IS THIS BITCH A MARRYIN' FOOL?

(I realise this question may simply reflect my own sad super-annuated kneejerk punk- ism: not to say jealousy... When even Trolls may find True Love, mark s yet feeds on wormwood etc etc...)

Are you more annoyed with the ceremony or the concept? :-)

I have a very positive view based on my parents as an example -- over thirty-five years together now, still very much in love and keeping together, while still retaining their own individual selves, a good balance. Similarly with my grandparents, both pairs of which stayed together until death. So classic, sure -- not universally, obviously. But when it works, looks like it works like a charm.

I wanna get married dead drunk in Vegas on a whim. Other than that, I refuse. If I don't wake up the next morning and go, "WHAT THE FUCK?" it's a dud.

Marraige always gets a bad rep. Maybe I'm able to view it from my parents example because they have been married for 23 years despite all their faults. It's actually something I envy about my parents and admire greatly. Fair play to them.

Hey, my parents have been together ages as well. What's going on? I thought from the Introduce Yourselves/Crowd at School we were all meant to be fucked up. Prove me wrong. Maybe Happy parents=Screwy children.

My parents will be married 40 years in November. They still act like love sick school kids sometimes. My marriage lasted 8 years. Never once in those miserable years did my marriage approximate anything like that of my parents. I am happy to say that I did finally find someone to act like a love sick school kid with, so all is not lost. F

N&A = sorry for ignorance, but who they?

My parents have been married 22 years...wtf is going on on this board? We're abnormalities of psychology, supposedly.

And my parent's have been married since 1955. Although not that happily, I think. But I'd say marriage/commitment=classic, the actual wedding thing=dud. I just find them unbearable. I'm usually very happy for the couple, but do we really all need to gather together to celebrate it? It gives me the creeps.

And gay marriages are totally totally classic, but gay marriage/commitment ceremonies are utterly revolting. I will never ever-never ever?-take part in one.

If people want to get married, I think thats really good. I'd rather get married than live together in a state of will it last, and having to introduce someone as my 'partner', a term I dispise. Of course, I've never been married, so what the hell do I know?

N&A = friends of mine, Robin — I don't bump uglies with crackhead supermodels and hollywood deviants every evening you know...

My parents = married 44 years this year, I believe. Yes, their success at it is an intimidation to me: sister = also fanatically anti-marriage. Arthur's pt abt gay ceremonies probably partly in my mind: cuz [xXx] was at N&A's party, and (I always tht) topped my antipathy to these shindigs. Obv. both of us fond enuff of N that we were BOTH on Best Behaviour. It's Pride today, which [xXx] goes dippy over and I hate...

23 years. They've been married 33 years. My bad.

my folks have been hitched since 72 - can't do the maths at 3am, but I still say its a fucking dud - esp fundie christian weddings where they don't evcen serve caffinated drinks. sppppthhhh!

Hot damn. Well, since you all seem to come from unbroken homes, I guess I'll have to provide a bit of contrast. Yes, my parents divorced each other. TWICE. The 1st time, I was 5, & my sis was 14. My mom & sis & I ran away to Italy for a few months, whilst The Boss went through his mid-life crisis. Eventually, we returned to the States, and eventually, they remarried. I'd gleefully offer up details on how fucked up it is that they remarried, but I've heard so many incongruous details from both sides, I can't say what really happened. (Never mind that it's a bit too personal.) But, yeah, after they figured out why they didn't like each other during Marriage #1, they went splitsville a second time. I think I was 15 at the time. Oh, boy, was that ever a thrill. The Boss (being a glutton for punishment) has been "happily" married for the past 9 years or so (Marriage #4, counting the mid- life crisis, and my mom X 2) - he refers to his wife as "it" half the time, though, which just makes me think he'd be a miserable shit no matter who he married. Despite the example put forth by my sires, and other friend's families (together, but @ each other's throats, or drunk off their ass 24-7), I certainly wouldn't discount myself getting hitched, for the proper reasons. But the one thing that sticks in my mind re: this thread (similar to Mark's misgivings) - Marriage = Compromise Marriage is a business venture, a merger. Love doesn't weigh into this, it seems. Oh, sure, it does at first (ideally, when you're nauseatingly thrilled & aflame with wonder and delight because this person makes you feel that thing), but gets shoved in the hope chest with the letters and the ribbons as one sits back and things, "Can I REALLY spend my life with this person? And what will I have to do to have this succeed?" (Not that anyone actually DOES this nowadays - blinded by the initial burst of heat, or the mistakes of impetuous boners, they stumble into this contract halfheartedly and fuck things up right & proper.) There are some good marriages out there, though - I'm holding out hope for some of my friends & their somewhat recent nuptuals. (Oh, and my sis & her hubby, who've made me an uncle twice over.) I think I'll have to support Ally's marriage model as the only one that'll probably work for me, though. Casino tokens, tropical drinks, and a Yahama keyboard. Classic, by the power vested in me by the local gaming board. The TRUE dud, however, is the wedding reception. Iffy food, idiots tapping their glasses or ringing bells every 5 seconds to see the bride & groom kiss (which, after the first 10 times, loses luster for the witnesses, I would think), cheesy DJs playing all "the hits" ("Who Let the Dogs Out?" AT A WEDDING!!! Jesus H. Christmas...), the whole garter belt / bouquet fiasco. Went to a wedding 2 weeks ago, and the DJs actually had a song to accompany the cake-cutting ceremony:

The bride cuts the cake
The bride cuts the cake
Hi ho the derry-o
The bride cuts the cake

If I do get married, it'll HAVE to be at a Las Vegas / Atlantic City chapel, just to avoid all this bullshit.

