About Marriage

I had an interesting debate with a female acquaintance recently. A friend of mine has been living with his girlfriend for several years now, and this lady chastised him – Why don’t you be a man and marry her, she inquired. My friend responded with Why don’t you go f**k yourself? Whatever his response may have lacked in tact was more than made up for in brevity and clarity. But, being the masochist that I am, I picked up the sword and marched into verbal battle with the lass. How do you define marriage, I asked? Initially she wouldn’t answer, spewing some nonsense about how I already knew what it was. But I pointed out that in order to debate whether something was good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or distasteful; one must first define the topic; and I suspected that our opinions may differ in this critical area. So she indulged me. Marriage is when two people love each other, agree to forsake all others, and live together in union as one under the eyes of the Lord, she said. Or words to that effect – I didn’t write all this sh*t down. But that’s pretty close. But, I replied, I know people that are married that hate each other. And depending upon which survey you want to believe upwards of 50% of married couples cheat on each other at some point. And I know one married couple that split up seven years ago but never did get a divorce. And yet all of these people are “married.” And, of course, a couple can have all of those things without actually being married, so that kind of blows your theory out of the water don’t it toots?

Sensing that she was cornered, she said Okay smartass, what do you think marriage is? This, of course, is exactly what I was waiting for. Bless her heart, she had taken the bait. Marriage, I replied, is a piece of paper on file in a county courthouse that will totally and completely f**k at least one of the parties and possibly both of them if things don’t work out. And with the divorce rate hovering around 53%, there’s a pretty damn good chance of that coming to pass, I pointed out. Now, if you were to go skydiving, and they told you that 53% of the parachutes don’t work, how likely would you be to jump off the perfectly functioning aircraft? (I did not admit to her, but I will to you, that I totally stole that analogy from a standup comedy bit I heard on Comedy Central). Nothing but stammering from my debate partner. Case closed. What about sex? Well, what about it? Any guy that can put a sentence together, look a girl square in the eye, and make her laugh will have no trouble pulling some tail of reasonable quality. Strap on a guitar and step on a stage, and I’ll bet you can even get a hot twenty-something to blow you backstage and pay for your beer all night. Trust me on that one.

My friend and his girl seem pretty happy to me, and I don’t blame him for not getting married. The system is just not set up to reward the act, and he has a lot of really cool sh*t that he probably wants to keep.

Deathpool Dave
DPDave.com