Cold Feet
My parents were very close friends. They spent, and still spend, every weekend night partying. Partying is what they have in common and it’s what they’re best at. They like each other’s faces best when bathed in the glow of a neon sign, they like each other’s voices best when drowned out by a thumping bass, and they connect the most when they’re shaking their respective butts on the dance floor to the hits of the eighties.
I don’t buy it that they were ever deeply in love. I do believe they love each other, but not in the fairytale kind of way. They settled for each other when they decided to give up on finding true love. A consolation prize is the origin of my birth. Can you believe that? I’m the product of mediocrity! There are worse ways to be brought into the world.
mar·riage /ˈmarij/ Noun
“Money ruined everything,” my mother told me. She wasn’t even drunk when she said this. What she really meant was, “Marriage ruined everything.” She didn’t mean it in a way that would make even the least romantic of honeymooners rage; what she should have said was, “Our business agreement ruined our relationship, which was barely hanging by a thread as it was.”
My sister got married at a respectable age to a respectable man. I, as a head-strong tomboy at the worldly age of eleven, had nothing good to say about and, in hindsight, was probably less popular at the wedding than the drunk uncle doing the “Macarena” and spilling whiskey on the kids.
I sat in the front pew of the church in my saggy-chested bridesmaid’s dress, arms crossed, and feet up, speaking from the diaphragm as I declared my atheism to anyone who looked a little too happy. All I was missing was a cigarette and a few divorces under my belt. If I met me then... well I’d probably have a beer with me. I was kind of the life of the party.
Biblically, marriage wasn’t a business agreement between a man and a woman. It was a business agreement between a father and a younger man, and they were usually negotiating whether the younger man was buying the daughter or the goat. “My daughter goes for twenty bucks, the goat for forty. I’ll throw in a pig if you buy my daughter. Ephesians 5:22-23” Legally, women are still property in a marriage, mostly at the fault of lawmakers who forget about old laws. One has to crash through layers of smoke screens to find that truth, but it’s there, especially in Texas.
Historically--and by historically I mean over the 200 years America the Beautiful has existed, because it was totally wasted land before the white found it--marriage was the pinnacle of a woman’s life. Getting married to a “good man”, which really meant he had the most money and screwed the most chamber maids and kitchen wenches, was the ultimate accomplishment.
“You’re betrothed to Henry Van Der Whatsit? Get it girl! Don’t worry about the burning when you pee, you’ll forget all about it while you’re washing the skid marks out of his pantaloons with your brand new, state of the art washboard!”
“Yeah! And my dad only had to pay his dad six goats and a pig carcass. He was a steal!”
Fast forward to the 1950s (every feminist’s favorite decade) when men were simultaneously at their most and their least relevance to the family unit. Without him, the family got no bacon, which usually resulted in raucous and uninhibited complaints because bacon is delicious. But his presence in the family’s combined and individual lives was nonexistent. The husband-father was the financial backer of the establishment and exercised all the obsessive control over the funds that any involuntary investor would. “Woman”, as most mother-wives were titled by their husbands, were management, and exercised all the underhanded embezzlement that any underpaid and under appreciated staff member would.
Proposal Season usually took place in the spring, after senior prom and before the men would announce they’ve chosen to forgo college in favor of going into the family soup can business. Women quickly boasted to the rest of the world, all 24 blocks of it, that they’re engaged to be validated-- I mean married. After all, who wouldn’t want to skip right to child-bearing at the ripe age of 17?
Of course marriage is and was much more romantic than this. People are meant to be monogamous (Or, is the jury still out on that one?), and telling someone that one is willing to commit the rest of one’s life to that other person, and effectively proving it by getting the government involved, is the best and most exclusively human way of building trust in that monogamy. After all, legal and financial ramification are the only kind of consequences modern homosapiens understand. Opening oneself up to something other than internal moral guilt and disapproving looks from the members of one’s village really makes one’s ears perk up.
“You mean, if I have sex with another woman other than my wife I could lose all my money?!” he asks in amazement, pen poised precariously over the dotted line.