DAMN THIS HTML. I think Dan & I are seperated at birth...

another long marriage. my parents been married 30 years

OK, I'll step forward and be the weird kid from the broken home. My parents had grown completely apart, had nothing in common and basically were two strangers sharing a house by the time I was a teenager. They probably should have got divorced years earlier, but they were stupid and stayed together "for the sake of the kids" and all that nonsense. All my friends whose parents got divorced while they were still young managed to be totally well adjusted, and had much better and healthier situations. When I was 22 (for the first time) my father just up and ran off to California with a mistress.

I do want to believe in marriage, if for nothing else, as a legal protection. Is that cynical? I just see marriage as being something which will always have an end, and the marriage is a glorified contract to protect the parties involved for what happens when it ends.

I don't know. I have several sets of happily married friends- several of them were long term couples who married for Green Cards or health benefits, but they've managed to stay together and be quite happy anyway. I'm just convinced that I've inherited the "cheating gene" or whatever, and I'll never be able to do it.

I'm the grandchild of a broken home - my Dad had to do holding-family- together stuff when he should have been off chasing dreams and has had a virulent anti-divorce and anti-adultery hardline ever since, which has led to a happy marriage as far as I'm inexperiencedly able to tell.

While in pretty much every other way I would love more than anything to end up like my Dad when I get to his age, I'm ambivalent about marriage. I will very probably get married but there'll always be trepidation - doesn't take too much to work out that this ambivalence is i) subconscious breaking-away from Dad's position; ii) fear of letting the old man down.

I sure hope you didn't inherit the 'cheating gene', Kate!!! As for marriage, well, I don't know. Living together for two years gives you the same rights legallly in most cases as being married now, so it's a romantic thing more than anything else.

My folks have been happily married for 39 years. I've been happly married for 1 3/4 years. My views towards marriage are therefore skewed towards the positive.

Badgering couples into marriage = complete and total DUD, BTW. I wanted to marry my wife but almost called the whole thing off because people were badgering me about why we weren't engaged. (Which, for the record, was purely because of financial reasons and not because I had doubts about commitment. You can't stay with someone for more than two years and claim that you have a fear of commitment, IMO.)

You can't stay with someone for more than two years and claim that you have a fear of commitment, IMO

I claim exactly this. I have a massive fear of committment and I've been in a relationship a lot longer than two years. It just has to be weaker than your fear of other things. ;)

Next, you'll be telling me I proposed to you at a Belle & Sebastian gig. As if *I* would be caught dead enjoying myself at B&S, let alone proposing marriage!

Maybe, Kate, you need to be drunk to enjoy Belle and Sebastian and think about getting married? I was just amazed you remembered nothing the next day. You remembered Tom Jones though...

Incidentally, is Tom Jones married? Never imagined he would be, but I did meet his son last week. What a strange week that was...

It does not strike me as the least likely thing in the world that T Jones, internationally desired rock star and renowned satyr, might have sired a kid or two - garsp! - outside wedlock.

Tom Jones = still happily married to childhood hillborn sweetheart, I think + never once strayed. He = international superhunk. She = small, mousy, plump, dowdy, almost (but in a nice way). His daughter-in-law helps design his stage clobber and advise on Aspects of Total Sex Attack

And his son manages him. Well I'll be.

Oh, you don't read the same sources that I do... Tom Jones has been married since childhood to his childhood sweetheart... apparently, a real wildcat who has threatened to *emasculate* him if he ever divorces her. He has had numerous quite public affairs, most notoriously with Mary Wells of the Supremes back in the 60s. She claims he wanted desperately to marry her, but his wife threatened both their lives, and Tom returned home.

Oh, why do I know all this nonsense?

But anyway, Tom Jones is the Welsh Fonz! How could I not remember that? Besides, I had considerably sobered up between the B&S Vodka syndicate the booze apocalypse that was the Leiber and Stoller aftershow.

I maintain that a certain level of commitment mus exist for a relationship to last several years. Inertia only gets you so far; after that, one or both sides has to make an effort to sustain things.

Non-monogamous relationships are exempt from this sweeping generalization, BTW.

Damn. I wish we'd had this Tom Jones discussion before: I could have asked him on Friday what the truth was. Wait, I do have his phone number here somewhere...

I always loved the title of this thread.

Lars, are you bored, perchance?

aw, I thought someone was announcing an engagement when I saw this thread title!

Maybe Ally is in Vegas right now.

I miss her.

There are many people I miss.

Today is goth day.

The picture of El Diablo's soul, dark like my heart:

http://www.freethinkers.freeserve.co.uk/Rob/robpix/archivistb-w.jpg

Ally's gone?

She's on vacation home in Arizona for a week or more, I think it's Columbia's spring break.

Ahh. I guess I don't read ILX enough, then. :)