Lisa Gabriele: Without Ceremony: How I've Managed to Avoid Getting Married for Forty Years

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Without Ceremony: How I've Managed to Avoid Getting Married for Forty Years

By Lisa Gabriele, Nerve.com. Posted May 1, 2008.

For an institution associated with a 50 percent failure rate and bad sex, marriage still has surprisingly many takers -- not me.




A little over ninety years ago, British philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered a famous lecture called "Why I Am Not A Christian," in which he rejected God, Christianity and the notion that only religion produces truly moral people.

Russell wasn't against the idea of love or humanism, nor did he argue that those who sought solace in some kind of god should be deprived of the right to do so. He simply felt that religion wasn't the best way to learn how to be good. In fact, he argued, it was one of the worst. Yet nearly a century later, people still flock to religion for its promise of self-fulfillment, just as they flock to a related institution, marriage, which also promises fulfillment and seems equally indestructible, despite its embarrassing failure rate, anachronistic qualities and implied sexlessness.

A big fat wedding will still fill a movie theater, just as a big fat sermon still puts asses in the pews. Rabid brides remain popular TV characters on par with home renovators and homosexuals.

I won't argue the myriad ways in which marriage as an institution is old, tired and obsolete. That's an old, tired, obsolete argument. But at forty, I'm tired of evading that perennial question: Why have your siblings and every single one of your three-dozen cousins been married and not you? I can't use a broken home as an excuse -- my brothers and sisters, raised under the same awful marriage, practically sprinted down the aisles in their twenties; two remain happily married. Nor is it true that I haven't met The One. I've met plenty of The Ones, so many that my sister took to calling my boyfriends The Two, The Three, etc. Counting the last boyfriend, we left off at The Eight.

Truth is, I was afraid, not just of marrying the wrong man at the right time, or marrying the right man at the wrong time. Most people have those fears. My fear was about how malleable, how changeable I was. I was afraid of permanency because I didn't know who I'd be a week, a month, a year from the big day. And though the men who loved me were stellar, I can't say the same for the men I loved. I still assumed one would show up in time to eliminate all those fears. He'd pin me down in a fixed point in time: after college, after I got settled in my career, after I bought a condo, lost ten pounds, went blonde, wrote a book, saved money, got a dog.

Part of the problem was that I was drunk for the better part of the two decades most women spend looking for an appropriate partner.

I was drawn to increasingly blurry guys: brats and posers, glowering self-loathers, the last ones to leave the party. Since quitting the booze years ago, I have discovered that, with rare exception, real love did whatever it could to avoid getting tangled up with a drunk girl drenched in fear. Lust stuck around for a while -- years, even. But true love, the kind that evolves into sturdy amity, took a walk a while ago. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/83923/

I mean, being drunk for 20 years as a strategy to avoid marriage! Genius!

I got sucked into the marriage thing, even though I thought it was a pretty stupid idea. It did confer the illusion of stability. That's about all it did.

Thank goodness for the divorce courts, they did us both a favor.

Marriage was obviously a much better deal for him than for me, he's on #4 while I'm still solo.

together until death parts them, and attend 50th wedding anniversaries, you have a different outlook on life and marriage. Unfortunately, it's not fashionable any longer.

That's why we baby boomers decided that if we were in a bad marriage, we would get a divorce, instead of tormenting the kids by staying together. Or we would live together first, to make sure that we weren't seeing a person always on their best behavior.

My dad was a divorce lawyer, and he said that a lot of unbroken homes were worse than broken ones.

My parents were married for 53 years. They argued constantly and made us miserable. Mom told me what a bum my father was all the time. I saw no evidence that he was a bad guy. So when I was six years old, I said "If he's so bad, why don't you get a divorce?" which left her aghast and catching flies. She had no answer for me.

Dad never considered divorce; Mom considered it all the time. :shrug:

Arguing is a process of any relationship, and keeps it alive, when there is respect for the other person and fulfillment of the promised commitments.

ABUSE is what kills a relationship.

This society is full of stunted, narcissistic people who cannot sustain a relationship because they can neither give nor take, nor compromise, and will drop any commitment at the first sign that it will require some effort or the slightest sacrifice.

I achieved the same ends by being hideously ugly, and being unable to tell a lie, especially to women. Keeps 'em away in droves. The lonliness is offset by the fact that I haven't gone into debt buying every little thing and taking care of any would-be partners.