“Yes,” his mother says with composure as her eyes bore holes into Mr. Van Der Whatsit’s sacreligious soul. “But if you don’t sign that piece of paper, I’ll be the laughing stock of Daughter’s of the American Revolution. So. Sign. It.” A strained smile turns up the corners of her impeccably painted mouth.
Down the block, an elated Average Joe stands proudly next to his new fiance, whom he adores, pledging his undying love. His fiance, Debbie, is even prouder than he. The love shared between them is pure and holy and perfect and a truer happiness never existed. The future Mrs. Van Der Whatsit is the first to volunteer as Debbie’s maid of honor, knowing this is the closest she’ll ever get to true love.
This inequality between marriages is unrecognized by the state, but wholly recognized by the rest of Mr. Van Der Whatsit’s and Average Joe’s graduating class. Mr. Van Der Whatsit is arguably the victim, here. He’s pressured by society to conform to a list of arbitrary standards when he would be much happier living a lifestyle taylor made for him, had he been so lucky to have the opportunity to construct one for himself. Despite this unfairness, Mr. Van Der Whatsit will be held to same same standards as Average Joe, who is at an obvious advantage.
Marriage isn’t for everybody-- I mean, yes it is, Mr. Romney. If we would all just get married, gun violence wouldn’t even be a thing anymore! Heh.
After the free love movement, women’s suffrage, feminism, and the willingness of men to be professionally lazy for the benefit of relationship equality, both sexes enjoy more flexibility in their lives than they would have fifty years ago. Men who want to stay home and enjoy their children can do so as long as they can handle a few jibes and some ribbing from his poker buddies. Women who want to be CEO of a major company can also do so as long she can handle some sexism, which incidentally, and to the relief of women across generations, decreases with every graduating college class. Hoorah! The Old Boy’s Club isn’t 100% boys anymore. It’s only 95% boys! Baby steps, ladies.
Marriage is unquestionably a steadfast tradition. The practice of pledging one’s love and devotion to another on a public platform is unquestionably driven by an innate instinct. Humans can argue their nature into the ground, but the evidence is in the everyday behaviors humans exhibit. Were it not for a natural desire to mate for life, such a ritual as marriage would not persist over time and space as it has. The parameters in which marriage exists is a social construct, but the practice of claiming another human being as a possession comes from the same place as the desire to binge on chicken wings while watching men knock the hell out of each other in an arena. It’s human nature, just ask the Romans.
I went to my first wedding when I was three years old. I performed the crucial role of flower girl, without whom there would be no flowers at all anywhere at the entire wedding. I made it two steps down the aisle before turning around and bolting back into the arms of my father, who then tried to bribe me with a Lifesaver candy to get my ass down that aisle. I refused vehemently, sticking to my guns like a boss.
The wedding went on as planned, somehow overcoming the absence of a girl with flowers, to my dismay. Apparently, I wasn’t as crucial as I was made to believe. In fact, I was so unnecessary I was more of an inconvenience than any kind of help. I made this observation during the ceremony, when candles were being lit and soft music drifted breezily from the organ. I piped up real loud, rightfully so, demanding the Lifesaver candy I was promised only minutes before.
This action was something called a “faux pas” which I learned, not very many years later, is really easy to do at weddings. It’s so easy to do, in fact, that my annual wedding faux pas became its own running joke at the proverbial open bar, where you will most definitely find me at the next wedding. My wedding track record is evidently less than sterling, and came to a crescendo when I burned down a fake tree in the bathroom using only some Lysol and a single match from one of the personalized match boxes in the goodie bag, which apparently is a thing at weddings. To be fair, the fault should lie with the ass who decided to personalize a matchbox to a twelve year old.
Despite the spectacularity of my performances, wedding faux pas are committed constantly. There is a faux pas committed approximately every four seconds during the ceremony, every 2.5 seconds at the reception, and perpetually at the after party, where only the brashest of relatives navigate.
