The marriage trap

I was standing outside a restaurant one evening with a dear friend who has been having marriage troubles for years.  On this particular night, like many others before this, things were not going well between him and his wife.

“Why did I marry a crazy woman?” he asked me.

“You live the life you choose”, I replied.

“F*^k you! Now that’s going to be bothering me the whole night.  What, you going Freudian on me now?” was his angry reply.

“Well it should have bothered you ten years ago,” I quipped.

What do you hope to teach your children by staying for years in a marriage where you are constantly at each other’s throats and can’t see things eye to eye anymore?  What are you teaching your children if you start throwing scathing and snide remarks to each other in front of them?

You take off on your own on certain nights without letting your wife know where you are. She hunts you down and follows you around town.  And she talks to anyone who cares to listen about the inner workings of your household.  Your comedy and tragedy are displayed before everyone to see.

But it doesn’t even matter what everyone thinks because what you should be concerned really is what are you going to do about a situation that’s been going on like that for years.

How long are you going to stay in a bad marriage before you are willing to call it quits?

You think you should stay married because the children need their mother and father in one roof.  Well that only works for happily married couples.  You are not doing your children any favor with your toxic excuse for a marriage.

As a child, of course I was sad that I didn’t grow up with both parents present.  As an adult, I couldn’t have thanked my parents more for separating when we were young. There was no way those two people could have stayed together and be happy.  They did us a huge favor by diminishing the damaging effects their bad marriage had on us. And I truly believe we would have had more psychodrama going on than we do now had they stayed together.

A marriage hits rock bottom when husband and wife have totally lost their mutual trust and respect for each other.  Once you get there, get out.  Because no matter what you do, there is no chance of saving it, no matter how much you try to kid yourselves and believe otherwise.

It’s hard to walk away from a marriage because society has built it up on a pedestal so high that everyone must uphold, and to do the opposite means failure.  No one wants to fail.

If we can step back for a while and look at marriage like any other contract that we sign up for.  Both parties have to work on it.  And when those agreements are breached and we realize that something isn’t working, we try to fix it, repair it, and talk about it.  And if it is still not working over a course of time, we end it.

Marriage is so overrated.  Marriage is so institutionalized that it makes it difficult for partners to just make the logical and obvious solution of ending something that doesn’t work.

We only live once.  And if we can’t find that someone whom we can truly live with in harmony and understanding, isn’t it so much better to be un-married and live in peace?