightly too positive. It's not just balancing roles, and fighting your inner self, it's really about recognizing that you are always going to be happy. Long-term, sure, but in shorter-term periods (which can be quite lengthy), there will be times when you will know (quite correctly) that you'd be happier out of the relationship. And when that LT vision starts to get hazy and uncertain and the ST circumstances are especially difficult, it gets tough.
Hey, if you're having trouble getting the baby to sleep, have you got a baby sling? Most of the people you'll find raving about them are annoying more-attachment-parenting-than-thou types who sound as if putting the baby down ever will cause brain damage, so they suck, but slings are great. It's much easier to get the kid in and out than with one of the buckled types of carriers, so you don't wake them up getting them out, and walking briskly around with the baby in the sling will put almost any baby to sleep. You should really get one, if you don't have one already.
129 should say you *aren't* always going to be happy. Jesus I'm being incoherent. Also, 128 in some sense gets it exactly rights, although I'm not sure it's necessary to bring God into the picture.
131 -- LB, thanks very much for the tip. We have a sling, in which the baby sleeps great if we are up and walking around. Which doesn't make for a very restful night. Still, it is a very nice tool and I appreciate the advice.
Actually, last night went pretty well. I think he's been a bit difficult b/c a bit premature, but hopefully things will improve.
My mother's more morbid take on the marriage advice thing is that you should consider how you would feel if the person you want to marry was suddenly involved in a horrible accident and became incapacitated and you had to become their caretaker for the rest of their life, and to consider whether they would do the same for you.
126 is what I thought you meant Armsmasher. I was only half explaining, because I didn't want to explain away the whole joke. I knew you knew and all that. I think I should rename myself Cryptic BG.
This is true, of course, and requires no NR subscription. The problem is, we've dissolved all these old traditions and replaced them with nothing new, except the ideal of personal gratification, which is an empty goal. Had we replaced out old traditions with an ideal of community, or some other social good that transcended the individual, we would have found equal happiness. Instead, we are all Thatcherites now.
"Do you think it would be less painful a split if, when the contract expires, one partner refuses to renew it even though the other one wants to?"
I don't want to get beat up about the "contract" phrasing, so I'd call it a promise.
If it made things any less painful, it'd be because having to consciously renew one's commitment periodically would keep building resentment or waning interest in one partner from being concealed so easily from the other, and so it'd force change sooner after a problem started.
But that kind of situation is certainly very painful, and I doubt time-limited commitments would help any with the emotional aspects. (Though they could help by separating financial/habitation related issues into separate commitments.)
Did The True and Only Heaven make an Emerson reader out of you?
No, I went through an Emerson phase as a teenager, and did not meet T&OH until I was in college.
I think ideally, one has a teenage Emerson phase ("must be a nonconformist," woo-hoo!) then a grown-up anti-Emerson phase (too many damn nonconformists messing up my lawn), then a mature appreciation of Emerson's talents within his actual milieu.
Yes, that has always been a problem. And though not explicitly addressed, Chapman, who was once described as a "belated abolitionist" may have gotten some of his animous from that.
Early 20th C canonizers, like Brooks and Mumford, had the sense to see that the New England trad became irrelevant in the 1860s.
I didn't mean late writings, but a mature understanding of his writings, such as you referred to and Lasch is very affecting in describing as a revelation to him.
Re. marriage, honestly, I think if I had to do it again, I wouldn't. Which is not a statement on the success of my marriage, but rather an expression of how I now understand the institution. I think that the *primary* advantage of marriage on an emotional level (aside from legal crap like joint property and visiting rights and taxes and health insurance and so forth) is that, for me at least, there is a sense of firm committment there that wasn't without it. Which is, in fact, why I got married--between Mr. B.'s then-job and my own career goals, I didn't think we'd stay together without that kind of committment.
On the other hand, I think it's wrong that I feel that way; that I wouldn't feel that kind of committment without the institution. And there seem to me to be a lot of things wrong with the institution, mostly things that have to do with social expectations, legal restrictions, and so forth. Butu also some that, like the committment thing, I think are psychological/emotional associations that aren't inherent in marriage, but are damn damn hard to separate from it. I would like to be able to feel the committment without being caught in the destructive bullshit. I honestly think that part of what makes marriage so difficult is all the unarticulated and unrealized stuff we (the people in the marriage, mostly, but also their friends and relations) think it means, or is supposed to mean.
Like for instance, the idea (in this thread) that the alternative to marriage is being single. This is manifestly untrue, and all the unmarried people here have surely been part of a couple at some point, or are now. But we still think that "not married" = "single," even when our own experience tells us otherwise.
But we still think that "not married" = "single," even when our own experience tells us otherwise.
'We' there means Americans, mostly, doesn't it? Asilon laughed at me for assuming she was married because she had kids a while back: in the US, controlling for class, that's a pretty safe assumption, but in the UK and Europe it isn't any more. Makes you wonder if it really is all about the social safety net.
I was never legally married. We had the intention of staying together, but it was too hard, and since we shared custody of the kid, we never really got separated. Not getting married saved us certain legal costs, and that's it. The other problems are about the same. I call it an unhapp marriage.
At my early age, I've been in one, fairly short coupleish kind of relationship. Cohabitation wasn't involved, but it almost was. I'm currently searching for another, but I'm really bad at said searching, so I'm not making a lot of progress.
160: I doubt more than one in ten people over twenty-five have never been in such a relationship.
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
You gt much nicer silverware.
And one's mother stops saying 'He'll never buy the cow if he can get the milk for free'.
The Biophysicist & I have been together in non-marital bliss for 14 years. If we got married, we'd take a financial hit. Our health insurance plan covers domestic partners, we've had our children, we have complementary tattoos and good estate plans. We also have all the kitchen appliances that will fit and a lot of silverware. If we thought there'd be a chance that we'd get this as a gift we might bother with the poofy dress and groom's attire and get hitched.
Marriage is a step I would no longer take, but complementary tattoos a step beyond that. Removing tattoos is more painful than divorce, at least short-term, and pretty expensive too,
164: Probably not. PK is angling for cake, but Mr. B. doesn't care for it.
Actually, yesterday, during the angling, PK said, "Mama, would you rather bake cake for someone you're a little annoyed with right now, or for the little grunty who loves you best?" (I think Mr. B. and I were arguing mildly over some packing-related shit, and around here elementary-aged kids are called "grunties.") Totally cracked his father up.
165: I knew a guy, once, who married a tattoo artist... the wedding was preceded by two tattoos: one a chest-sized skeletal bride and groom with their names, surrounded by a ring of fire... the other a shoulder-to-elbow glow-in-the-dark succubus with a likeness of his wife's face.
In his capacity as a clergyman, my grandfather did a lot of pre-marital discussions, and he apparently told his charges that they'd be all right as long as they loved God more than each other.
It certainly gets you lasting marriages, but of the sort where people piously grumble that their commitment was to God, not to you.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to admit divorce as an evil absent the horrible side-effects. It's kind of like saying that women shouldn't work because if they have the financial ability to walk out of a bad marriage situation they will rather than grimly making it work (the abuse isn't really that bad, and sometimes we go dancing!)
It's probably the best out of a lot of alternatives, and while in theory it might be better if everyone took the commitment more seriously, I think that just means that people stay in abusive or unhealthy relationships longer than they should, and I'm not sure that's worth moderately unpleasant people working out their differences and staying together.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to admit divorce as an evil absent the horrible side-effects.
Sure, absent the horrible side-effects, nothing's all that bad. I don't favor efforts to make divorce more difficult -- it's certainly preferable to legally compelling people to remain in bad marriages -- but it's still an awful thing to have happen to you.
I understand. I'm just not sure I don't prefer, absent the legal question, of a cultural narrative saying 'your commitment above all else.' I dunno. I'm kind of anti-marriage at the moment, because it's scary to think that of me and my friends, most of their marriages aren't going to make it.
Oh, no-fault divorce is totally a good thing. But the actual experience of a divorce, I'm sure, is absolutely excruciating, even without kids in the mix.
(Unless you're a sociopath or a narcissist, in which case in might not be that bad for you, but probably worse for your partner. How often do sociopaths marry? Probably not often.)
I really am in favor of divorce. Just not marriage, in most cases. (But how can you have divorce without marriage? asks the logician. If we do not first sin, how can we receive forgiveness?)
"Yes, of course! I'll love you no matter what." Because you're young and in love and think you can survive anything. And you know what? Maybe you can.
The safe bet is, "no you can't". Some things should just be assumed to be insurmountable. So very much of it is simply divergent expectations. Of course some things can't be anticipated, but some rather major ones can.
Things like sex are big, but the one that I see getting ignored is money. Money is huge. If your partner has issues with money that you find irresponsible, that should rule them out as a spouse. Because that frustration will be magnified tenfold when married. Not to mention, it can screw up your life for years to come. My wife and I were casual friends with a couple, and we watched the husband drive them into bankruptcy. It was seriously ugly to watch. They're divorced now, and the wife's finances are ruined because her husband was a nutjob.
That's always been what I've been looking for: Can I see myself sharing a checkbook with this woman?
The one person I've dated about whom I would've unambiguously answered yes to that question was, coincidentally, wrong for me in virtually every possible way. But I'm optimistic.
190 -- depends on the wedding, and on the house. You could have one of Becks' co-worker's hundred-grand relandscape-the-back-yard-and-then-rent-a-catering-hall marriages, and then move to one of Emerson's North Dakota houses to which they pay you to assume title.
198: I think that that book is about as powerful as most pop psychology. Haven't read it, though, but so little psychology of that type is any good that i feel justified. Those books are like diet books.
198: Well, I think there are certain aspects about the way we approach relationships, and the attitude we have toward people in general, that are much less determined by genes than most other aspects of our personalities, and much more determined by experiences from birth to age 6-8, which is generally before children start to spend more time with their peer group than their parents. And these tend to be the ways that people get fucked up the most.
