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cadmonkey
01-25-2006, 09:42 AM
The Say No To Marriage Manifesto
Why not to get married
By: Kevin Oliver Kalish

One of the saddest moments in my life came in August at a time when I was transferred to Santa Rosa, CA for three months for work. As I was the oven mitt who kept everyone around me from getting burnt by the hot stove of marriage, this was the opportunity my friends’ girlfriends were waiting for. After one month of carefully crafted planning by the women in question with the marrieds around them, three of my boys buckled. All they wanted was to bring back the girl who enjoyed watching the Patriots with the guys, and now they’re wondering where their shadows have gone and why they’re always so “cold”. The effect will be felt by the woman shortly after they return from their honeymoons; the shininess of a diamond has been scientifically proven to numb the feeling of impending doom for anywhere from 6-24 months and inevitably wears off within two weeks after the sayings of “I do”. Upon hearing the news that I had been bamboozled, I wrote the following broken-hearted response to my boys …

I'm in California for two months and suddenly getting engaged becomes the new "hip" or "rad" thing to do in the greater Lowell area. Hey if all your friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too? Apparently the answer is absolutely...WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Much like gonorrhea spreading through a whore house, all my boys are spreading the myth of puss-filled eternal love through these rings of death. Wilk's engaged, the mayor's engaged, Mark is married in 38 states, just wants to pretend like he's single (Mark, you live together, own vehicles together, have a dog together...face it, you're married without the license, cake, and a drunken 19 year old Kevin dancing on stage). The real question is this...Where's the fricken boat? Huh? I don't see a boat in anyone’s yard. By giving Kerri and Michelle and Erica the rings you know that your money becomes "our" money and her money remains "her" money. Have fun staring at your white picket fence built with the boat money. Is that a Christmas bonus that you want to use to buy a motorcycle? Nope, not anymore. Now it's going to the kid’s college fund. Wait, you don't have kids yet...it doesn't matter because your soul belongs to her now. Get used to saying yes dear a lot with a Budweiser in your hand because that's all you'll have to look forward to for the rest of your life. In conclusion, I can now see how my life will end...27 years old...alone on my boat that I will purchase with the money I saved by not buying the ring, giving myself a Viking burial because I'm the last man standing and no one is allowed to hang out with bad influence Kevin on his boat until the yard work is done.

At the time I wrote that e-mail I did not fully understand the pain marriage also causes to women. I realized that women aren’t the enemy of my anti-marriage stance, but rather it’s all the married people around us (If you think hard enough you might even know one or two yourself!) See, married people are inherently unhappy…mostly due to the fact that they are, in fact, married. A lot of this has to do with “the grass is always greener on the other side” phenomenon. When you’re in a relationship and it’s good, you don’t care about the other relationships around you…you think yours is the best ever…the stuff of legend.

Part of that comes from the security in knowing that if things change and get bad, you have the ability to break up and make a quick escape. When you break down and get married, you become trapped and instead of focusing solely on each other, you end up looking at married couple Ashley Big Boobs and Tommy Perfect’s relationship and wonder why your relationship can’t be more like Tommy/Ashley. What you don’t know is that Ashley Depressed Housewife and Tommy Unable To Satisfy The Wife “Sexually” wonder the same about you and your “perfect” relationship. The women wonder things like where the polite man who opened doors and took them on spontaneous trips went and the guys wonder where the free-spirited girl went who wanted to have sex in the back seat of the car in the parking lot before the Sox game went. All that will be gone and what will remain is the fallacy that the grass is greener on the other side and an unrelenting jealousy of those who are still unwed.

But married people will have their revenge…

This is where the circle comes to play. All marriages meet the following pattern…

Step 1: Boy And Girl Meet
Step 2: Boy And Girl Date
Step 3: Boy And Girl Fall In Love, Becoming “A Perfect Couple”
Step 4: Pressure Starts To Come From “The Marrieds” Around The Couple
Step 5: Moment Of Weakness Resulting In Boy Buying Engagement Ring And Girl Saying Yes
Step 6: Wedding
Step 7: Regret
Step 8: So-Called “Happy-Married” Life Where You Have A Strong Desire To Seek For Revenge By Convincing Those Around You That Marriage Is The Way To Go
Step 9: Sweet Release Of Death

This is how the steps work in action. We start with bitterly married couple that hates each other. They are at the upswing of the circle…Step 8. They will “pretend” that the handcuffs of marriage made their relationship stronger. They will claim they love each other even more with each passing day. They will convince the unwed female that this is what she wants and that she is too good to be an “old maid” at 30. In an attempt to avoid this so called tragic fate, she will plot with “the marrieds” to convince the male that she needs to know he’s committed to her and her alone for the rest of his life, and the only way he can prove it is through this act of marriage (even though he’s not going anywhere and neither is she).

