Must marriage be forever and ever?

OM, I have to go back & read what y'all are talking about!

Wow, what was the topic again? Went from gay to bi, to couples, to Warlord & PB&A still being in love, back to dysfunctional families, to extended families, to shacking up for convenience, to many partners & many divorces, to kids, to just plain shacking up for different reasons, back to kids, to being acceptable or not to society!
My head hurts now. I feel so much like Vinnie Barbarino: (I'm sooo confused.) And the topic still is: Must Marriage Be Forever & Ever?

Personally & IMO. It all goes back to self respect. When there is a dysfunctional family (we all have em folks, seen through the eyes of a child). As we become teenagers we sometimes have seen the vast views of society (through attending school, events, having & playing w friends, visiting or not visiting family, info from media, opinions of others we cherish or hate) & start making our own decisions, our own rules, finding out where we stand & eventually who we are. We continue to primp & preen our own self reliance into young adulthood. Agree?
STOP. Some never get this far! We bring our baggage of how things were in our lives, & what we are looking/aiming for in our adult lives.
STOP. Some never get beyond their baggage. Some refuse, some cherry coat it, they never get to the point of self realization or self assurance.
STOP. So what 2 people bring to the Marriage table are their past, present, & futures. Separate, but wanting or needing to be with this other person. Someone to connect with, enjoy, have fun with! The joys of courtship or lust! (Love, such a funny word. We come by that definition again through our PAST experiences, seen through a childs eyes).
We are all different, our experiences are different, our views are different, our relationships w others are different, our lifestyles are different, our committments to ourselves & others are different.
STOP. The hard part comes when 2 people want to BLEND, with each other & be seen as ONE. Maybe through their eyes, or societies. For their own reasons or for societies. Thats when the committment begins.
Does it have to be legalized, documented, confessed, witnessed, or approved ? That is for those two individuals to decide. NO ONE else.
Does this make sense so far?

I think the only reason the divorce rate is spiralling out of control is because people have been brainwashed into rushing into everything they do, black and white thinking, the media puts a lot of demands and orders onto people that are unrealistic. The concept of relationships has gone out the window, with all the unwritten laws we are supposed to follow in order to "succeed".
I surely believe in soul mates, but i also know i have met several of them. I think we meet soul mates who serve different purposes, i don't think we are meant to stay with one person for eternity. i think we love many different times, some people are destined to be alone. When prison bars are put up, it damages the freedom and amazing aspect of true caring for someone, and the world we live in has corrupted what caring really means.
I don't believe in marriage. I'm not pessimistic, i'm just a realist. If i found a soul mate i could be with for a long period of time, i probably wouldn't even share a house with them, because I, personally, need my space or i go on a killing spree. I would be loyal to extremes, but still, i don't believe in all those rules of what relationships and marriages are supposed to look like. i have my own morals to follow.

HappyKweer wrote:

tmarie64 wrote:Then why get married at all, HK? Why bother playing commitment if you're not truly going to MAKE one?

Why end up in a marriage where the partners take each other for granted or believe that, since they are married, they can 'let themselves go,' (whether it be physically, emotionally, toss manners out the door, skip sex, whatever.) If you know that marriage contract is up for renewal or cancellation every year, it seems to me it would serve to keep BOTH partners on their best behavior towards each other, rather than getting slack towards the commitment or each other as time goes on.

In other words, the idea that a marriage commitment is 'for life' (much like a murder conviction) is a wholly man-made construct that I do NOT believe is necessity, or even valuable as an ideal. People can change over time and grow apart. If two married people grow in different directions over periods of years such that they no longer have much in common, why not cancel the contract or fail to renew? It will allow both to go out and seek new partners who better fit the people the each have grown into over the years.

You think shack up don't take each other for granted? You think shack ups don't "let themselves go"?
If you have to pretend at being your best toward your partner, then your partnership is DOOMED. You have to WANT to be your best.
My husband and I don't have huge amounts of stuff in common. But we LOVE each other. We would die for each other. Like Warlord and PB&A, we are soulmates. We complete each other.
You seem to think that if two people are not alike they should split. That's just stupid. I have no desire to further my education...He is working on his Master's. I HATE being in charge and making decisions for business, he thrives on it. He loves to watch sports on tv, me-not so much. He's a history geek, doesn't like math...I'm a math geek, can't stand history.
So, by your standard, we should divorce. Spoken like someone who has no idea of what they speak. Some do grow apart. Some should never have married in the first place...Those are usually the people who think an orgasm is the same thing as love. But there are just as many who stay together because, in spite of all their differences, BECAUSE of all their differences, they love each other, and they truly LIKE each other.

Davelaw wrote:Oh did he mean a literal tea-pot?

I thot it was another way of saying:

You gotta lick it
before we can kick it

LOL now I have this awful nightclub song in my head! Thanks a lot!



(Marriage talk from someone who hasn't been married long, feel free to ignore)
As for the topic...I haven't read through the *entire* thread but I can say so far that I agree with Tmarie...if you go into something thinking it's going to fail, it will most of the time. That's certainly been my experience. My parents taught me that relationships, like many other things, are what you make of them. It takes effort from both sides. Accidents happen. People lose their jobs. People get sick...I don't know that some people really consider these things when they're thinking of getting married.