Wedding faux pas are common because weddings themselves go against human nature. Three year olds aren’t equipped to wear their weight in lace and totter down a six mile long (if memory serves) aisle in front of a packed house of relatives. Twelve year old girls aren’t equipped to handle being in possession of a box of matches that somehow slipped through her parent’s alcohol impaired radar. She’s going to commit arson. It’s just inevitable. Come on, grown ups!
Forty-five year old men who have already lived through the bulk of their marital years are not equipped to hold back the arsenal of inappropriate jokes they’ve wracked up over the past two decades. They’ve been waiting for the perfect audience with which to share their material, and the happy couple has just unwittingly provided it.
Every step of the way, human nature is being suppressed at a wedding. There is an endless list of rules and procedure one must follow in order to avoid committing one of these faux pas. For example, women are restricted to a limited pallet of colors from which to choose a dress from. If she wears white she’s competing with the bride, because being the center of attention all day isn’t good enough to calm a woman’s natural paranoia that another woman will ruin her day. If she wears lavender but the color scheme of the event is peach, she clashes, probably deliberately trying to ugly up the affair. There’s just no winning there.
Men are required to bond with their fathers-in-law and nephews and grandfathers and cousins, which must take place around the bar amidst a constant flow of booze, lest one should be called some derogatory word for “woman”, the worst thing in the world to be. However, they must hold, and hold well, the twelve glasses of liquor forced on them, lest they should cause a scene and piss off the women, resulting in their imminent demise. No winning there, either.
However, the extremity of a wedding’s suppression of people’s nature is nothing compared to that of courting, without which there would be no wedding. A man and woman who have embarked on the journey of a mating ritual are in for some first rate torture. The ever changing rules of engagement are hard enough to follow without the added shakes, shortness of breath, increased pulse rate, and dry mouth a date causes. The fact that a date induces the same symptoms as most common viruses should be a red flag, really.
During this system meltdown, one must recall and execute a series of actions that make up a grandiose plan premeditated to impress the subject of the opposite sex. This plan must adhere to a list of muddled rules that have become so watered down and inconclusive over the years that one is still decoding them by the time of the date’s embarkation. The male of the species must play the aloof alpha male while simultaneously making the female of the species feel special. He must allow the female of the species to make all the decisions about where they go and what they do, but must somehow convince her he is still in charge. The female has to pretend to try to pay for dinner, but not put up too much of a fight when the male argues against it. If she pushes just a second too long, the male may waver in his conviction that he should be paying for the meal and allow her to pay out of fear that she is one of those feminazis he’s heard about on Howard Stern. If this happens, the whole date is a bust and both parties are ready to go home, call their friends, and demonize the opposite party.
We love marriage. It’s the driving force behind everything we do in our lives. No, wait. that’s sex.
Still, marriage dominates our collective consciousness. It’s what people spend most of the first quarter of their lives planning and it’s something we all expect to do one day. Even the grimiest of frat brothers and slickest of players that I’ve met still say the words, “When I’m married...” It’s so dominant in our society, it’s invisible. The majority of people never once question its existence. Sure, we all stop and think for a moment about the legitimacy of the traditions we’re inheriting and there are a few fringe folks who say they don’t “need that piece of paper to be happy together”, but mainstream society has yet to be deterred.
Each generation takes the marital traditions of the one before and makes them their own. The actual execution of the ritual and the subsequent partnership has been manipulated and doctored so many times that the final product we have today, which will be different from tomorrow, is unrecognizable as compared to the starting product. The traditions of marriage have to keep up with the times, after all. Where would we be without Madonna's contribution to the establishment? Who knows? Probably somewhere a little better, though.
Marriage in and of itself is a wonderful thing that satisfies one of human kind’s deepest and most fundamental instincts. But, he institution surrounding the basic purpose has been less than satisfying to entirely too many lives. As long as there are weddings there will be bathroom arson, whiskey spilt on kids and riotous episodes of dress arguments. We do the best we can as people, which is by default not very good. Our best hope for future generations is probably the comeback of old fashioned marriage. But who knows? Vintage might not be in anymore by the time the kids of my own generation are ready to tie the knot. Either way, it’s a safe bet that they will tie the knot, whatever that might mean in the future.