The male not wanting to end the relationship, as she is the best girlfriend he’s ever had, succumbs to his weaknesses and insecurities and talks to his married friend not yet knowing that he’s the villain of the story. The married friend tells him how much better married sex is (which is all he needed to hear), and he’s off to buying the ring. The couples 12 month engagement flies by because of all the planning and save-a-dates and flower ordering and wedding dress teasing/flirting games (I’ll give every guy a big hint as to what his bride’s dress will look like…it’ll be white and she’ll look beautiful…of course you’ll both put on 20 lbs over the year following the ceremony, but that’s just one of the many tragic footnotes to our story). Finally, the “big day” arrives and they both have wedding day jitters. The jitters are the conscience’s way of screaming “DON’T DO IT! RUN AWAY! LOUD NOISES!” The conscience sees the impending doom coming and knows it can’t be stopped…kind of like the feeling one gets split second before being involved in a traffic accident…only worse because it is forever.

After the ceremony, the honeymoon begins and ends and everything is wonderful until you return home. It is then that the power of the engagement ring wears off and the worst hangover of your life begins. You wonder if it can ever be stopped…but it can’t. You each go and talk to your married friends and they tell you the truth…the truth about the strain it put on their once wonderful bond. They tell you that they were once happy and what happened to you happened to them a long time ago. It is then that you are initiated into Step 8. And round and round the circle goes…single to dating to “a perfect couple” to angst caused by pressure from “the marrieds” to moment of weakness to funeral of your so-called happy life to 30+ years of unhappy married “bliss” where you spread your plague around to all the “perfect couples” around you to the sweet, sweet release of death.

The name of my fantasy football league this past year was “Say No To Marriage”. The three guys mentioned in my e-mail above were part of the league, as well as three guys in relationships where they might as well be married and one guy who already is trapped in marriage (he finished almost last as a result of all his chores around the house he had to do before he could have 15 minute of “playtime”…but only if he was good). The name served as a warning to everyone in the league, and now to all of you.

You don’t need to be married to have a great relationship. You can be committed to one person for the rest of your life without the paper and ceremony saying that your love is legit and eternal. Little girls don’t dream about their wedding because they want to…they do it because they’re trained to by their married parents or their friends’ married parents. At some point all the pressures of society wear people down and make them weak and marriage becomes the security blanket to make your lives “whole” or “complete” or “perfect” again. Marriage doesn’t do any of those things. All it really does is transform two people who were once happy just to be with each other and puts them in a situation where they have no escape, so they focus on that one fact. All the good things about the relationship are gone or hidden and all the bad resides at the surface and builds and builds until the once perfect relationship is ruined, and our once happy, but now miserable couple are stuck together until death do they part.

http://www.barstoolsports.com/article/The_Say_No_To_Marriage_Manifesto/704/ (http://)

DJJasonp
01-25-2006, 09:50 AM
I needed this reminder so I can remember to stay strong without any moments of weakness...

Thanks!

Simplex3
01-25-2006, 09:59 AM
This was funny. Then the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th.... and eleventy-th billion paragraphs happened.

cadmonkey
01-25-2006, 10:00 AM
I needed this reminder so I can remember to stay strong without any moments of weakness...

Thanks!


Thats what I'm hear for, to stop the insanity of marraige.

cadmonkey
01-25-2006, 02:55 PM
bump.......

KCTitus
01-25-2006, 03:02 PM
The author confuses the problem as marriage rather than the men and women entering marriage for the wrong reasons.

Too many people jump into marriage because 'its time' or other reasons and Ive seen friends do what the author bemoans--confusing lust with love.

Phobia
01-25-2006, 03:13 PM
The Say No To Marriage Manifesto
Mark is married in 38 states, just wants to pretend like he's single (Mark, you live together, own vehicles together, have a dog together...face it, you're married without the license, cake, and a drunken 19 year old Kevin dancing on stage).

You don’t need to be married to have a great relationship. You can be committed to one person for the rest of your life without the paper and ceremony saying that your love is legit and eternal.May I interest anybody in a blatant contradiction?