I like to thank my mother that her alternating hands-off/smothering style of parenting set the stage for my avoidant attachment personality and hence suited me admirably for life.
'People with a dismissive style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with these statements: "I am comfortable without close emotional relationships. It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient, and I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me."'
That is what I've been like all my life, though, so I doubt my mother can take all the credit for it.
Re: Divorce - I've had two of 'em. I've learnt since then that a) one should never marry a man whose mother set up his losing his virginity [can we say "unhealthy apron strings"?] and b) never marry an artist, however brilliant he may be, who can't balance a chequebook, because that's a sign he doesn't interface with the real world much. Marriage #1 barely lasted a year; I lost track of him soon thereafter. [In my defence, I was only 16 when we met in college, barely 19 when we married and had no freakin' idea what I was doing.] No. 2 lasted for 10 years or so, with a relatively amicable post-divorce relationship until he remarried and wife #2 decided that he shouldn't have to pay child support because The Kid is adopted. [The court, of course, differed...especially as his income was in the hefty six figures and mine had declined severely when I had to cut my billables to have the time to take The Kid to therapy sessions for his reading disability. I think that, ultimately, my secretary made more than I did.] All in all, the divorce was better for The Kid, as the Biophysicist is a far better male parental unit and our relationship is a better role model than his dad's and wife #2.
Note to second wives: If you decide to marry a man whose profession is "artist", do not then complain bitterly that painting is messy and that you don't want it done in [your] house. This is a bit like marrying Mozart and refusing to allow music in the house because it makes a racket. /snark
Painting is much messier than non-painters assume, I guess? Paint can end up in places you'd never have guessed it could have gotten- your hair, your ears, your teeth, the ceiling, etc.
If he was pulling down six figures with his painting you'd figure she wouldn't care where paint ended up. I know I wouldn't.
Note to artists: always have at least one spare spouse in the wings in case your present spouse breaks down.
Wives of artists are like junker cars, they get you there most of the time, but they break down when you most need them. You absentmindedly forget to change the oil for 50,000 miles, a mistake anyone can make, and they go all high-maintenance on you.
Winna: I don't get it, either. She also managed to alienate a lot of people with jealous fits at Hollywood parties, which thoroughly thrashed his client base. Not my concern; as he stopped helping the Kid out the second our son hit 18, the fact that he's in worse financial straits now affects me not one whit. [Well, OK, there's the snarky satisfaction that Wife #2 can't do her $3000 weekends at La Costa...] As the hovel that they live in is worth seven figures, I am far from feeling sorry for them.
JM: Since he mainly painted in gouche and acrylic, there weren't the same sorts of mess/fumes one gets with oil paint. All the time we were married, he used a spare bedroom as a studio. Even his tendency to lick his brushes [some paints are toxic] hasn't killed him.
JE: Ha! How 'bout 'Artists: Hire an accountant, a live-in housekeeper and a handyman; they are all you really want. Do not, above all, have children, as they tend to become fractious when you forget to feed & water them when your wife is at work/school, forcing you to close the door to the nursery and play loud music until the little woman comes home. Inevitably, this results in recriminations and eventually your wife gets tired of having to take care of all the practical things in life whilst you work your way up the artistic ladder, until even the prospect of a big house with a pool and a sauna and a Jacuzzi isn't enough to compensate for having to take a Torts class with a baby on her hip.'
I always licked my paintbrush, too, when I worked with acrylics. I think I made it through with only minimal brain damage.
Artists can also be annoying with wanting your opinion on their work and then becoming distressed and angry if, even if you like their work, you like it for the wrong reasons. I am sorry, Boyfriend # 4, that I failed to see your pretty blue square was intended to represent the plight of Brazilian landless people in a globalizing economy.
Wives of artists are like junker cars, they get you there most of the time, but they break down when you most need them. You absentmindedly forget to change the oil for 50,000 miles, a mistake anyone can make, and they go all high-maintenance on you.
a little worked up. hmm what was I saying? Oh yeah. All this goes double times ten to the tenth power for poets, who are never going to make big bucks even if they become the fucking poet laureate. Even if you are an artist, because when it comes to the I-am-a-spiritual-creature, you-should-get-a-job olympics, poets are like the East Germans in the sixties, and you will lose.
Plus they all resent not being rock stars. A couple of poets I used to know used to rank their poet friends on a "who would they be if they were rock stars" scale.
And William Carlos Williams was a doctor. That makes a grand total of three poets with non-academic jobs. But actually, they frequently do have an excuse. The excuse is they are insane.
BTW, props to Leonard Cohen, who was a literary poet before he became a pop star. I like his literary poems a lot. He also customized tunes to a weak voice and made it work.
Most of his stuff is pretty restrained in production, but his early song "Marianne" is thoroughly cheesified in terms of what was possible in those days (cheesification has advanced exponentially during the last few decades). The version of his stuff I have also has the tracks separated so that on earphones you hear some parts only in one ear and the other parts only in the other.
Incidentally, and I hate to say this, but the Swedes are the premiere cheesificationists of our time.
I used to think that when guys told me they liked poetry they actually liked it, instead of just using it as a way to make a move. That is an excellent illustration of a lookback that makes a person feel like a clueless idiot.
I blame it on all the acrylic I licked off my paint brush.
I know, ogged, must I refer you to Standpipe's joke-explaining blog? I prefer to condemn the entire species, rather than make meager individual exceptions.
And you have your tense so very very wrong in the first sentence.
Lorene is ok with me, because I never met her, plus she's a girl, but I still wouldn't date her.
I'd say those have limited cultural relevance, but more than poetry. Broadway musicals are important to the extent they end up being imitated by high school hopefuls in the class musical. Opera is relevant among a certain social class. Poetry seems to die, probably for lots of reasons but Imma gonna blame it on the comp lit department, as is my birthright as a philosopher.
Seems to me like poetry has a lot of cultural significance over the long term, doesn't it? Is that different from what you guys are talking about? I mean a lot of those genres you mentioned have significance like a hundred or more years down the road.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by relevant. Among fine art practices, painting is currently riding pretty high. It survived its much-hyped death, draws crowds, makes big money, and gets reviewed in the newspapers and magazines (even, sometimes, stuff like Time and Newsweek.) Admittedly most painting doesn't draw such rewards, but such is life in all the arts. Still: You can hang it in your living room! The value of that fact, for better or for worse, has become quite evident to a large number of those people who are getting a larger share of the economic pie. Painting, far from being dead, has been a growth industry in recent years. The middle class, it turns out, likes paintings, and the rich need status symbols.
Which doesn't mean it's all good--of course it's not--or necessarily important. The economic support does tend to encourage more work, which can have good results and bad. Within the discourse of fine arts, painting's been pretty heavyweight in recent years, and in broader cultural terms, it hasn't reached the point of utter irrelevance of, say, certain types of rock music. It's a high art form that has, in perhaps some detriment to its status and/or current quality level, adapted and remained popular and sometimes discussed even among people who don't discuss art much.
As I once pointed out to Armsmasher, we're still a lot more relevant than ballet. And--as was likely true at that time, though I didn't note it--I am immaculately Becks style.
Though I suppose there's no way of insuring that today's poetry will have influence in the next century except by inductive reasoning. Of course the coming apocalypse reduces the weight of long-term arguments.
I like to thank my mother that her alternating hands-off/smothering style of parenting set the stage for my avoidant attachment personality and hence suited me admirably for life.
And I'd like to thank my parents for helping me develop my own fearful avoidant attachment personality. It has been the financial salvation of many a bar. Let's get married Winna! (Quickly before I change my mind.)
Yeah, it's mildly terrifying. More than mildly, actually.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:40 PM
The obvious solution here is cheating, and lots of it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:43 PM
Ah, that sucks for your friend.
I don't think it's quite a roulette wheel though. This guy claims he can predict, with great accuracy, which couples will get divorced after observing them argue for three minutes. And I remember some other shrink type saying that he could tell by the way couples touch each other whether they're likely to divorce. But, of course, there are always surprises.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:46 PM
I dunno, ogged. Everyone seems to go through a really rough patch, often due to exogenous factors, and it's at that stage that it seems to look like a roulette wheel to me. Some soldier through, and some don't, but from the outside, hearing about some of this stuff, it looks the same to me.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:52 PM
According to that shrink in 3, I'm probably going to end up divorced and I'm not even married yet. How depressing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:56 PM
I was the first one in my circle of friends to get married, the first one to have a kid, the first one to get divorced. Since then, I've been a shoulder for a huge number of friends whose marriages fell apart. Some weren't at all surprising, some were total shocks. I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble. Of all my friends who got married in the 90s, only two couples are left standing and one of them went through a year-long separation before pulling it back together.
He looked rough
I had just about the friendliest, most civil divorce imaginable, and I still had days where I (quite literally) thought I might die from heartbreak. I lost 30 pounds in six weeks because I simply couldn't bring myself to eat anything. I showed up to work, but spent days at a time doing nothing but writing despairing emails to friends and then reading them over and over again.
The only thing I can imagine that would have been worse would be having a child die, and I don't have any idea how those parents ever put themselves back together again.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 9:57 PM
apo, That soes sound awful and awfully like a depressive episode. I sort of understand why teh Duke researchers excluded you from their study.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:00 PM
Well, there ain't no denying I was depressed.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:02 PM
I don't have any idea how those parents ever put themselves back together again
I think they often don't.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:03 PM
A big part of it was that, unlike Labs' friend, I really didn't see it coming. It was like getting hit by a truck.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:05 PM
10: I can't decide which would be worse. I've a friend who went through a long bad period with his wife, and they ended up staying together. Gawd, from the outside it looked like one long, multi-year, hell.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:10 PM
In grad school I had a friend go through a divorce, and he went through the same sort of thing. Lost a lot of weight, started looking haggard all the time, was obviously in rough shape. It was nice to see him get a little plump afterwards.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:12 PM
I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble.
