The marriage contract is full of terms. Line items such as love, fidelity, trust, commitment, honor, and sharing of resources get explained to you or threatened to you by her father or religious community. The vetting process may be long, to make sure you are both qualified and have what it takes to be one another’s forever partner, before getting confirmed as such by a minister, with the witness and validation of your community of family and friends, and God.
Amidst the noise of wedding preparation, you briefly–almost unnoticed–sign a marriage license, which registers you to the state in sixty seconds or less, and then a nice, calligraphic-looking marriage certificate which goes in your wedding album or up on the wall. Icing on the cake, right? While everyone keeps your focus on event preparations, preparing the girl, or preparing for the girl, it turns out that these little documents form the skeletal structure of your marriage, and you don’t even know it.
While all of your energies have gone toward being the better man and fulfilling the terms of marriage as demanded by family or you bride herself, this little side document has no regard for such human values. In fact this “certificate” binds you to legal terms that were never explained to you, you know nothing about, you never agreed to, and change based on which state you reside in at any given time, and have as a general rule zero concern for marital fidelity or human rights.
So one day your wife flakes out and doesn’t feel like being married anymore. She wants to break all her wedding vows which formed your sacred bond and were the only insurance you had for a balanced agreement, just because she is having a bad day, or read too many tabloid magazines. And when it comes down to the wire, most of the family will turn on you–your very wife included, for whom you may have sacrificed years of schooling, paying off her debts or student loans, and generally postponing your own life, whatever that might look like.
Your wedding vows, enforced by community morals, are there to protect you from this exact scenario, so it’s a good thing you made them…..right? Otherwise she would have just been a flaky long-term girlfriend, without the protection you have under the structure of marriage, and the seriousness of your investment would have been far from worth it.
But it turns out those vows you made on your wedding day actually carry ZERO weight. Zero. The masses of hundreds of people who witnessed these vows with you–including everyone you have ever known, and those old-timers who half jokingly told you you had better be good to her or they will come beat you up–can’t remember your wife making those vows to you, or her father giving her away. Even if you have it caught on video. They all act like it never happened at all. That a woman is expected to flake out, and cannot be trusted, and you should have known this going in (thus devaluing your wife). That deal you made in the presence of God was no deal at all, and is null and void. That when you gamble at this house and lose you are expected to pay and they will come after you, but when you win you are owed nothing. They will say the commitment which kept you going in your marriage through years of sacrifice to make sure you and cupcake would make it, and for which you have given your life, is meaningless. And therefore, you too are meaningless.
And then the crazies come out. Her holy godmother who instilled virginity into your virgin bride turns out to be a drug-using town whore. Your own parents and siblings betray you, agree together that you are better off dead, and run off to celebrate your wife’s new public adultery and stuff their faces with alcohol and creamed cakes.
Staring into the blank faces of such mass hysterical “forgetting,” these people will appeal to the record they have of your marriage agreement: your legal married status, confirmed by the marriage certificate. Not the verbal contract you publicly made and have record of, but that marginal little paper that was blank and only asked for a signature, is deceptively called a “certificate”, and didn’t even have fine print written on the back, the terms of which you did not even agree to signing. It turns out this is the only legally enforcable part of the deal. Those legal terms contain nothing to which you have prepared and devoted yourself since the days of your courtship. Everything else–and I mean everything–that was agreed to, goes out the window.
As for the more trust-based, “humane” parts of your contract, you soon learn that none of those people are humane. These same people will steal as much as they can from you, and draw more of your blood than the most violent criminals. The people you are close to will attack you like a gang of wild dogs, at times premeditated and organized, and at other times one-on-one.
"Once you’ve taken care of the basics, there’s very little in this world for which your life is worth deferring." -David Hansson. "It’s not when women are mean or nasty that anything is out of the ordinary. It’s when they are NICE to you that you have to be on high alert..." -Jackinov.
Gargamel 1 year, 8 months ago.
