The Idiot's Guide To Marriage

Did you get my text?

In light of the ever increasing number of text messagers I think it's time we spoke of this anomaly. I think text messaging is representative of the American lifestyle as a whole. It's convenient, impersonal and partaken of in mass quantities. More is better you know. What does this have to do with marriage you ask? I have no idea and never did when I first started typing this but as this post goes on I think I can tie it in.

Personally I don't do much text messaging simply because my phone is archaic. In other words, it is a year and a half old. You have to actually use your fingers to punch on the little tiny number buttons, and you can sometimes take upwards of 2 hours to send a message that says: "get milk on your way home from work or you'll wake up in the night with a rusty shiv in your spine".

Except it isn't that technical, it's broken down into our nations second language, text language which would look like this:

"gt mlk or ul wk up w/a shiv n ur bk" I'm probably not doing that right because as I said before I don't do much texting and when I do, I reveal my true text-tardness by actually spelling out entire words. People probably can't read it. Nothing says "I'm cool" like a head bent over and fingers flying on the keypad, or the stylus pecking the screen.

Many marriages exist inside a text box. (didn't think I could do it didja?) There's only so much variation and a lot of repetition. Some are a little more in depth, like the texters box who types out the whole word, but most of the time what goes on inside that marriage is abbreviated as much as possible much like the text language users text box. Some use all of the pre-made standard messages that came with the phone.

What I'm trying to say is that marriage is not that complex, and most marriage relationships are pretty similar and mundane. People will argue that point but those are the ones who've only been married 2 days and are not yet home from the honeymoon.

Everyone gets bored, everyone gets annoyed with the nuances of their spouse and everyone falls into a routine. Everyone learns what to expect from their spouse, good or bad and everyone wears on each other at some point. That's not to say the marriage isn't a success or the partners don't love each other, it's just that it "is what it is" and there's not much that's going to change it. Maybe.

As a single person at age 40, as can be expected most of my friends are married. When they are telling me of their day-to-day trials, I'm thinking to myself; "poor sorry bastards". It makes me glad to be single even though I can't afford anything and live off the charity of American Express.

The other thing I'm thinking to myself is: "didn't we just have this conversation a month ago?" ... or "I think I'm having deja-vu" or "are they just going to continue to have the same argument and never do anything different?". That's all the stuff I'm thinking. I'm also thinking: "If I was married to that person I'd pay someone to clonk me on the head with a shovel, take me into the woods and bury me in a shallow grave because that sounds better than this nonsense".

I've given up on dispensing my awesome advice, which by the way is way cool and would mostly likely work 60% of the time all the time. I just listen, empathize with the person and think about how much I like being single. If any of you readers want to actually experience for yourself some of my mind-blowing advice, throw me out an issue in the comments and I'll throw you out some astounding advice.

To be continued.....(because I think I can tie marriage into other cell phone features cause tha's how I roll!)

posted by Anonymous at 2:49 PM