I don’t buy it that they were ever deeply in love. I do believe they love each other, but not in the fairytale kind of way. They settled for each other when they decided to give up on finding true love. A consolation prize is the origin of my birth. Can you believe that? I’m the product of mediocrity! There are worse ways to be brought into the world.
mar·riage /ˈmarij/ Noun
- The formal union of a man and a woman, typically recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife.
- A relationship between married people or the period for which it lasts.
“Money ruined everything,” my mother told me. She wasn’t even drunk when she said this. What she really meant was, “Marriage ruined everything.” She didn’t mean it in a way that would make even the least romantic of honeymooners rage; what she should have said was, “Our business agreement ruined our relationship, which was barely hanging by a thread as it was.”
My sister got married at a respectable age to a respectable man. I, as a head-strong tomboy at the worldly age of eleven, had nothing good to say about and, in hindsight, was probably less popular at the wedding than the drunk uncle doing the “Macarena” and spilling whiskey on the kids.
I sat in the front pew of the church in my saggy-chested bridesmaid’s dress, arms crossed, and feet up, speaking from the diaphragm as I declared my atheism to anyone who looked a little too happy. All I was missing was a cigarette and a few divorces under my belt. If I met me then... well I’d probably have a beer with me. I was kind of the life of the party.
Biblically, marriage wasn’t a business agreement between a man and a woman. It was a business agreement between a father and a younger man, and they were usually negotiating whether the younger man was buying the daughter or the goat. “My daughter goes for twenty bucks, the goat for forty. I’ll throw in a pig if you buy my daughter. Ephesians 5:22-23” Legally, women are still property in a marriage, mostly at the fault of lawmakers who forget about old laws. One has to crash through layers of smoke screens to find that truth, but it’s there, especially in Texas.
Historically--and by historically I mean over the 200 years America the Beautiful has existed, because it was totally wasted land before the white found it--marriage was the pinnacle of a woman’s life. Getting married to a “good man”, which really meant he had the most money and screwed the most chamber maids and kitchen wenches, was the ultimate accomplishment.
“You’re betrothed to Henry Van Der Whatsit? Get it girl! Don’t worry about the burning when you pee, you’ll forget all about it while you’re washing the skid marks out of his pantaloons with your brand new, state of the art washboard!”
“Yeah! And my dad only had to pay his dad six goats and a pig carcass. He was a steal!”
Fast forward to the 1950s (every feminist’s favorite decade) when men were simultaneously at their most and their least relevance to the family unit. Without him, the family got no bacon, which usually resulted in raucous and uninhibited complaints because bacon is delicious. But his presence in the family’s combined and individual lives was nonexistent. The husband-father was the financial backer of the establishment and exercised all the obsessive control over the funds that any involuntary investor would. “Woman”, as most mother-wives were titled by their husbands, were management, and exercised all the underhanded embezzlement that any underpaid and under appreciated staff member would.
Proposal Season usually took place in the spring, after senior prom and before the men would announce they’ve chosen to forgo college in favor of going into the family soup can business. Women quickly boasted to the rest of the world, all 24 blocks of it, that they’re engaged to be validated-- I mean married. After all, who wouldn’t want to skip right to child-bearing at the ripe age of 17?
Of course marriage is and was much more romantic than this. People are meant to be monogamous (Or, is the jury still out on that one?), and telling someone that one is willing to commit the rest of one’s life to that other person, and effectively proving it by getting the government involved, is the best and most exclusively human way of building trust in that monogamy. After all, legal and financial ramification are the only kind of consequences modern homosapiens understand. Opening oneself up to something other than internal moral guilt and disapproving looks from the members of one’s village really makes one’s ears perk up.
“You mean, if I have sex with another woman other than my wife I could lose all my money?!” he asks in amazement, pen poised precariously over the dotted line.