I hear you. I see serious fault lines in all my close friends' relationships.
The year leading up to my divorce was hell on earth: I spent that year studying in Cairo, and the distance from my husband allowed me to see that something in my life was horribly, horribly wrong, but I wasn't thnking that divorce was inevitable. I came home and a week later we separated; about a week after that I was more or less fine, and the whole thing was totally amicable.
We didn't have kids, which makes it all so much easier. With kids involved, it's a whole other level of complication and heartache.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:14 PM
Strangely, the only person I'm close to who's divorced was my sister, who married the father of her first child when she (the baby) was 2. No one was surprised when it broke up a year later. Oh, and my good English friend, who just got divorced last year. It was awful for him, but in a way I wasn't surprised about that one, either.
But all my girl friends who got married have stayed married so far.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:18 PM
I lost 30 pounds in six weeks because I simply couldn't bring myself to eat anything.
See, for me, that would be the upside.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:22 PM
With kids involved, it's a whole other level of complication and heartache.
Is it ever.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:22 PM
15: Actually, I saw it as an upside at the time. I was about 25 pounds over to start with. But even though I was at what is probably my optimal weight, losing it in that fashion doesn't make you look healthy. At all.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 10:25 PM
In my family 6 people have scored 4 divorces and 3 intact marriages, of which one is seemingly happy. My "no marriages - no relationships" policy is really just for me, but when people are being grumbly I run it past them. Usually they don't want medicine that strong.
My neighbor has been married 3 times, really 4, and he's not looking for #5.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 11:05 PM
My neighbor has been married 3 times, really 4, and he's not looking for #5.
Two divorces should be the max. After the second divorce people should be denied marriage licenses.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 11:16 PM
Yeah, I can go along with that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 6-06 11:24 PM
I had just about the friendliest, most civil divorce imaginable, and I still had days where I (quite literally) thought I might die from heartbreak. I lost 30 pounds in six weeks because I simply couldn't bring myself to eat anything. I showed up to work, but spent days at a time doing nothing but writing despairing emails to friends and then reading them over and over again.
Exactly the same thing happened to me when I split up with someone with whom I'd been living for 4 years: not actual divorce, as such, obviously but I imagine it feels the same. Lost a ton of weight really quickly.
It totally sucks. Luckily, within two or three months I felt pretty much back to normal.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:16 AM
I've pretty much reached the point where I expect everybody's first marriage to crumble.
I am astounded by all the divorces around me, as people hit their early thirties. I could understand if the divorcing couples married ridiculously young. but these people married out of undergrad. Are they so different now? If the marriage didn't involve abuse, why do they think another person will be better than someone they have been in love with already? Why are they so willing to risk solitude (which is a fine choice for some, but I bet more lonely and demanding than people who have been coupled for many years remember)?
I have to remind myself that I can't know what it is like inside a marriage in general and their marriage in particular, otherwise I end up pissed that they are ending something I want so fucking badly.
I lost 30 pounds in six weeks
35 pounds in a couple months, when the seven-year ex decided not to marry me.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:58 AM
I showed up to work, but spent days at a time doing nothing but writing despairing emails to friends and then reading them over and over again.
Hey, that's just like my work day.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:18 AM
I'm pretty sure that the break-up with the five-year ex would have resulted in significant weight gain had I not been extremely hawkish about it. Sadness or depression makes my metabolism slow to a crawl, and cooking goes right out the window.
Two divorces should be the max. After the second divorce people should be denied marriage licenses.
These sound like words of wisdom, but there are models to the contrary. My dad married twice before he married my mom, and they're still happily married with three children to show for it.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:49 AM
Two divorces should be the max. After the second divorce people should be denied marriage licenses.
I'm on my third marriage. It has lasted over 13 years now. So things can work out. On the other hand, there certainly are plenty of days when I think 19 gets it exactly right. What are you gonna do?
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:04 AM
The combination of despair, anger and hopelessness generated by divorce is difficult to overcome. I did it only by appreciating the absurdity of my situation: giving up everything was not enough, I had to want to give it up.
That Buddhism class in college came in handy after all.
Posted by shpx.ohfu | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:06 AM
Science says that Armsmasher should never have been born.
Around here (Lake Wobegon) no one ever used to get divorced. People didn't expect to be rich, either, and they didn't believe they deserved much. Marriages were conventions and duties, not ways toward happiness. Everyone preferred happiness, but no one demanded it, and if things got rough the whole town worked together to save the marriage.
Beyond not being happy per se, among hip folk an unhappy marriage is a kind of failure or abnormality. "I deserve more than this". This makes the unhappiness worse. If people realized that happiness is not what marriages are normally about, and that it's perfectly normal and OK to be unhappily married, then at least the surplus unhappiness derived from perceived failure and abnormality would be much less. No one gets down on themself if they buy a losing lottery ticket -- losing lottery tickets are the rule.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:10 AM
Twenty years ago, I was honestly predicting many more divorces in my extended family...a half dozen blood aunts and uncles, a couple dozen cousins...that didn't happen. Different era and environment, of course. Upper mid-west, lower-middle to middle-class.
I once told a friend that the ultimate value I grew up with, the purpose and mark of a successful life, was ensuring that your grandkids did not divorce. Money and other achievement was considered a vice that cut into family time. Most weekends, many evenings, were spent within the extended family as I grewup. Takes a village to preserve a marriage.
My parents got divorced. I left all that behind twenty years ago. But all my cousin's children live within fifty miles of each other.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:32 AM
Emerson and I grew up in the same neighborhood.
:)
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:34 AM
From the inside, I'm sure there's a story that makes sense of it all
Don't be so sure.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:47 AM
I did it only by appreciating the absurdity of my situation
I pulled out of my tailspin through the time-honored tradition of the ill-advised rebound relationship (TheCrazyBlonde™). It does work to stop the overt manifestations of the depression but, of course, you're still squarely in the middle of CrazyTime even if it feels all better and in no condition to hold up your end of a relationship properly. Also, anybody that finds you an attractive prospect while you're in that state should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:06 AM
I have a tendency to look at people getting married and be convinced they're all nuts -- so many of the people I know seem to have gotten married when they already knew they had real problems. I can't imagine why people do that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:35 AM
Emerson's remarks about happiness in marriage seem exactly right. The sense of entitlement in this country has no bounds. Next, we're going to have people putting up their kids for adoption when they turn out to be sarcastic and acne-pocked in their teenage years.
Labs, I think it'd be best for you to wait to get married until after you're tenured. That way, you aren't in danger of losing your job due to the post-divorce depression.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:49 AM
Mormons all live in Emerson's neighborhood. My extended family on that side has one divorce--which took almost fifteen horrible years to actualize.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:56 AM
Eh. I don't know that we're entitled to be happy, but I'm glad that we generally believe we're not required to live an unhappy life whose only end is to comfort our community with our conformity.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:59 AM
No divorces in my family tree. They do have that sort of 'a good marriage is one that stays together' mentality, so a fair amount of miserable people married, but no divorces.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:59 AM
This is something that I've wondered about. As a kid, divorce seemed pretty normal -- lots of people's parents were divorced, mine weren't but I thought they probably should have been, it was an ordinary part of life. As a married adult, and looking at friends getting divorced, it seems much less normal and much more like having your liver ripped out by wild dogs. I don't understand why people put themselves in positions where it happens -- I would think that they would protect themselves better than that, either staying single in the first place, or managing to stay married.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:08 AM
I'm more on SCMT's side. You don't have to live with a losing lottery ticket day in and day out. People should have reasonable expectations of their marriages, but it doesn't mean resigning themselves to unhappiness in the marriage.
I also think that it's reasonable to expect a full-time job to yield a middle-class standard of living, for values of "middle class" that don't include "subject to estate tax." Better than Wal-Mart jobs, anyway.
(The first divorce I know of in my family was I think four generations before me, when my great^n-grandfather came to the U.S. and his mother-in-law told his wife [my great^n-grandmother] not to go with him because she'd be his slave.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:10 AM
Divorce is my only family tradition. It goes back three generations that I know of - back to when it was still considered scandalous.
Posted by shpx.ohfu | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:11 AM
"Next, we're going to have people putting up their kids for adoption when they turn out to be sarcastic and acne-pocked in their teenage years."
There's an opening there for a political entrepreneur: state foster homes for incorrigible kids from 12 up. Uniforms, gruel, hard work, and prayer, (with the option for unbelievers of solitary confinement in a dark room shackled to the floor).
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:12 AM
37--Conversely, when I was young, I thought that divorce was the most horrible thing that could happen to a family and didn't understand how people could be so stupid and immoral as to allow it to happen. Now, I think it's more normal, and, while heartbreaking, it doesn't need to be as horrible as many people make it.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:13 AM
The only sad thing about my divorce was that I spent seven years being married. Every day I give thanks that I will never again get yelled at for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:18 AM
I don't understand why people put themselves in positions where it happens
This sounds really, really callous when I look at it, and I didn't mean it that way. I can completely understand not being able to avoid divorce at some point -- what confuses me more is that the prospect doesn't scare people away from marriage, or generally seem like more of a worry to people than it is.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:19 AM
I'm 21, and my parents, in their 40s, are finally getting a divorce after about 20-21 years married. (I'm the oldest.) It was unhappy pretty much from the time I was born. I gather I was the cause of much of the unhappiness (unwanted and always resented by my father, very wanted by my mother). I see the divorce as a very good thing, and while I haven't been too involved (don't live around my parents anymore) it hasn't seemed like a very bad process for either of them. My perspective may not be completely shared by my parents or brothers, though.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:20 AM
43- Everyone thinks they are the exception, that's why. All those other people are married to knob ends, but I am marrying a wonderful person who will never hurt my feelings or eat icing straight out of the can! It's part of all the stupid gauzy expectations we drape around it.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:22 AM
Hrm. Mine followed a similar pattern (well, ten years later. I'm younger than my sister, and they waited until I was 23 or so, so they were married twenty-seven years.) While at the time I thought it was the best thing for them, ten years later they really haven't bounced back all that much. Dad's pretty happy, but in a weird monastic kind of way -- he lives in a house with basically no furniture in it. Mom, who wanted out of the marriage much more, really isn't very happy at all.
