Marriage

…and why I’d prefer to pierce my ballsack with a rusty hypodermic needle I’ve just found on the floor than be wed

Ah, the age old tradition of declaring half of your worldly possessions to belong to someone you met on eHarmony three months ago. What a beautiful institution. NAHHHHT.

Okay, you might think me bitter — and you might think me just the tiniest bit cynical. But what is the point? I really have nothing against love, commitment, or partnership in any sense. In fact, I’m all for it. I just think that marriage is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money.

Marriage is (wrongly) seen as the highest peak that a relationship can ever climb — and this is down to a staggering lack of imagination. Girls and guys go misty-eyed at the prospect of spending thousands of pounds to publicly chain themselves to someone else who’s equally as deluded. Why isn’t just being together enough? Why are you so weak that you need to cave to the expectations of everyone else around you? The phrase “to do the honourable thing” is incredibly medieval, and you don’t need a similarly-medieval government document to declare that your relationship is infallible, that your eyes won’t rove or that you will never change your mind about the person you’ve chosen — as it’s no guarantee.

What you’re really doing when you put that engagement ring on his or her finger is inviting a bunch of tired, hungover bureaucrats to hover over every fiscal aspect of your lives; it’s another invisible rein of authority bearing down upon your already meagre existence. One can’t even love freely without a legal covenant. The bond of marriage is just that — you both share a common stock in the eyes of the law: each other. Your marriage is now WORTH something physical, something monetary, which is a relief because now your brain can process the enormity of your decision, whereas before — in love’s most mellifluous and heightened passion — it was too busy living in the moment, seizing the day, and being happy to notice that it had to UNDERSTAND what it was going through.

We live in a nation still subtly dominated by religious doctrine, the conservatism of our culture lies in how everyone has to be the same in order to be happy. Differences are not celebrated, they are regarded with suspicion (and often reviled). Marriage has become one of those hideous life stages that you’re expected to complete by the rest of society — otherwise you’re considered freakish, and you’re outcast and judged by your peers as unhappy if you haven’t done so. That’s more of a reflection of the morons who subscribe to this disastrous mind-fuck than it is about anyone who dares to live a life independent of the constrained and immovable thought patterns of others.

While I carry on like a raped Carrie Bradshaw, I’ll conclude with this: the most cursed and insidious axiom is one that finding someone to “share your life with” will make you happy. That you MUST find someone to share your life with otherwise you WON’T be happy. It’d be impossible to calculate, but I’d bet billions if not trillions of hours were wasted collectively by people every year who while away the hours making themselves more attractive, texting, dating, and even thinking about potential mates. People who are single are in a state of perpetual depression, and openly admit that they would be happy if someone else came along to make them so. Why delegate the responsibility of your own happiness to a complete stranger that you haven’t met yet?!

The reality, of course, is different. Yes, some people are happy in relationships. Others aren’t. People say that relationships “take lots of hard work”. Why bother? If only single people could realise they have the ability to be the happiest they’ve ever been right NOW — then a relationship wouldn’t be so much hard work when the shit hits the fan. The things that make a marriage hard work are the roots that you’ve laid down. The mortgage, the kids, the job that you forget you exist in from 9 ‘til 5 every day. It’s a trap of epic proportions, and moral ones at that. All this under the umbrella hex of marriage — you knew you wanted this, but you didn’t know it was going to be like this, did you? You can’t even love someone without a friggin’ bank being involved these days…and the worst part is, you actively allowed them to be.

Marriage is a transient promise atop a web of legal entanglements — or it could also be the happiest day of your life.