“Yes,” his mother says with composure as her eyes bore holes into Mr. Van Der Whatsit’s sacreligious soul. “But if you don’t sign that piece of paper, I’ll be the laughing stock of Daughter’s of the American Revolution. So. Sign. It.” A strained smile turns up the corners of her impeccably painted mouth.
Down the block, an elated Average Joe stands proudly next to his new fiance, whom he adores, pledging his undying love. His fiance, Debbie, is even prouder than he. The love shared between them is pure and holy and perfect and a truer happiness never existed. The future Mrs. Van Der Whatsit is the first to volunteer as Debbie’s maid of honor, knowing this is the closest she’ll ever get to true love.
This inequality between marriages is unrecognized by the state, but wholly recognized by the rest of Mr. Van Der Whatsit’s and Average Joe’s graduating class. Mr. Van Der Whatsit is arguably the victim, here. He’s pressured by society to conform to a list of arbitrary standards when he would be much happier living a lifestyle taylor made for him, had he been so lucky to have the opportunity to construct one for himself. Despite this unfairness, Mr. Van Der Whatsit will be held to same same standards as Average Joe, who is at an obvious advantage.
Marriage isn’t for everybody-- I mean, yes it is, Mr. Romney. If we would all just get married, gun violence wouldn’t even be a thing anymore! Heh.
After the free love movement, women’s suffrage, feminism, and the willingness of men to be professionally lazy for the benefit of relationship equality, both sexes enjoy more flexibility in their lives than they would have fifty years ago. Men who want to stay home and enjoy their children can do so as long as they can handle a few jibes and some ribbing from his poker buddies. Women who want to be CEO of a major company can also do so as long she can handle some sexism, which incidentally, and to the relief of women across generations, decreases with every graduating college class. Hoorah! The Old Boy’s Club isn’t 100% boys anymore. It’s only 95% boys! Baby steps, ladies.
Marriage is unquestionably a steadfast tradition. The practice of pledging one’s love and devotion to another on a public platform is unquestionably driven by an innate instinct. Humans can argue their nature into the ground, but the evidence is in the everyday behaviors humans exhibit. Were it not for a natural desire to mate for life, such a ritual as marriage would not persist over time and space as it has. The parameters in which marriage exists is a social construct, but the practice of claiming another human being as a possession comes from the same place as the desire to binge on chicken wings while watching men knock the hell out of each other in an arena. It’s human nature, just ask the Romans.
I went to my first wedding when I was three years old. I performed the crucial role of flower girl, without whom there would be no flowers at all anywhere at the entire wedding. I made it two steps down the aisle before turning around and bolting back into the arms of my father, who then tried to bribe me with a Lifesaver candy to get my ass down that aisle. I refused vehemently, sticking to my guns like a boss.
The wedding went on as planned, somehow overcoming the absence of a girl with flowers, to my dismay. Apparently, I wasn’t as crucial as I was made to believe. In fact, I was so unnecessary I was more of an inconvenience than any kind of help. I made this observation during the ceremony, when candles were being lit and soft music drifted breezily from the organ. I piped up real loud, rightfully so, demanding the Lifesaver candy I was promised only minutes before.
This action was something called a “faux pas” which I learned, not very many years later, is really easy to do at weddings. It’s so easy to do, in fact, that my annual wedding faux pas became its own running joke at the proverbial open bar, where you will most definitely find me at the next wedding. My wedding track record is evidently less than sterling, and came to a crescendo when I burned down a fake tree in the bathroom using only some Lysol and a single match from one of the personalized match boxes in the goodie bag, which apparently is a thing at weddings. To be fair, the fault should lie with the ass who decided to personalize a matchbox to a twelve year old.
Despite the spectacularity of my performances, wedding faux pas are committed constantly. There is a faux pas committed approximately every four seconds during the ceremony, every 2.5 seconds at the reception, and perpetually at the after party, where only the brashest of relatives navigate.
Wedding faux pas are common because weddings themselves go against human nature. Three year olds aren’t equipped to wear their weight in lace and totter down a six mile long (if memory serves) aisle in front of a packed house of relatives. Twelve year old girls aren’t equipped to handle being in possession of a box of matches that somehow slipped through her parent’s alcohol impaired radar. She’s going to commit arson. It’s just inevitable. Come on, grown ups!