But they probably would have been less happy had they stayed together.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:24 AM
43--I know (and have dated) a lot of children of divorced parents; they seem to be rather leery of marriage. I think, however, that there were some statistical findings showing that they got married pretty much as often as children of parents who stayed together.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:25 AM
The Shakers are going extinct, and I have no idea why. It seems to me that their "Don't-get-married" message is sorely needed in our day.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:25 AM
48 has a tense problem.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:28 AM
49 is incorrect.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:30 AM
What I'm worried about is that although I have the long-suffering values that Emerson and Jackmormon describe, many other people don't -- thus I could end up doing all this work to keep together a relationship with some woman with a hugely exaggerated sense of entitlement and still end up divorced simply because of her ridiculous expectations. Surely I deserve better than that!
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:58 AM
51: Yes, Kotsko, it's important to get it on the record now that any future divorce should be considered the fault of that spoiled bitch you'll marry sometime in the future.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:05 AM
still end up divorced simply because of her ridiculous expectations
For example.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:11 AM
Wow. This discussion is doing nothing for my desire to get married, for the first time or ever. Not that it was that positive anyway; I think I'm definitely one of the leery-of-marriage types. It's going to have to do a serious brainwashing job on me to think that it's a good idea.
My parents and their siblings are 7 people, with at least 8 divorces among them (Only one person got married and stayed that way. Another never married, but was in a long-term partnership, had a kid, and may be undergoing a not-divorce from his not-marriage now that the kid is in college). My parents divorced when I was 17, after a few years of obvious unhappiness. And my father's parents themselves divorced when he was a kid, back in the 1950s.
Among my friends, I have seen many more divorces than "successful" marriages, and they've only been seriously at it for perhaps five years.
Posted by Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:12 AM
Being married often sucks. Not being married can also suck. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:16 AM
Mismatched ideas about what marriage represents is surely a contributing factor in divorces. Which is why you talk a lot about it with your partner, to see if your values are reconcilable, before you get married.
I'm watching the marriage of one of my friends break up over precisely this sort of problem. She's from a similar background as mine, he's very much not (broken family that he rejected to immigrate to the US). She did all of the work to keep it together, and now that she's sick of trying so hard, I think it's just about over. Just about everyone saw this coming. But she doesn't regret having gotten married, and of course there aren't any kids, so I can't say they were wrong to have given it a shot, even though the odds were against them.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:19 AM
Singledom is a perfectly ducky yet often overlooked option for people.
Why are they so willing to risk solitude (which is a fine choice for some, but I bet more lonely and demanding than people who have been coupled for many years remember)?
I've always kept a diary, and it became very clear in re-reading them recently that over my lifetime I've been much happier single. My relationships have not been particularly bad and the breakups were usually pretty amicable, but still.
My only concern is who will check in on me when I'm old and feeble.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:20 AM
My dog genuinely enjoys singing along to The Darkness's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." He'll start howling if he hears even the first intro guitar riff. Slays at parties with that trick. The point being, someone around these parts believes.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:25 AM
53: Am I wrong to think that female orgasm requires clitoral stimulation and that a cock is not the ideal instrument for doing that?
Also, my comment wasn't necessarily misogynistic -- most men of my social class are horribly spoiled as well (other than me). It's just that I am primarily in the market for marrying a woman, since I want to conform to God's perfect will for my life.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:26 AM
Which is why you talk a lot about it with your partner, to see if your values are reconcilable, before you get married.
I'm not sure I believe that. My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time. Or, if you do, you end up agreeing with your partner with the best and most honest intentions, only to find out seven years down the road that you really don't agree with her.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:26 AM
Clownae stats:
My maternal grandparents were divorced before I knew them; grandma was remarried and I thought of her husband as grandpa; grandpa was never remarried but had a weirdish relationship with his live-in nurse the entire time I knew him. Paternal grandparents remained married until grandpa passed on.
Parents are still married. In their generation there are 7 kids, all but one of whom are currently married, between them 5 divorces but 3 of those are my mom's serially-married brother.
In my generation, 4 kids, 3 are married, no divorces although my kid brother and his wife were separated for a couple of months. They are back together and seem to be doing really well. In my crowd of friends, the only person who got married before I did got divorced and remarried; and the person who got married after I did is back together after a longish separation. Others never married.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:30 AM
60 is absolutely correct.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:31 AM
59 -- I thought you theologian types were supposed to remain celibate.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:32 AM
My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time.
True. In pre-marriage discussions, no one ever says, "After we've been married a while, I intend to have recurring episodes of deep depression which will involve me drawing the curtains shut and not leaving the bedroom for months on end. Are you sure you're okay with that?"
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:34 AM
Dad's pretty happy, but in a weird monastic kind of way -- he lives in a house with basically no furniture in it. Mom, who wanted out of the marriage much more, really isn't very happy at all.
LB, let me level inappropriate queries in public. Why did they bother going through a divorce? Couldn't they just kind of stake out their territory in some kind of compromise?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:34 AM
My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time.
This is true, of course, but you can improve your odds by talking about as many of the obvious factors as possible: money, religion, kids, work, etc.
This is part of why I'm actively in favor of cohabitating before marriage, to work out some of the things that otherwise may crop up once you're bound together.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:35 AM
Brain fart: perhaps the rate of divorce is higher because people are delaying chldren and so there's no 'think of the children' consideration.
A conservative evangelical friend of mine thinks that the divorce rate is high among his contemporaries because many of them get married while young and in love so they don't have pre-marital sex. Knows quite a few of married-at-20, divorced-at-26 types.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:42 AM
66 - See, I'm against cohabitating before marriage because you can end up going into "make it work" mode prematurely when you should have just broken up. Not living together makes continuing the relationship more of a conscious choice, and not just the easier default option, which I think is important when you're dating.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:43 AM
"My sense is that marriage is made up of a thousand different things, and that no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time."
I wonder if a good pre-marriage compatibility checklist would help with this. Surely many of the things that people don't talk about, they don't talk about because they didn't think of it beforehand, because they didn't have the foresight. But if it were brought up it might be something that could be addressed beforehand. While there are always things that can seriously strain and break relationships that can't be foreseen (your checklist couldn't ask "Will either of you develop a drug addiction or discover that you have a chronic illness?") there are plenty of things that can.
As a corollary, people who don't have such a checklist per se, but who know a lot about themselves and relationships, can do a better job of predicting how well their marriage might go, and thus avoid bad matches. If marriage counselors can do it, so can others. And I think people who are better at relating honestly and resolving conflict have very increased chances of staying happily married.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:43 AM
For instance, the checklist could include "Do either of you have any history of depression? How did you cope with that depression?" People who have never been depressed by the time they're 25 or older are much less likely to ever be depressed.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:46 AM
68 - Well, sure, I don't think you should go from third date to moving in together, but I don't see how the "make it work" pressure would any worse when living together than when married, and in fact I expect it would be less.
Moving in together is definitely a big step, and not to be undertaken lightly, because it's painful and expensive to extricate yourself, but it's somewhat less painful and expensive than divorce.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:47 AM
Apo, you're unusual in that the very sight of your memeber from across the room can bring a woman to orgasm. Or a man of appropriate sexuality.
But tell everyone about the time in the farmer's market when you were briefly mistaken for ahttp://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:hB5zwJ1wW6IyDM:troyandgay.com/pix/Geoduck06240520001.jpg">geoduck
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:48 AM
68: On the other hand, cohabitating for a while during engagement might be a good idea, as a test run before things turn final.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:48 AM
A good marriage contract is important too.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:49 AM
But tell everyone about the time in the farmer's market when you were briefly mistaken for a geoduck.
Talk about flubbing the punchline.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:49 AM
no one ever talks about the ones that are going to matter because you just can't know it ahead of time
Because, among other things, people change. You can talk all you like at twenty-five, but at thirty-five, you'll be different people.
And another thing. The marriage issue is complicated by the delaying of what we can call economic or professional maturity. Now that college education is understood to be necessary for more jobs, people often are still preparing for life until the age of 21. For those of us with post-graduate degrees, we're doing it till our mid-twenties. For those of us in careers with long apprenticeships, like tenure-track academics or big-firm lawyers, we're still making professional progress into our mid- to late-30s.
In other words, it's getting to be later and late in life that you look up and say, Oh. This is my life, for the next n decades. Then I'll retire, then I'll die. And if you got married sometime before then---which is reasonable to do, considering how late it now comes for a lot of people---your marriage is going to get inflected by that realization, but seriously.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:50 AM
I'm imagining the divorce settlement: "You weren't charitable according to this set of rules that we mapped out at age 20!"
I'm sorry. It was just hanging there.
Seriously, though, I think pre-marital counselling is wise, but I'm not sure of the success of a rigorous checklist. (And really, who is going to break up with the love of their life because she was depressed before they met?)
None of the minor factors which lead to a divorce are in and of themselves obvious dealbreakers (setting aside abuse,e.g.) or the sort of thing one is going to know in advance. Depression *can* pop up later in life, but so can lots of other, minor annoying habits, and I get the sense that most marriages collapse not due to one big thing but under the weight of small daily annoyances.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:52 AM
76 gets it exactly right.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:53 AM
77 is making me picture pdf23ds and his sweetheart establishing conventions for meta-marriage.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:54 AM
69: My wife and I had exactly such a checklist, and we scored off the charts, compatabililty-wise. Like 99 percent. Our marriage has been less rosy than that would have led us to believe (though we've made it work for six years). People and situations change, especially when kids enter the picture.