I don't really see why someone would even bother to get married if they weren't going to make a commitment, or intend to be together through it all. Otherwise, wouldn't it be better to save yourself all of the legal and financial bullcrap that goes with a divorce if you think you're going to split up when its not fun anymore? Because that's what it often boils down to for a lot of people-when it starts to become 'too much work', a lot of people 'jump ship'. Things aren't going to be rosy and happy all the time. I don't mean to sound bitter here, I've had relationships where I was the main one putting in the effort, and where things like bad moods, crying jags or frustration over lost jobs were 'too much for them'. I'd understand if I were a holy terror, but that's not the case...either way, I'm glad none of these relationships worked out (however much I prayed that they would), because my husband and I have already had quite a few trials and are doing a lot better than I ever thought possible.

My point is that I can't see why someone would go through all of the rigamarolle that goes along with getting married if they aren't willing to at least try to stick by each other when times are hard. We have good examples-his parents have been married and liking each other for more than 40 years, and mine would have been married much longer than their 28 years if my mom were still alive.

BD... I think the reason the really good marriages last is because they are friends LONG before they become lovers. My husband and I were friends, we'd hang out, go drinking, talk... we dated for a long time before we had sex.
We really LIKED each other. Hell, we didn't even realize that we loved each other until he was about to get out of the Army and it hit us that he might be going back to Kansas and we might never see each other again. Then it hit us that we NEEDED each other.

That's how my parents were, good friends before anything else. Even if the sex thing isn't a huge thing with my husband and me, we get along very well and are very accepting and affectionate toward each other. I think that's probably the best thing.

DotNotInOz wrote:Hear, hear...what Ebon, MC and Gilly all said.

Hubby and I are agreed that you've a relationship likely to last when you can fart in bed comfortably, and the other person only complains when the fumes are noxious enough to make breathing hazardous.

It's a really workable relationship when you laugh and compete to see who can drive the other person out of bed without experiencing any "unfortunate mishaps."

LOL so you've been hanging out in my and my husband's bedroom?

Davelaw wrote:Hope I don't get flamed; but I believe we are all a little bi-sexual. That attraction is like a bell curve and some are to the far right or left and some are more in the middle and attracted to both. But we all will occasionally see that person of the same sex that stops us in our tracks; but depending on how strongly we wired-it may or may not-change our current path.

No flaming here, because I agree with you. Sexuality for a lot of people is on a 'spectrum' rather than hard-and-fast in one place. Also, there are different kinds of attraction. I've known people who didn't really think they would be attracted to a particular person (of either sex), but once they got to know the person and a close friendship grew, the romantic stuff came naturally. To quote one of the ladies on Grey's Anatomy-"I don't generally like kissing girls, but I like kissing thisgirl." One lady I know once said to me that she's had so many relationships with women, she's surprised that she ended up with a man. She's not confused about her sexuality, just in love with a particular man rather than a woman. Relationships can be very complicated, with a lot of layers.

Seems like a good place to refer to the Kinsey Scale as follows:

0- Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexual

1- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual

2- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual

3- Equally heterosexual and homosexual

4- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual

5- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual

6- Exclusively homosexual

...The scale is purely a method of self-evaluation based on your individual experience, and the rating you choose may change over time.

The scale ranges from 0, for those who would identify themselves as exclusively heterosexual with no experience with or desire for sexual activity with their same sex, to 6, for those who would identify themselves as exclusively homosexual with no experience with or desire for sexual activity with those of the opposite sex, and 1-5 for those who would identify themselves with varying levels of desire or sexual activity with either sex.

Source

I've had no experience with, nor do I want experience with, another woman. It's just not appealing at all.
So, the "we're all bisexual" theory is just that... a theory. Because there's nothing any woman has that turns me on.

Then you fall at the far extreme, Tina and of course people do fall there. I don't have any desire in that area either but I do wonder. A friend of mine taught in the prison system for many years and he is fond of saying that men will have sex, in his experience, with each other if there is no one else. He doesn't think that it is so much that everyone is bisexual, it is just that people have a strong impulse to have sex and skin contact. If having that with a woman is impossible then some will settle for what they can get. I wonder that if I was in that situation would I take what I could get? I don't honestly know.

I agree with BD (and Dave). There's really no black or white, just a spectrum. I've seen homophobics and heterophobics (yes, there's just as many) on both sides who swear "There's no way I'd EVER EVER EVER", and that's fine, but I don't think that holds true to the biological instincts and wiring in the brain that adapt. Like the prison story - Before prison, most of these boys would "NEVER EVER EVER."

Sexual brain chemistry is bizarre, and I've been thinking deeply on it since I was sitting in Sunday School at 13, destined to hell, because I had sex with the boy sitting across the table from me and not the girl on my right.

I think even the Kinsey scale is too black-and-white because there are so many variables, we'll never understand it. That's why acceptance is just necessary.

gillyflower wrote:A friend of mine taught in the prison system for many years and he is fond of saying that men will have sex, in his experience, with each other if there is no one else. He doesn't think that it is so much that everyone is bisexual, it is just that people have a strong impulse to have sex and skin contact. If having that with a woman is impossible then some will settle for what they can get.

But that's a matter of what I'd call "situational homosexuality." It's not as though the men (or women) in prison have any option but their own gender.

As Tina and you have pointed out, you've never felt any attraction to another woman, so you're both at the extreme het end.

I wonder that if I was in that situation would I take what I could get? I don't honestly know.

The nasty reality probably is that whoever was bigger and meaner than you would make that decision for you.

Lisa Lampanelli: "I have a question. When you fags go to prison... is that taking a trip to Disneyland? Must be *this* tall to ride."

Yeah, yeah...I'm part of her posse.

All you organisms, shooting your DNA at each other.....