Comments on: Quotage [marry the one you burn for]

By: Hearthrose

Tue, 06 May 2014 21:31:00 +0000

There are reasons I’m quite blunt about my youth – same as you are. It would be terminally easy for me to shut my mouth and let people think that it was smooth and easy and virtuous. You get a lot of mythos when you marry your high school squeeze. IF you want to marry young – (your original point in your blog is that sometimes we do want to do this) – we have to have systems in place that make it workable. I was just about insane by the time I got out of college, we’d waited so long to be together… I was sleeping 14 hours in a day to make the days go by more quickly. (Eat, write papers, sleep – that was my life).

My husband *does not* have a college degree. If we’d married young, like as not we could have done college together – we took a couple of classes at the local junior college together and enjoyed that. But you’ll note that he’s the one putting the roof over our heads? There hasn’t been a day of our marriage that he hasn’t out earned me. A chunk of that was the dumb degree I took, but still. The “go to college and life will open out before you like a flower” is a lie. I bought that lie and my teachers bought that lie. I remember when I was in junior college, working at a local craft store on my off hours. One of my HS teachers came in – you’d have thought I’d killed her puppy from her face. I was one of the bright ones, I wasn’t supposed to be in town working a cash register… :p

Long reply – but basically I’m agreeing with everything you wrote and cheerfully offering myself up as an object example of what not to do.

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By: chrisgale

Tue, 06 May 2014 20:01:00 +0000

The acceptance in our society that you will fornicate before you go to the altar and the idea that this is some kind of romantic sacrament is…
… a distortion of what should happen, when you go to the altar, lay your live down for each other, and then consummate that joyfully.

This lie is repeated often: consider the Sookie Stackhouse series (True Blood TV — which has more bonking in it than Game of Thrones, but in GoT the temptation is power, which gets me less than romance. Need to avoid TB) where she sleeps with Vampire Bill, gets bitten, and this is portrayed as high gothic romance.

EDIT
In my mother’s day (she was a teenager during the 1940s and 1950s) if you did have sex with that man there was a very high likelihood you would end up pregant and either “go up North” (to the family farm, have the baby in a rural maternity ward, and give the baby up for adoption) — which is what happened to my birth mother — or go down the aisle knowing you were in for labour pains in seven months or so.

Sex had consequences then, and everyone knew it. It still has consequences, but our society denies it. Hence the need for vampires to MAKE it romantic and irreversible — it is part of our psychology. We want this to be more than a pleasant exercise.

And that used to be getting knocked up after the first or second time you “went all the way”.

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By: Hearthrose

Mon, 05 May 2014 21:17:00 +0000

It is good to know where you belong, yes. And I’m daffy over him.

But as your article said – there are drawbacks. Imagine the … impatience of youth (you have two as an example) who know who they’re supposed to be with but don’t know how to make that happen within the “rules”.

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By: chrisgale

Mon, 05 May 2014 20:12:00 +0000

Lucky you. I did not meet anyone like that until I was older than you were when you wed. And yes, I married her. According to yesterday’s paper 35% of marriages in the year I wed (1988: I am ancient, Will) were divorced before their silver anniversary — which would have been November last year. And we made it to 20 years.

You give a woman your life, your fortune and your sacred honour and you trust that she will never pull the trigger on you. But that can break at any time in this world.

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By: Hearthrose

Mon, 05 May 2014 14:23:00 +0000

Yes. I might have even deserved white on my wedding day if I thought I was shooting for a wedding at 18 rather than in my early-20s…. (For your reference, DH and I started off-and-on dating at 14, and have been attached at the hip since 16/17, got married at 22 – 23 for him by four days). And I’d not have chosen Women Studies if I wasn’t *looking for* the lowest and easiest hurdle to jump over so I could finally get married.

At 18 I drove over here every morning, got him out of bed so we could go to class, we went to class together, shared an unofficial bank account (meaning he deposited his checks into mine and I took as much money out as he wanted) and worked completely as a team. We *could* have gone to college as a married couple…

And yes, me going off to Santa Cruz to finish my degree work was sucky for our relationship, although we didn’t break up or anything. I put a lot of miles on a wonky car getting home to see him though! (Poor man thought I was dating around on him until he visited me. Not a lot of hetero males at UCSC – those that were had a nice selection).

So yes, thanks for mentioning my “if only we’d done it *that way*” … 😛

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By: Wiless

Mon, 05 May 2014 13:34:00 +0000

“Most fall in love, seriously and hard, in their late teenage years — as it was designed from the beginning. We should work with this, not against it.”
Exactly!

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