Don't Fear the Ringbearer

Yesterday was Khrysten’s Anniversary. Upon thinking about this I realized just how semi-retarded/stupid Anniversaries are. Anniversaries are the short-bus of personal holidays.

I see it like this: An anniversary is just a couple’s way of celebrating the fact that they both stuck around for an allotted period of time. Example: we’ve been dating for 6 months, go us. That’s fucking stupid. If we are going to celebrate sticking around, shouldn’t you do it every single day? As in Hooray! I didn’t leave you again today, lets have cake!

Now to me, if there is marriage involved it is self-implied by being married, that you are going to stick around. That’s sort of the purpose of the whole paper you signed and that pretty ring you are wearing. Celebrating that you made it through another year just seems self-congratulatory. Yay! We are succeeding in this whole marriage thing unlike 55% of Americans! Yay!

As someone who couldn’t actually keep a relationship longer than 8 months (it’s my record) I’ve never gotten to celebrate that year mark. Then again when you are so drunk you almost black out the night you meet and agree to date someone, that actual date of meeting becomes hard to remember, and thus hard to celebrate.

The whole thing made me wonder if I really want to ever be married at all. I mean, technically a marriage is an agreement to legitimize the children and to pay each others bills when someone gets cancer. There is other stuff too but it’s mostly of the I will make chicken soup for you when you are sick or I’ll clean up the dog barf only if I think you will realize I saw it before you were awake kinds. I mean I can do all that without a ring and piece of paper. I can get legal documents that say when I am dying in the hospital of random cancer X that you can visit me and make decisions about my care. It’s called an advanced directive. I didn’t need a ring or a dress for that, just the internet and a few minutes of quality time with my pen.

So to me the only real thing that the piece of paper and ring combo does is this: it binds the two of you together so you cannot leave, so you have to listen to the person, you have to pay attention. I mean you can physically leave but you are fucked in a legal sense. Shouldn’t there be other things keeping the two of you together? For instance, that you care about each other, and that you want each other to be happy and stuff?

I look at Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and see a good thing. They are not married, have a child together, have been with each other and lived together for over 2 decades, and there is no ring or paper. They are free to leave at any time. They don’t because they are friends as well as partners.

I am sad that the word partner now has such a gay vibe attached to it. I mean, I love my gays, but straight people can enter into partnerships that don’t involve multi-national corporations with off-shore bank accounts too. I’d rather have a good friend, a partner in crime who I can have copious amounts of sex with, make dinner for and watch movies with. I want someone that if something goes wrong or we bore of each other or whatever that we are both free to fucking leave. No papers involved, no court, no nothing, just end it already.

I will not name names, but there are women I know in the late 20’s- early 30’s range who are ready to settle. They are ready to go ahead and marry the next bastard that treats them good enough and has a job. To me that’s just not fucking good enough. No, I don’t want romance and flowers and candlelit dinners, but I want mutual respect and intellect and all of the things I won’t get if I just settle for some schmuck because society tells me that this is what I am supposed to do.

I am supposed to start bordering on desperate as a female on the latter side of 25, I’m supposed to start putting out the husband traps and checking them daily in hopes that a real keep has gotten tangled in the box. But that’s just not who I am. I don’t want to trap anyone. I want someone who is with me out of free fucking will. I don’t want to steal someone’s soul or eat their still beating heart or trap their balls in a jar on top of the fridge so I can forever emasculate them into the perfect little man-slave. I don’t know why anyone, man or woman would want to be with someone under such false pretenses. But it’s societies way, so line up for your ring, and get ready for your anniversary. I hear the second one is the Crack anniversary.