Posted by jmcq | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:57 AM
"Seriously, though, I think pre-marital counselling is wise, but I'm not sure of the success of a rigorous checklist"
First, I meant it to be a checklist of things to make sure that you know and have talked about with your partner, to make sure you've covered as much ground as you need to before committing to marriage, not a list of requirements by any stretch. Second, yes, by the time a couple starts to talk about marriage, they're likely to be too infatuated to be in the emotional state where they could call things off if some major incompatibility comes up. But it'd be better than nothing.
And counselling would be good, but I imagine a lot of people would say "What, we're not even married yet and you want marriage counseling?" There's a bit of a stigma to that sort of thing still, because of the association with mental illness and therapy.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:57 AM
Nobody ever realizes how big the changes involved in childraising really are. It's impossible to prepare for. It's probably only easy for already-domestic women who go from taking care of their younger siblings and cousins to taking care of their own child, which is probably easier.
As for marriage, it's sort of metaphysical. What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married? There must be something, or else they wouldn't do it. But often, whatever the new thing is (long-term thinking? "getting serious"? taking for granted? being treated as a couple by everyone?) makes things worse, and the couple breaks up.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:01 AM
Many churches require pre-marriage counseling. In one case the issue arose: Can a gay Episcopalian priest properly counsel a heterosexual couple?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:03 AM
Also, I fully accept "things change", and I don't really think a checklist could even start to help with that. Though, I imagine there could be a checklist of things you could evaluate *yourself* with, that would give you an estimation of how likely you are to want to change directions in life at some point, rather than sticking to one path. And if you're the wandering type, you might want to consider not marrying, or at least not having kids.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:03 AM
To continue the train of thought I started in 64, if anyone were to ask a question like that in a pre-marriage talk, the answer would likely be "Yes, of course! I'll love you no matter what." Because you're young and in love and think you can survive anything. And you know what? Maybe you can. Maybe you can't. The only way to find out is to go through it.
For the curious, the depression example in 64 is true to life. And we are still married.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:04 AM
82: Granted. I wonder how this would be affected by living in a tight community of people, where you really get to see up close how friends grow up and deal with marriage. In this situation (which seems to be pretty rare) you might have a better idea what marriage and childrearing is really about.
But I'm not interested in ever having children.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:06 AM
Of course, being in love, as a factor of confusion, makes marriages more likely while making them less bearable once the euphoria wears off.
Trivia: Blue states like NJ, NY, and Massachusetts have lower divorce rates than the Red states where people talk family values. Remember, there's nothing hotter than a Christian chick, especially if her marriage isn't working.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:11 AM
84: Though, I imagine there could be a checklist of things you could evaluate *yourself* with, that would give you an estimation of how likely you are to want to change directions in life at some point, rather than sticking to one path.
Ah, the sunny optimism of youth.
Goddam kids.
Posted by jmcq | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:12 AM
I don't see how the "make it work" pressure would any worse when living together than when married, and in fact I expect it would be less.
The pressure to make it work isn't so much less (or worse), because cohabitation brings about strong commitments like marriage. But the bond implied by cohabitation is less strong than that of marriage, so the arrangement may be entered into with less apprehension or consideration. Nearly every couple I know who is currently living together and had been considering marriage is now not very much interested in staying a couple but have this obligation to one another.
In part the cohabitation makes couples realize more quickly whether they are truly suited for one another, but I'm not sure the arrangement doesn't also contribute pressure to problems that might resolve naturally with some space. I'm nearly convinced that marriages would work better without the cohabitation part.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:13 AM
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
Pretty much nothing in our case. She'd just defended, I was entering my third year of law school. We'd deferred probably because of her mother's death when we'd been together two years. I can remember talking about marriage and children and religion, abstractly of course, on our first date. I had an overwhelming sense of shared values very early in our relationship.
I have no idea how to turn any of my marital experiences into advice; from that first date, my relationship with her has been the most important thing in my life, I can say that without hesitation.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:14 AM
being treated as a couple by everyone
This was something I was not prepared for at all. There are all kinds of ways marriage changes your life that are social and that have nothing to do with your partner's personality.
I have friends who are marrying men who are totally unsuitable for them, but because my friends want kids really badly (they're in their mid-thirties), they're willing to overlook some heavy-duty potential problems.
Re: pre-marriage counseling: I'm skeptical that many couples go for pre-marriage counseling and then decide, as a result of that counseling, that maybe they weren't ready to tie the knot.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:17 AM
84 -- if all "wandering types" took that advice, we would have no "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" -- and the world would be far poorer for it.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:17 AM
Can a gay Episcopalian priest properly counsel a heterosexual couple?
Probably about as well as a celibate Catholic priest can counsel a heterosexual couple.
pdf, I'm not undervaluing contemplation, but most of my friends are in the three-four year points in their marriages and are undergoing more stress than they could have predicted. One couple's struggled with infertility; another, with his residency and how he's never home and she's left with the new baby; another with serious illness. They're all making it, more or less, but it's not the sort of thing they could have evaluated when they decided to get married.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:17 AM
You can talk all you like at twenty-five, but at thirty-five, you'll be different people.
This, absolutely. I know it totally rankles folks in their mid-twenties to hear that they can't have any idea what they will or won't desire a decade in the future, but it's true true true. I tell anybody who asks that getting married before your thirties is a terribly risky proposition. Though perhaps when I'm 45, I'll say the same thing about 35.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:17 AM
As the child of a third marriage, according to the rules established here Armsmasher should never have born, so he has no standing to testify. Purge the record.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:20 AM
We got married on a bit of a whim really - we'd known each other, not well, for a few months, and then had been together for about a month when we decided. Got married a couple of months later. And 10 1/2 years later we constantly surprise ourselves with just how similarly we think about things, and how similar our tastes are. Roulette indeed.
My parents divorced, and then remarried each other. My brother and I both think we came through that with a rather optimistic view of marriage. His marriage ended after about 4 years (no kids) and his view may have changed now!
Children though - I think it takes far far longer than most people think to be back to 'normal' after a baby arrives. Most people seem to act as if about 6 months is long enough to become accustomed to this new lifestyle, whereas it's probably more like 2 or 3 years.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:20 AM
I think the difference between marriage and long-term cohabitation, other than the expectation of permanence, is the expectation of children.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:21 AM
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
You suddenly inherit your partner's family's problems and dramas in a way that you didn't think possible.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:21 AM
Though perhaps when I'm 45, I'll say the same thing about 35.
Agree with this (and slol's point) entirely. People change, especially as circumstances change (or don't). There isn't, I don't think, an "authentic" you that is unceasing in its existence. Or if there is, it's a trivial you, and won't necessarily be the deciding factor.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:28 AM
Vanessa Bryant's husband!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:33 AM
I really do think successful long-term marriages just actually do take a commitment to place the marriage above one's own happiness (by both partners). I don't really think ultra-LT relationships "work" in a world in which individual happiness is the highest value. You (meaing of course both partners) have to believe that the maintenance of the relationship has some independant value above that of your own personal satisfaction. Which is of course not how we like think of relationships. Perhaps I am unduly cynical, though. Perhaps this actually just says something bad about my own marriage, I don't know.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:34 AM
65: LB, let me level inappropriate queries in public. Why did they bother going through a divorce? Couldn't they just kind of stake out their territory in some kind of compromise?
Actually, they're not divorced, they just live apart and don't speak to each other. Neither one has showed any particular interest in remarrying, or in interacting socially with members of the opposite sex, and the hassle of splitting up assets and no longer being covered by each other's medical plans seems not worth it.
It's weird, but that's how they want it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:35 AM
Re: pre-marriage counseling: I'm skeptical that many couples go for pre-marriage counseling and then decide, as a result of that counseling, that maybe they weren't ready to tie the knot.
Case in point: the pre-marriage counselor my wife and I saw told us that we failed all the tests he gave us, that he had more serious concerns about our relationship than any of he had ever advised in his decades of pre-marital counseling, and that he strongly advised us to reconsider what we were doing. This made my now-wife (then-fiance) cry a lot but otherwise had no effect on our wedding plans. (It might have been a factor had we heard this report early on in our engagement, but this was only a month or so before the wedding and momentum was strong.)
FWIW, we are still married. Of course, see 101.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:41 AM
they just live apart and don't speak to each other
But don't things like having the same health insurance and commonly held assets necessitate some minimal communication? Do they use an intermediary (I'm looking at you)?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:45 AM
Weird. Do you think he had a point and you just managed to work through all the problems he saw, or was he just wrong?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:46 AM
My mom's old world advice regarding marriage is "you should marry someone who makes your life easier, not more difficult."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:47 AM
104: Oh, they don't absolutely not speak (they both came over for cake yesterday) but they manage not to communicate much. Taxes involve two separate visits to the same accountant, and so forth.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:47 AM
106: Your mom's not dumb. That's an excellent way of putting it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:48 AM
My wife used to see a therapist who told her -- shortly after we'd moved in together, not that long before we got married -- to dump me because our relationship was not as wonderfully romantic 24/7 as that of the main characters in Titanic, which she (the therapist) had recently seen.
This woman was licensed and well over 13 years old.
