Posit by Mellryn: Marriage sucks. Not necessarily for the guy, but almost definitely for the gal.
The Devil’s Advocate in Mellryn’s brain: But how do you know marriage sucks? You’ve never been married.
Mel: I’ve never been in a car wreck either, and I don’t need to be, in order to know that car wrecks suck. It is a simple conclusion based on my observations of car wrecks and hearsay about other car wrecks. In virtually every instance I’ve seen personally and heard others talk of, being married ruins the relationship.
Devil’s Advocate: So you’re not even going to try marriage?
Mel: Like I said, I don’t need to be in a car wreck to know it would suck. I don’t need to be in a car wreck to know I don’t want to be in one, and I don’t need to get married in order to know I’d be unhappy and regret it.
Devil’s Advocate: Seriously though, how do you know if you don’t try it? Are you going to take the bad experiences of other people and let them interfere with you being happy?
Mel: Being married wouldn’t make me happy. It would make me feel trapped. Being married just makes it a huge pain-in-the-ass to leave the person you’re married to if you want to, so you end up putting up with someone you love(d) being a pain-in-the-ass, when you wouldn’t have otherwise, because it’s MORE of a pain-in-the-ass to leave them than to just suck it up and put up with their shit. If you’re married, your significant other has to push you to a really unhappy point in order to make you willing to plow through the legal process of leaving them (which, in case you haven’t picked up on it, is a huge pain in the ass). Marriage results in relationships turning into a cost-benefit analysis, instead of being about caring and loving the person you’re with. Relationships, intimate or not, shouldn’t be a cost-benefit analysis. That just sucks.
Devil’s Advocate: Isn’t comparing a marriage to car wrecks a bit disingenuous? And insulting to married people, to compare their marriage to a car wreck?
Mel: Perhaps, but being insulting is not my intention or my point, it’s merely an unfortunate side-effect.
Devil’s Advocate: I concede that some marriages turn IN to car wrecks, but not all marriages are like car wrecks. Would you stop driving because of the fear of getting into a car wreck?
Mel: No, marriages don’t automatically turn in to car wrecks, they just set up a situation where getting into a car wreck is almost inevitable. Like drunk driving. Driving while drunk increases the chances of you doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous a thousandfold. (Ok, I’m not actually sure what the exact statistics of impairment and it’s affect on accidents and their seriousness are. Think “hundredfold” if it makes you feel better.) And it decreases your ability to react in time to avoid disaster and serious harm to yourself and others. Worse, most people who drive drunk probably think that they’re “fine” in terms of driving straight and reaction time, because your perception of your drunkenness is thrown off by the fact that your judgment is compromised by your drunkenness. Some people do it and get home without a scratch. Those people have thus learned that driving drunk may not have consequences, which increases their chances of doing it again, which increases their chances of hitting and killing someone/something. It’s a vicious cycle.
Marrying has the same affect on your relationship as driving while drunk does on your reaction time and likelihood of getting into an accident, and when you do, getting into one involving serious injury and damage. It skews your judgment and makes you apathetic and complacent. You think everything’s fine, but other people who are sober (usually unmarried people) can see you swerving all over the road. And maybe you get home fine, several times. But eventually something bad will happen.
Devil’s Advocate: Comparing marriage to driving while drunk is disingenuous too, almost as much as that hated “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” analogy you hate so much. Women are not cows to be bought and having sex is not like “milking”. Getting married is not the same as driving drunk in terms of disaster and harm inflicted, because driving drunk is much more likely to result in a terrible accident than getting married is to result in a terrible end of your relationship. If the divorce rate is a measure of the success of a marriage, then you can look at it positively as a sign that 50% of marriages succeed. How do you explain that many successful marriages?
Mel: No, the analogy isn’t perfect. That’s the biggest problem with analogies, is that there are no two situations which exactly resemble another enough to be used properly. But neither is using the divorce rate as a measure of a marriage’s success a good idea. Just because you haven’t divorced doesn’t mean the marriage is good, or works, or is successful, or makes both partners happy and better off than they would be if they weren’t married. I am convinced that those relationships that are happy and successful marriages succeed in spite of the fact that they are married, not because of it.
Devil’s Advocate: So you’re going to stop driving in the hopes of avoiding a car wreck? You won’t get married?
Mel: No, I am still driving; I am still in an intimate, committed, possibly “forever” relationship. I’m just not going to drive while drunk, because I want to avoid a car wreck, and driving drunk greatly increases the possibility that a car wreck will happen. Ergo: I’m not going to get married because I want to avoid the apathy and disconcern resulting from marriage, because of the affect that such apathy and disconcern causes on a relationship. I am not getting married to avoid increasing the possibility that my relationship will end up being a fount of misery and a source of dissatisfaction and pain.