I found this article a while back and found it a bit cynical. Being a bit more experienced nowadays, it seems like sound advice. What do you think?
This pretty much sums up marriage:
Were a young man to ask me, "To marry perchance, or remain forever
single?" I would, given the hostile circumstances today of law and
love, urge caution. "Marriage is a commitment of several years of your
life, plus child support," I would say. "Do not make it rashly."
The question is simply, "Why marry?" As a young man full of dangerous
steroids, your answer will probably be, "Ah, because her hair is like
corn silk under an August moon; her lips are as rubies and her teeth,
pearls; and her smile would make a dead man cry." This amounts to,
"I'm horny," with elaborations. It is as it ought to be. The race
continues because maidens are glorious, and striplings both desperate
and unwise.
Note, incidentally, that by the time October rolls around, corn silk
is shriveled and brown.
Why marry, indeed? In times past, marriage occasionally made sense.
Life on a farm required two people, a woman to work herself ragged in
the cabin while the man carried heavy lumpish things and shot Indians.
Later, come suburbia, the man did something tedious in an office and
the woman did two hours housework and stayed bored for six. It worked,
tolerably. In the Fifties, nobody expected much of life. It generally
met their expectations.
And there was sex, though not enough of it -- the scarcity being the
propellant behind matrimony. Back then, before the miracle of
feminism, women had not yet commoditized themselves. A lad had to pop
the question before he got laid regular. Women controlled the carnal
economy and, in a world that was going to be boring anyway, that was
probably a good thing. At least kids had parents.
Times change. Some advice to young fellows setting forth:
First, forget that her lips are sweet as honeydew melon (though not,
of course, green). It doesn't last. One of nature's more disagreeable
tricks is that while men are far uglier than women, they age better.
Remember this. It is useful to reflect in moments of unguided passion
that, beneath the skin, we are all wet bags of unpleasant organs.
Soon you will be a balding sofa ornament and she will look like a
fireplug with cellulite. Once the packaging deteriorates, there had
better be something to get you through the next thirty years. Usually
there isn't.
Prospects have improved for the single of both genders. Sex is
nowadays always available. If you don't marry Moon Pie, which would be
wise, you may get another chance when she comes back on the market
with the first wave of divorcees. It's never now-or-never. Getting
older doesn't diminish your opportunities. As you gain experience, you
will recognize the tides, the eddies, the whirlpools of coupling --
the urgency of the biological clock, the lunacy of menopause. Men by
comparison embody a wonderful clod-like simplicity.
As you ponder snuggling forever with Moon Pie, compare the lives of
your bachelor and your married friends. The bachelors come and go as
the mood strikes them, order their apartments with squalid abandon,
drive Miatas or Harleys if they choose, and live in such pleasant
dissolution as is consonant with continued employment. The married guy
lives in a vast echoing mortgage beyond his means, drives sensible
cars he doesn't like, and loses his old friends because he isn't
allowed to hang out with them.
Self-help books to the contrary, marriage does not rest on
compromises, but on concessions. You will make all of them. Perhaps it
doesn't have to be this way. But it is this way.
Moon Pie has only one reason for marriage: to get her legal hooks into
you. She doesn't think of it in these terms, yet, and she has no evil
intentions. She just wants a nice quiet home in the remote suburbs
where she can live uneventfully, raise progeny, and keep her eye on
you.
If you think surveillance isn't part of the contract, try going out
late with your old buddies. Marriage is an institution founded on
mistrust. If she thought you would stick around if not compelled, she
wouldn't need marriage. She wants monogamy, at least for you and, with
some frequency, for herself. She knows viscerally that you would
prefer the amorous insouciance of an oversexed alley cat. You know it
consciously. Marriage exists to control the male, until recently a
good idea. Now, however, she can support herself, and doesn't need
protection. She doesn't need you, or you, her.
She will, however, want to have children. Women do. At which point,
God help you.
Given the schools, drugs, latch-keyism consequent first to working
parents and then to divorce, and the cultural pressure on children to
be slatterns and dope-dealers, reproduction is a gamble. You may not
even particularly like them, or they, you. Nobody talks about this,
but how many people do you know who hardly talk to their grown
children?
And you've just tied yourself into twenty years of raising them.
The moment Junior enters wherever it is that we are, Moon Pie will
have you screwed to the wall. She won't think of it this way, yet.
She'll be delighted with the cooing bundle of joy, his little fingers,
his little toes, etc. But divorce usually comes. The chances are two
to one that she will file: Women are more eager than men to enter
marriage, and more eager to leave it -- with the kids, the house, and
the child support. It won't be amicable, not after seven years. You
will be astonished at how ruthless she will be, how well she knows the
law, and how utterly hostile to divorcing fathers the law is.
You don't understand how bad the divorce courts are. You probably
don't know what "imputed income" is. You think that "joint custody"
means "joint custody." Think again. Quite possibly you will have to
support her while she moves with your kids to Fukuoka with an Air
Force colonel she met in a meat bar.
In short, marriage often means turning twenty-five years of your life
into smoking wreckage. Yes, happy marriages exist (I personally know
of one) and there are the somnolent marriages of habitual contentment
or, perhaps, of quiet resignation. But the odds aren't good.
Permit me an heretical thought. In an age when neither sex
economically needs the other, in which women do not need protection
from wild bears and marauding savages, not in the suburbs anyway,
perhaps marriage doesn't make sense, at least for men. The divorce
courts remove all doubt. A young fellow might do well to stay single,
keep his DNA to himself, pick such flowers as he might find along the
way, and live his life as he likes.