My wife ditched her therapist on grounds of unbelievable idiocy, and we've done pretty well since then, marriage-wise, considering.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:48 AM
No need to abort me, John Emerson—I'll be the first to tell you that my opinions on the matter should be taken with a grain of salt. None of my close friends are married and none seem likely to be any time soon, for economic reasons relating to slol's 76 and for the fact that most men I know are just simply focused on the upcoming NCAA season.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:49 AM
your mom's not dumb
Hey watch what you say about -gg-d's mom!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:51 AM
I hate that I'm apparently giving the impression of being idealistic about the prospects of being able to get into and maintain happy, working, marriages over long periods of time. I'm just bringing up things that can decrease the uncertainty some. Geez, I'm someone who thinks that time-limited commitments would be a good alternative to marriage for most people.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:52 AM
109 -- early in my marriage I briefly saw a (female) therapist who advised me, among other things, to visit a sex worker because I was having issues at home. One of a long string of therapists I have not gotten much good out of. (Hey Bitch and Tia, y'all persuaded me -- I am having another go at it starting next week.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:55 AM
113: Do report back on your visit with the sex worker.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:57 AM
114 -- no see, it didn't work out that way. Rather than take the shrink's advice, which sounded to me like bad advice, I stopped seeing her.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 10:59 AM
113: Man, that's weird as anything.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:01 AM
115: And it is this central misunderstanding that so humorously informs 113!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:02 AM
Oh maybe I misread 114 -- were you making a play on my parenthetical comment to Bitch and Tia, that next week I am going to try visiting a sex worker?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:03 AM
I like the points made by Brock, but I might want to put them differently, and maybe more positively. There is just an incredible natural pull to become a monster of self-regard and egoism; it’s a tough fight and one that it is easy (for me at least) not just to lose, but to fail to realize one needs to be fighting. Being in a relationship raises the stakes of that battle. So rather than stipulating an opposition between “your happiness” and “marriage," I would rather say “your egoism” and “who you want to be” are in conflict, and that a marriage can increase the collateral damage.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:04 AM
116 -- I could visualize Emerson giving me the advice the shrink did. But then he is not licensed to practice psychotherapy.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:04 AM
time-limited commitments would be a good alternative to marriage for most people
This is an interesting idea. But what exactly do you see as the benefit to this, as opposed to just breaking up when one wants to?
Do you think it would be less painful a split if, when the contract expires, one partner refuses to renew it even though the other one wants to?
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:04 AM
My mom's old world advice regarding marriage is "you should marry someone who makes your life easier, not more difficult."
You so don't merit your mom.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:05 AM
I believe he was just blindly assuming, for comic effect, that you had followed the therapist's instructions. (Did she give you a referral to a reputable sex worker, or just tell you to drive around down by the Lincoln Tunnel?) But this comment belongs on Standpipe's joke-explaining blog.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:05 AM
I thought that Smasher was reading Clownae Kid's comment as saying that Bitch and Tia had persuaded him to try going to see a sex worker and that he had an appointment to see one next week.
And of course, we all want to know the details.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:08 AM
This [101] is absolutely correct: "the maintenance of the relationship has some independant value above that of your own personal satisfaction."
But this is not universally true: "a commitment to place the marriage above one's own happiness (by both partners)."
The marital relationship must be balanced with the individual's role as "self," as mother/father, as daughter/son etc. Some may find that the marriage is above all, but others may not. Spouses who assess the balance in an uncompatible fashion will get divorced.
Posted by shpx.ohfu | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:09 AM
Was it really that cryptic? It was clear to me that Tia and B had convinced Clownæ to see a shrink again, especially since, you know, I read this blog and remember the thread in quesion, but it's funnier to presume they had convinced Clownæ to give the sex worker another try. Now that I've solved that mystery, I'll ban myself on my way out.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:16 AM
119 and 125 are better than 101, I think. I didn't mean to be quite so negative -- I am (happily) married after all. I plead exhaustion as an excuse for the tone. Also, for all the typos.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:17 AM
In his capacity as a clergyman, my grandfather did a lot of pre-marital discussions, and he apparently told his charges that they'd be all right as long as they loved God more than each other. I take this to be in line with what baa and Brock are saying.
(This is part of why the breakdown of our traditions leads to misery. I will now renew my subscription to National Review.)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:20 AM
Actually, on second thought, 119 and 125 are both slightly too positive. It's not just balancing roles, and fighting your inner self, it's really about recognizing that you are always going to be happy. Long-term, sure, but in shorter-term periods (which can be quite lengthy), there will be times when you will know (quite correctly) that you'd be happier out of the relationship. And when that LT vision starts to get hazy and uncertain and the ST circumstances are especially difficult, it gets tough.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:21 AM
I refuse to believe that the Great Satan descended from clergy, even two generations back. Your vile lies catch me not, ibn Labs.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:22 AM
Hey, if you're having trouble getting the baby to sleep, have you got a baby sling? Most of the people you'll find raving about them are annoying more-attachment-parenting-than-thou types who sound as if putting the baby down ever will cause brain damage, so they suck, but slings are great. It's much easier to get the kid in and out than with one of the buckled types of carriers, so you don't wake them up getting them out, and walking briskly around with the baby in the sling will put almost any baby to sleep. You should really get one, if you don't have one already.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:23 AM
129 should say you *aren't* always going to be happy. Jesus I'm being incoherent. Also, 128 in some sense gets it exactly rights, although I'm not sure it's necessary to bring God into the picture.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:24 AM
therapist who advised me, among other things, to visit a sex worker
Was your therapist also a rabbi?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:27 AM
131 -- LB, thanks very much for the tip. We have a sling, in which the baby sleeps great if we are up and walking around. Which doesn't make for a very restful night. Still, it is a very nice tool and I appreciate the advice.
Actually, last night went pretty well. I think he's been a bit difficult b/c a bit premature, but hopefully things will improve.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:30 AM
My mother's more morbid take on the marriage advice thing is that you should consider how you would feel if the person you want to marry was suddenly involved in a horrible accident and became incapacitated and you had to become their caretaker for the rest of their life, and to consider whether they would do the same for you.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:30 AM
126 is what I thought you meant Armsmasher. I was only half explaining, because I didn't want to explain away the whole joke. I knew you knew and all that. I think I should rename myself Cryptic BG.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:31 AM
135: Does that work with parents too? Sadly, we can't choose those.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:34 AM
the breakdown of our traditions leads to misery
This is true, of course, and requires no NR subscription. The problem is, we've dissolved all these old traditions and replaced them with nothing new, except the ideal of personal gratification, which is an empty goal. Had we replaced out old traditions with an ideal of community, or some other social good that transcended the individual, we would have found equal happiness. Instead, we are all Thatcherites now.
</Christopher Lasch>
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:36 AM
"Do you think it would be less painful a split if, when the contract expires, one partner refuses to renew it even though the other one wants to?"
I don't want to get beat up about the "contract" phrasing, so I'd call it a promise.
If it made things any less painful, it'd be because having to consciously renew one's commitment periodically would keep building resentment or waning interest in one partner from being concealed so easily from the other, and so it'd force change sooner after a problem started.
But that kind of situation is certainly very painful, and I doubt time-limited commitments would help any with the emotional aspects. (Though they could help by separating financial/habitation related issues into separate commitments.)
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:37 AM
Did The True and Only Heaven make an Emerson reader out of you?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:38 AM
Did The True and Only Heaven make an Emerson reader out of you?
No, I went through an Emerson phase as a teenager, and did not meet T&OH until I was in college.
I think ideally, one has a teenage Emerson phase ("must be a nonconformist," woo-hoo!) then a grown-up anti-Emerson phase (too many damn nonconformists messing up my lawn), then a mature appreciation of Emerson's talents within his actual milieu.
We are talking about Waldo, not John, right?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:42 AM
The best treatment of passing from pro to anti in early manhood is John Jay Chapman's Emerson.
I mean the mature, of Fate and Compensation.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:45 AM
I'm a bit down on the later Emerson, for reasons having to do with arguments like this.
I confess ignorance of Chapman on Emerson.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:48 AM
Yes, that has always been a problem. And though not explicitly addressed, Chapman, who was once described as a "belated abolitionist" may have gotten some of his animous from that.
Early 20th C canonizers, like Brooks and Mumford, had the sense to see that the New England trad became irrelevant in the 1860s.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:55 AM
I didn't mean late writings, but a mature understanding of his writings, such as you referred to and Lasch is very affecting in describing as a revelation to him.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 11:59 AM
133 -- Wow, that is a pretty excellent story. Thanks for the link.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:01 PM
146 - I totally stole it from Wolfson.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:14 PM
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
You get much nicer silverware.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:19 PM
That baby sling looks great. But sadly, the site had no stats on the range one could expect to achieve.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:20 PM
147 -- Wolfson was comparing Bitch to the prostitute, but she took him as comparing her to the frigid wife.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:20 PM
Wow indeed. Thank G-d for antibiotics.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:27 PM
149: Too many variables involved. Baby size, parental arm strength, wind resistance, etc.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:41 PM
Whether the baby has been trained to assume an aerodynamic position in flight.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:42 PM
I'm not a disease vector, people.
Re. marriage, honestly, I think if I had to do it again, I wouldn't. Which is not a statement on the success of my marriage, but rather an expression of how I now understand the institution. I think that the *primary* advantage of marriage on an emotional level (aside from legal crap like joint property and visiting rights and taxes and health insurance and so forth) is that, for me at least, there is a sense of firm committment there that wasn't without it. Which is, in fact, why I got married--between Mr. B.'s then-job and my own career goals, I didn't think we'd stay together without that kind of committment.
On the other hand, I think it's wrong that I feel that way; that I wouldn't feel that kind of committment without the institution. And there seem to me to be a lot of things wrong with the institution, mostly things that have to do with social expectations, legal restrictions, and so forth. Butu also some that, like the committment thing, I think are psychological/emotional associations that aren't inherent in marriage, but are damn damn hard to separate from it. I would like to be able to feel the committment without being caught in the destructive bullshit. I honestly think that part of what makes marriage so difficult is all the unarticulated and unrealized stuff we (the people in the marriage, mostly, but also their friends and relations) think it means, or is supposed to mean.