Forty-five year old men who have already lived through the bulk of their marital years are not equipped to hold back the arsenal of inappropriate jokes they’ve wracked up over the past two decades. They’ve been waiting for the perfect audience with which to share their material, and the happy couple has just unwittingly provided it.
Every step of the way, human nature is being suppressed at a wedding. There is an endless list of rules and procedure one must follow in order to avoid committing one of these faux pas. For example, women are restricted to a limited pallet of colors from which to choose a dress from. If she wears white she’s competing with the bride, because being the center of attention all day isn’t good enough to calm a woman’s natural paranoia that another woman will ruin her day. If she wears lavender but the color scheme of the event is peach, she clashes, probably deliberately trying to ugly up the affair. There’s just no winning there.
Men are required to bond with their fathers-in-law and nephews and grandfathers and cousins, which must take place around the bar amidst a constant flow of booze, lest one should be called some derogatory word for “woman”, the worst thing in the world to be. However, they must hold, and hold well, the twelve glasses of liquor forced on them, lest they should cause a scene and piss off the women, resulting in their imminent demise. No winning there, either.
However, the extremity of a wedding’s suppression of people’s nature is nothing compared to that of courting, without which there would be no wedding. A man and woman who have embarked on the journey of a mating ritual are in for some first rate torture. The ever changing rules of engagement are hard enough to follow without the added shakes, shortness of breath, increased pulse rate, and dry mouth a date causes. The fact that a date induces the same symptoms as most common viruses should be a red flag, really.
During this system meltdown, one must recall and execute a series of actions that make up a grandiose plan premeditated to impress the subject of the opposite sex. This plan must adhere to a list of muddled rules that have become so watered down and inconclusive over the years that one is still decoding them by the time of the date’s embarkation. The male of the species must play the aloof alpha male while simultaneously making the female of the species feel special. He must allow the female of the species to make all the decisions about where they go and what they do, but must somehow convince her he is still in charge. The female has to pretend to try to pay for dinner, but not put up too much of a fight when the male argues against it. If she pushes just a second too long, the male may waver in his conviction that he should be paying for the meal and allow her to pay out of fear that she is one of those feminazis he’s heard about on Howard Stern. If this happens, the whole date is a bust and both parties are ready to go home, call their friends, and demonize the opposite party.
We love marriage. It’s the driving force behind everything we do in our lives. No, wait. that’s sex.
Still, marriage dominates our collective consciousness. It’s what people spend most of the first quarter of their lives planning and it’s something we all expect to do one day. Even the grimiest of frat brothers and slickest of players that I’ve met still say the words, “When I’m married...” It’s so dominant in our society, it’s invisible. The majority of people never once question its existence. Sure, we all stop and think for a moment about the legitimacy of the traditions we’re inheriting and there are a few fringe folks who say they don’t “need that piece of paper to be happy together”, but mainstream society has yet to be deterred.
Each generation takes the marital traditions of the one before and makes them their own. The actual execution of the ritual and the subsequent partnership has been manipulated and doctored so many times that the final product we have today, which will be different from tomorrow, is unrecognizable as compared to the starting product. The traditions of marriage have to keep up with the times, after all. Where would we be without Madonna's contribution to the establishment? Who knows? Probably somewhere a little better, though.
Marriage in and of itself is a wonderful thing that satisfies one of human kind’s deepest and most fundamental instincts. But, he institution surrounding the basic purpose has been less than satisfying to entirely too many lives. As long as there are weddings there will be bathroom arson, whiskey spilt on kids and riotous episodes of dress arguments. We do the best we can as people, which is by default not very good. Our best hope for future generations is probably the comeback of old fashioned marriage. But who knows? Vintage might not be in anymore by the time the kids of my own generation are ready to tie the knot. Either way, it’s a safe bet that they will tie the knot, whatever that might mean in the future.
