There is a meme out there which has two sides.
The first is “All men are like that”. If a man has done wrong, all men are tarred with the same brush. Because a minority of men were cads and left without caring for their children, we now have a situation where ordinary men are hounded by the courts if they miss payments, particularly if they lose a job for the courts assume that income can be imputed, despite (in the real world, in a global economic crisis) it cannot be.
In short, I’m in trouble with DCS (child support), and this time it’s pretty serious. This is because I was unemployed and had my income imputed on divorce (this means that they force you to pay at a previous income whether you have it or not), which led to accumulation of arrears. If you haven’t read it before, here’s the background on the situation. I was working it down for a couple of years, but things have dried up lately, and I have to deal with it immediately if I want to see my kids for the holidays and stay out of the King County hotel.
Hopefully, I can come up with enough to do that and will be back to focusing on writing again soon. All in all, it’s just another day in the life of millions of non-custodial fathers, so it isn’t the end of the world. But it still sucks.
The child support system is oppressive. One of the (many) advantages of living in NZ is that you can opt out of this and the child support is linked to your actual, not imputed income. Which is another reason I counsel my sons not to marry or live within an North American Jurisdiction.
There are other examples out there. However, the other meme is the exact opposite. “Not all women are like that”. Even with the most obvious situation where things are unfair and a person has been taken to the cleaners… one exception disproves the rule. To make it fairly clear to any female readers, this is what many men see.
If you are in possession of a decent character, if you believe you have a right to keep the fruits of your labour, and that no-one has the right to stop you from spending time with your own children, then consider Western marriage an extremely high-risk project. Ignore the pressures and ridicule your family and women may throw at you. You are not a sacrificial lemming whose only option is to queue up on the cliff-top and jump, hoping for the best. In the current climate, women have no right whatsoever to lecture us on the need for us to marry. They are not the ones committing suicide en masse due to their kids being taken away and poisoned against them. They are not the ones divorced for no reason then kicked out of their house and forced to spend the rest of their lives labouring simply to meet the costs of a family that now hates them.
Most men know that or have lived that. If a man chooses to commit, he is indeed gambling that not all women are like that, and that the woman he has fallen in love with and has committed to is definately not like that.
But I want to say something else. We are all like that.
We all have the propensity to be like that. In general, men want to have exclusive relations with each women, but adding a younger and prettier version is a temptation. They want whoever the new Brittney is.
In general, women want to trade up. Given a choice of boring and being Mrs Rockstar, Mrs Rockstar they will be.
However, most of us do not act merely on our instincts. We think of those around us. We think of how to be great and good, and we put a civilized veneer over our farts, tolerate the prats, and understand that most men are not monsters, all women are not saints, and that we all fart.
And anyone who denies this is living an ideology, not a life.
PS.
I think Emma Thompson’s character in “Love Actually” is the most tragic one, and the one I have the most sympathy for: and her horrible son’s fart essay is golden.