Like for instance, the idea (in this thread) that the alternative to marriage is being single. This is manifestly untrue, and all the unmarried people here have surely been part of a couple at some point, or are now. But we still think that "not married" = "single," even when our own experience tells us otherwise.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:47 PM
(first sentence of 154 to 150, obviously.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:48 PM
But we still think that "not married" = "single," even when our own experience tells us otherwise.
'We' there means Americans, mostly, doesn't it? Asilon laughed at me for assuming she was married because she had kids a while back: in the US, controlling for class, that's a pretty safe assumption, but in the UK and Europe it isn't any more. Makes you wonder if it really is all about the social safety net.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:53 PM
I was never legally married. We had the intention of staying together, but it was too hard, and since we shared custody of the kid, we never really got separated. Not getting married saved us certain legal costs, and that's it. The other problems are about the same. I call it an unhapp marriage.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:57 PM
Makes you wonder if it really is all about the social safety net.
Richard Posner thinks so, which is why he's against it.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:58 PM
156 is definitely true.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 12:59 PM
all the unmarried people here have surely been part of a couple at some point, or are now.
Probably most have, but would it be too surprising if some hadn't? People live different kinds of lives.
Posted by Fanny Najef-Yoga | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:00 PM
At my early age, I've been in one, fairly short coupleish kind of relationship. Cohabitation wasn't involved, but it almost was. I'm currently searching for another, but I'm really bad at said searching, so I'm not making a lot of progress.
160: I doubt more than one in ten people over twenty-five have never been in such a relationship.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:05 PM
What changes when a couple who's been living together for five years gets married?
You gt much nicer silverware.
And one's mother stops saying 'He'll never buy the cow if he can get the milk for free'.
The Biophysicist & I have been together in non-marital bliss for 14 years. If we got married, we'd take a financial hit. Our health insurance plan covers domestic partners, we've had our children, we have complementary tattoos and good estate plans. We also have all the kitchen appliances that will fit and a lot of silverware. If we thought there'd be a chance that we'd get this as a gift we might bother with the poofy dress and groom's attire and get hitched.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:21 PM
I think 162 gets it exactly right.
Also, btw, tomorrow is our 14th wedding anniversary.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:30 PM
Happy anniversary -- are you baking a cake for the occasion?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:32 PM
Marriage is a step I would no longer take, but complementary tattoos a step beyond that. Removing tattoos is more painful than divorce, at least short-term, and pretty expensive too,
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:34 PM
My late mother gave us a nice wedding present even though we weren't legally married. She was a church lady too.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:36 PM
164: Probably not. PK is angling for cake, but Mr. B. doesn't care for it.
Actually, yesterday, during the angling, PK said, "Mama, would you rather bake cake for someone you're a little annoyed with right now, or for the little grunty who loves you best?" (I think Mr. B. and I were arguing mildly over some packing-related shit, and around here elementary-aged kids are called "grunties.") Totally cracked his father up.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:36 PM
Happy Anniversary, Bitches!
A good friend of mine registered for a compound miter saw for his wedding, and we got it for him, so you never know...
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:37 PM
165: I knew a guy, once, who married a tattoo artist... the wedding was preceded by two tattoos: one a chest-sized skeletal bride and groom with their names, surrounded by a ring of fire... the other a shoulder-to-elbow glow-in-the-dark succubus with a likeness of his wife's face.
Yeah, uh... *that* didn't last too long.
Posted by CatAndGrep | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:40 PM
People always seem to be taken by surprise that social pressures and expectations affect them.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:41 PM
In his capacity as a clergyman, my grandfather did a lot of pre-marital discussions, and he apparently told his charges that they'd be all right as long as they loved God more than each other.
It certainly gets you lasting marriages, but of the sort where people piously grumble that their commitment was to God, not to you.
I'm sort of hard-pressed to admit divorce as an evil absent the horrible side-effects. It's kind of like saying that women shouldn't work because if they have the financial ability to walk out of a bad marriage situation they will rather than grimly making it work (the abuse isn't really that bad, and sometimes we go dancing!)
It's probably the best out of a lot of alternatives, and while in theory it might be better if everyone took the commitment more seriously, I think that just means that people stay in abusive or unhealthy relationships longer than they should, and I'm not sure that's worth moderately unpleasant people working out their differences and staying together.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:44 PM
The only reason I want to get married is for the cookware. Lovely, pretty things to fill up the kitchen. People don't give you cookware otherwise.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:46 PM
I'm sort of hard-pressed to admit divorce as an evil absent the horrible side-effects.
Sure, absent the horrible side-effects, nothing's all that bad. I don't favor efforts to make divorce more difficult -- it's certainly preferable to legally compelling people to remain in bad marriages -- but it's still an awful thing to have happen to you.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:52 PM
people piously grumble
But Cala, this is my ideal relationship.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 1:59 PM
I understand. I'm just not sure I don't prefer, absent the legal question, of a cultural narrative saying 'your commitment above all else.' I dunno. I'm kind of anti-marriage at the moment, because it's scary to think that of me and my friends, most of their marriages aren't going to make it.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:00 PM
Oh, no-fault divorce is totally a good thing. But the actual experience of a divorce, I'm sure, is absolutely excruciating, even without kids in the mix.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:03 PM
176: Yes, even in the best of cases.
(Unless you're a sociopath or a narcissist, in which case in might not be that bad for you, but probably worse for your partner. How often do sociopaths marry? Probably not often.)
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:14 PM
Probably not often.
Really?
(Yes, I know.)
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:18 PM
I really am in favor of divorce. Just not marriage, in most cases. (But how can you have divorce without marriage? asks the logician. If we do not first sin, how can we receive forgiveness?)
But childraising changes a lot of things.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:20 PM
172: From my experience you can get away with asking for stuff when you get a house.
Then you have a party and show everyone how pretty it all is!
So you don't need a wedding, just a house.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:21 PM
But marriage is cheaper than a house.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:26 PM
"Yes, of course! I'll love you no matter what." Because you're young and in love and think you can survive anything. And you know what? Maybe you can.
The safe bet is, "no you can't". Some things should just be assumed to be insurmountable. So very much of it is simply divergent expectations. Of course some things can't be anticipated, but some rather major ones can.
Things like sex are big, but the one that I see getting ignored is money. Money is huge. If your partner has issues with money that you find irresponsible, that should rule them out as a spouse. Because that frustration will be magnified tenfold when married. Not to mention, it can screw up your life for years to come. My wife and I were casual friends with a couple, and we watched the husband drive them into bankruptcy. It was seriously ugly to watch. They're divorced now, and the wife's finances are ruined because her husband was a nutjob.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:26 PM
But marriage is cheaper than a house.
And less of a commitment than is a mortgage.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:27 PM
But a house is an investment and you can sell the house. People frown on you selling a husband.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:32 PM
That's always been what I've been looking for: Can I see myself sharing a checkbook with this woman?
The one person I've dated about whom I would've unambiguously answered yes to that question was, coincidentally, wrong for me in virtually every possible way. But I'm optimistic.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:34 PM
People frown on you selling a husband.
What if you just rent him out during the tourist season?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:35 PM
I don't see why that would be a problem.
You would just have to remember to have him professionally cleaned before and after!
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:37 PM
Another difference: you want shingles on your house all the time, but you only want shingles on your spouse during a nasty divorce.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:37 PM
181: Oh, you think that, do you?
185: See, that's the problem right there. Don't share a checkbook.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:38 PM
Well, a wedding is cheaper than a house. The marriage sucking your soul dry probably can't be put into monetary terms.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:40 PM
190 -- depends on the wedding, and on the house. You could have one of Becks' co-worker's hundred-grand relandscape-the-back-yard-and-then-rent-a-catering-hall marriages, and then move to one of Emerson's North Dakota houses to which they pay you to assume title.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:42 PM
ould have one of Becks' co-worker's hundred-grand relandscape-the-back-yard-and-then-rent-a-catering-hall marriages,
Yes, but I'm not on crack.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:44 PM
192: Well, obviously. Crack addicts can't generally afford that kind of wedding.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:46 PM
Crack dealers, on the other hand...
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:50 PM
Crack whores are a threat to the spread of traditional marriage among crack dealers, I'm convinced of it.
Posted by jmcq | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:54 PM
194: Live with their mothers.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 2:56 PM
178: I don't think it takes a sociopath to fuck up a child. Many milder problems suffice.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:18 PM
RE 197
I think this book is right and there isn't much you can do to fuck up or help your kids outside of your genes.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:31 PM
198: I think that that book is about as powerful as most pop psychology. Haven't read it, though, but so little psychology of that type is any good that i feel justified. Those books are like diet books.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:35 PM
Kobe!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:36 PM
198: Well, I think there are certain aspects about the way we approach relationships, and the attitude we have toward people in general, that are much less determined by genes than most other aspects of our personalities, and much more determined by experiences from birth to age 6-8, which is generally before children start to spend more time with their peer group than their parents. And these tend to be the ways that people get fucked up the most.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:42 PM
I like to thank my mother that her alternating hands-off/smothering style of parenting set the stage for my avoidant attachment personality and hence suited me admirably for life.
She doesn't quite see it as much of a compliment.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:50 PM
202: "Avoidant attachment" as in slow to trust, but strongly attached to those you do trust? Sounds like me.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 3:53 PM
From Wiki
'People with a dismissive style of avoidant attachment tend to agree with these statements: "I am comfortable without close emotional relationships. It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient, and I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me."'
That is what I've been like all my life, though, so I doubt my mother can take all the credit for it.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 4:00 PM
Happy 14th , Dr & Mr B. Apparently the "appropriate" gift is either the tooth of an endangered species or overly-expensive yellow metal...
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 4:39 PM
Hook 'em B's 14th woo!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 4:47 PM
I think the traditional 14th anniversary gift is polyvinyl chloride. Maybe something like this.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 4:47 PM
Make an elephant shaped cake with gold dust on the frosting.
And have a happy anniversary!
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 4:54 PM
I think this book is right and there isn't much you can do to fuck up or help your kids outside of your genes.
