Ready, Aim, Marry Me

I am in my room wearing about a dozen layers. This could be an exaggeration but you wouldn't know would you? Either way, its fucking freezing in here so if my typing trails off it's because my fingers have frozen and I have fallen face first into a warm hypothermia induced coma. If I could choose any dramatic way to die it would definitely be hypothermia because instead of freezing your ass off, at the end of it you start to feel really warm and all you wanna do is sit down. Sounds like a peaceful way to die dramatically to me. WIN and WIN.

I am really glad for my close friends. My roommate especially. Last night we went to Baker Square for her to get some studying done (laughable but good effort Bang) and I went for free food. She works there and they were giving out these coupons to a few of the employees for a free cafe menu item every day for this entire month! That means I get free food every day which is probably the most awesome present I have ever encountered. So last night I got a delicious sandwich and we hung out and nerded out over old videos of our cat when we first got him. Her cat. When she first got him. I also really appreciate my friend Stacey who is not close to me at all but he is just so wonderful. See, most of my friends, specifically my guy friends, who wanna spend time with me oh maybe once a month or less, either a. had a crush on me a long time ago and still secretly nurse feelings for me, or b. want some action. Stacey is neither of these. I appreciate his ability to stay a good friend and hang out whenever we both have time and his genuine interest in me as a person. We have so little in common, but he makes me feel safe and loved. So theres my double shout out for the day.

This weekend I went to B for boyfriend (:):):))'s house down in WI for the first time. I got to meet his roommates and see his world. Most of that stuff belongs in my journal but I would like to state for the record that it was a really good time and I genuinely appreciated being let in and even welcomed whereas some guys are quite uneasy about combining the two worlds. We did however come across a subject that I would like to explore a little more in detail in my blog. We were talking about people living together or something ( I don't know how it came up) and he was stating that he thought that living together was a sort of necessary step and the final step before he would ask someone to marry him. Of course I parried with the statement that I would never ever live with someone before I was married to them. He questioned this and I gave a quick overview of my reasoning but I didn't really go in depth. I questioned myself about it later and still came up with the same answer and now would like to go into depth about my reasoning on the issue. Besides my original reason, that I have the rest of my life to live with this person, why rush? I have many other reasons for this belief. I think the core of it comes down to American culture today. There are countries in the world with arranged marriages that are so much more successful than here. Now, I know a lot of those are because the women are not allowed out of them, or divorce is not socially a possiblity there, but there is a somewhat famous quote that a man from India said at some time or another. I heard it once in church. He said, "In America you marry the woman you love, In India we love the woman we marry." This statement reflects strongly the fallacies of the American dream. America, it seems to me is a county where we want everything to work for us. It is a country where we believe that we can change our social status, our level of wealth, our place of living whenever we want. If we are unhappy with what we have we work to find a new thing to make us happy. This attitude can be good but it can also be very detrimental. It banks on the fact that everything can be thrown away, we don't need to be forced to be happy with anything. Even our bodies can be changed with painful plastic surgeries. This may sound dramatic but I see a reflection of this on American marriages. When they don't work for us, we mold our lives to make us more happy, we don't mold ourselves to make us more happy. I truly believe that I know about 15 guys that I could probably marry and be reasonably happy with. Yes, I wouldn't want to marry most of those guys and yes I will continue to look for "the one" but I believe that a right state of mind and a caring biblical relationship is necessary to success in a marriage. And now I come to my real argument (finally). The number of people living together before marriage is skyrocketing. I don't think that these people are bad pagan people who just want all the benefits of marriage without the commitment. I see these growing numbers as a reflection of a generation of children affected by divorce. These children have grown up and they want their marriages to succeed. So they think to themselves, "What better way to know if this is the person that I want to marry than by living with them?" They genuinely want to succeed with their partner. The question is, where does it end? Lets say that these people considering marriage decide to live together for six months, they do, it works, they are happy. They get married. They have children. Suddenly they are fighting all the time, have no time to spend together and get divorced. Living together didn't foresee the consequences of children. Or lets just say they are living together, they have babies, they decide to get married. They are married for 6 years and the husband cheats and the wife divorces him. Who could have seen that coming? My point is, no matter how long two people live together without getting married, there are still going to be unforseen circumstances that come up once they are married. I believe that it is better to get to know a person, really get to know them, understand their flaws, accept their weaknesses, work together and then take a leap of faith together in marriage. Yes there is still the possibility of failure, but there is a point where you just have to say "I'm in." To me, living together is probably gonna be one of the most exciting parts about the newness of marriage. Its those first three lovebird years where couples that you know want to fucking gag because you can't get off of each other. Where are those years when you live together first? I think that those years are the years that you work your ass off to build a strong marriage. It's where you are forced to discover that your significant other, no matter what you do will not stop leaving his underwear on the kitchen table (this could be a real psychological issue and I strongly recommend counseling if it is one) and you accept it and start leaving a hamper on the table for him to put it in. Now, I know that if you lived together first, you would already know this and it would factor into your deciding to marry, but that is my point about the American culture. If I love someone and know so much about someone that I am ready to live with them, then I am ready to marry them, because I will not bow to the concept that everything should come ready fit for me. You've got to mold yourself sometimes and I wouldn't miss that prime exciting opportunity of the first few years of a new marriage to do that. I have heard so many stories of people growing to love each other, growing to accept faults. It is possible!!! Honestly, I have no statistics to back this up but I do believe that many marriages that do fail aren't due to the surprises that first living together have to offer, but more a slow falling out over long years and then eventually waking up next to the person you once loved and realizing that you don't know them. I do understand that living together does troubleshoot a lot of areas and I understand that it is my CHOICE to not troubleshoot things before they come up by living with someone. My point isn't so much to argue that living together is completely ineffective but that is not the answer that this generation should be looking for to avoid the tragedies of divorce. There needs to be an attitude shift, an understanding if you will of ones inability to foresee trouble and one's personal responsibility to accept imperfection as part of the human experience.