Lord, that book is so wrong it's hard to know where to begin. #201 is on the right track.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:06 PM
Re: Divorce - I've had two of 'em. I've learnt since then that a) one should never marry a man whose mother set up his losing his virginity [can we say "unhealthy apron strings"?] and b) never marry an artist, however brilliant he may be, who can't balance a chequebook, because that's a sign he doesn't interface with the real world much. Marriage #1 barely lasted a year; I lost track of him soon thereafter. [In my defence, I was only 16 when we met in college, barely 19 when we married and had no freakin' idea what I was doing.] No. 2 lasted for 10 years or so, with a relatively amicable post-divorce relationship until he remarried and wife #2 decided that he shouldn't have to pay child support because The Kid is adopted. [The court, of course, differed...especially as his income was in the hefty six figures and mine had declined severely when I had to cut my billables to have the time to take The Kid to therapy sessions for his reading disability. I think that, ultimately, my secretary made more than I did.] All in all, the divorce was better for The Kid, as the Biophysicist is a far better male parental unit and our relationship is a better role model than his dad's and wife #2.
Note to second wives: If you decide to marry a man whose profession is "artist", do not then complain bitterly that painting is messy and that you don't want it done in [your] house. This is a bit like marrying Mozart and refusing to allow music in the house because it makes a racket. /snark
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:08 PM
Painting is much messier than non-painters assume, I guess? Paint can end up in places you'd never have guessed it could have gotten- your hair, your ears, your teeth, the ceiling, etc.
If he was pulling down six figures with his painting you'd figure she wouldn't care where paint ended up. I know I wouldn't.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:17 PM
And then there are the paint fumes. I like the smell, but you really shouldn't sleep in the same room as your gear.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:25 PM
Thanks, all. The elephant cake sounds fabulous. LB, would you make that for us? We're busy painting and packing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 5:33 PM
Note to artists: always have at least one spare spouse in the wings in case your present spouse breaks down.
Wives of artists are like junker cars, they get you there most of the time, but they break down when you most need them. You absentmindedly forget to change the oil for 50,000 miles, a mistake anyone can make, and they go all high-maintenance on you.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:00 PM
Winna: I don't get it, either. She also managed to alienate a lot of people with jealous fits at Hollywood parties, which thoroughly thrashed his client base. Not my concern; as he stopped helping the Kid out the second our son hit 18, the fact that he's in worse financial straits now affects me not one whit. [Well, OK, there's the snarky satisfaction that Wife #2 can't do her $3000 weekends at La Costa...] As the hovel that they live in is worth seven figures, I am far from feeling sorry for them.
JM: Since he mainly painted in gouche and acrylic, there weren't the same sorts of mess/fumes one gets with oil paint. All the time we were married, he used a spare bedroom as a studio. Even his tendency to lick his brushes [some paints are toxic] hasn't killed him.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:06 PM
some paints are toxic
Oh my, yes. I heard a BBC report about shitty conditions in African cobalt mines recently...
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:14 PM
JE: Ha! How 'bout 'Artists: Hire an accountant, a live-in housekeeper and a handyman; they are all you really want. Do not, above all, have children, as they tend to become fractious when you forget to feed & water them when your wife is at work/school, forcing you to close the door to the nursery and play loud music until the little woman comes home. Inevitably, this results in recriminations and eventually your wife gets tired of having to take care of all the practical things in life whilst you work your way up the artistic ladder, until even the prospect of a big house with a pool and a sauna and a Jacuzzi isn't enough to compensate for having to take a Torts class with a baby on her hip.'
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:15 PM
gosh drat it all, you American types don't half take everything a bit seriously don't you?
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:39 PM
I always licked my paintbrush, too, when I worked with acrylics. I think I made it through with only minimal brain damage.
Artists can also be annoying with wanting your opinion on their work and then becoming distressed and angry if, even if you like their work, you like it for the wrong reasons. I am sorry, Boyfriend # 4, that I failed to see your pretty blue square was intended to represent the plight of Brazilian landless people in a globalizing economy.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:40 PM
Wives of artists are like junker cars, they get you there most of the time, but they break down when you most need them. You absentmindedly forget to change the oil for 50,000 miles, a mistake anyone can make, and they go all high-maintenance on you.
This goes double x 1010
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:49 PM
a little worked up. hmm what was I saying? Oh yeah. All this goes double times ten to the tenth power for poets, who are never going to make big bucks even if they become the fucking poet laureate. Even if you are an artist, because when it comes to the I-am-a-spiritual-creature, you-should-get-a-job olympics, poets are like the East Germans in the sixties, and you will lose.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 6:53 PM
I have dated an aspiring rock star, an actor, a visual artist, a poet, and a composer. The poet was the absolute worst.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:01 PM
Plus they all resent not being rock stars. A couple of poets I used to know used to rank their poet friends on a "who would they be if they were rock stars" scale.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:07 PM
T.S. Eliot was a banker, Wallace Stevens an insurance exec. Aspiring poets have no excuse.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:08 PM
Honest, guys, I haven't written a poem since 1979.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:11 PM
And William Carlos Williams was a doctor. That makes a grand total of three poets with non-academic jobs. But actually, they frequently do have an excuse. The excuse is they are insane.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:15 PM
BTW, props to Leonard Cohen, who was a literary poet before he became a pop star. I like his literary poems a lot. He also customized tunes to a weak voice and made it work.
Most of his stuff is pretty restrained in production, but his early song "Marianne" is thoroughly cheesified in terms of what was possible in those days (cheesification has advanced exponentially during the last few decades). The version of his stuff I have also has the tracks separated so that on earphones you hear some parts only in one ear and the other parts only in the other.
Incidentally, and I hate to say this, but the Swedes are the premiere cheesificationists of our time.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:16 PM
Lorene Niedecker was quite a fine poet who was self-financed and destitute, but then she was a chick.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:19 PM
mcmc, you enabler, no wonder you date poets. What I mean is, it's possible to be a major poet and hold down a real job.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:19 PM
I used to think that when guys told me they liked poetry they actually liked it, instead of just using it as a way to make a move. That is an excellent illustration of a lookback that makes a person feel like a clueless idiot.
I blame it on all the acrylic I licked off my paint brush.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:23 PM
I know, ogged, must I refer you to Standpipe's joke-explaining blog? I prefer to condemn the entire species, rather than make meager individual exceptions.
And you have your tense so very very wrong in the first sentence.
Lorene is ok with me, because I never met her, plus she's a girl, but I still wouldn't date her.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:25 PM
230: the ones who actually like poetry are much worse. I think I must have licked a lot of paint too.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:27 PM
This Lorine Niedecker?
huh.
Posted by winna | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:27 PM
What art form, if any, is as culturally irrelevant as poetry? Discuss.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:28 PM
Painting.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:29 PM
Yes.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:31 PM
John, I thought you were going to say "analytic philosophy," and I was preparing to laugh heartily.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:35 PM
Damn. Missed my cue.
Not exactly an art form, though.
"Yes" meant "Yes, THAT Lorene Niedecker, not all the others."
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:41 PM
Broadway musicals.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:45 PM
Opera.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:51 PM
Yeah, but who cares? Like cultural relvance matters.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 7:57 PM
Opera at least has big budgets, and you can hear it on the radio every week. People talk about broadway musicals a lot, even if it's a small industry.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:00 PM
I'd say those have limited cultural relevance, but more than poetry. Broadway musicals are important to the extent they end up being imitated by high school hopefuls in the class musical. Opera is relevant among a certain social class. Poetry seems to die, probably for lots of reasons but Imma gonna blame it on the comp lit department, as is my birthright as a philosopher.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:04 PM
Probably avant-garde jazz. That's what I listen to, if evidence is needed.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:06 PM
Seems to me like poetry has a lot of cultural significance over the long term, doesn't it? Is that different from what you guys are talking about? I mean a lot of those genres you mentioned have significance like a hundred or more years down the road.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:08 PM
I suppose it depends on what you mean by relevant. Among fine art practices, painting is currently riding pretty high. It survived its much-hyped death, draws crowds, makes big money, and gets reviewed in the newspapers and magazines (even, sometimes, stuff like Time and Newsweek.) Admittedly most painting doesn't draw such rewards, but such is life in all the arts. Still: You can hang it in your living room! The value of that fact, for better or for worse, has become quite evident to a large number of those people who are getting a larger share of the economic pie. Painting, far from being dead, has been a growth industry in recent years. The middle class, it turns out, likes paintings, and the rich need status symbols.
Which doesn't mean it's all good--of course it's not--or necessarily important. The economic support does tend to encourage more work, which can have good results and bad. Within the discourse of fine arts, painting's been pretty heavyweight in recent years, and in broader cultural terms, it hasn't reached the point of utter irrelevance of, say, certain types of rock music. It's a high art form that has, in perhaps some detriment to its status and/or current quality level, adapted and remained popular and sometimes discussed even among people who don't discuss art much.
As I once pointed out to Armsmasher, we're still a lot more relevant than ballet. And--as was likely true at that time, though I didn't note it--I am immaculately Becks style.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:09 PM
Though I suppose there's no way of insuring that today's poetry will have influence in the next century except by inductive reasoning. Of course the coming apocalypse reduces the weight of long-term arguments.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:10 PM
Imma gonna blame it on the comp lit department
Cala, it's so important that we present a unified front on this. I'm reminded of this earlier post.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:24 PM
I like to thank my mother that her alternating hands-off/smothering style of parenting set the stage for my avoidant attachment personality and hence suited me admirably for life.
And I'd like to thank my parents for helping me develop my own fearful avoidant attachment personality. It has been the financial salvation of many a bar. Let's get married Winna! (Quickly before I change my mind.)
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 8:28 PM
The only artform to truly have cultural relevance is cake. Preferably chocolate.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 08- 7-06 9:38 PM