GETTING MARRIED? CONGRATULATIONS! WHOM AGAINST?

Written by Jokeress (currently suspended on Twitter for some stupid reasons), published in Playboy magazine a few years ago.

I should have been married seven times already had it been up to my girlfriends, their female friends, my female friends or even the very few of my romantically inclined male friends. I haven’t married, however, because this is also somewhat up to me. I am not a fan of marriage as an institution; not because I’m unromantic or don’t believe in love, but simply because of the fact I’m not stupid. Romance is overrated, and marriage nowadays is not being taken seriously. The blind desire for romance often turns into infinite stupidity, the result of which is marriage. I’m not too popular among my romantically inclined friends because I frequently fail to feign enthusiasm and joy adequately enough when they break the news to me: “Mary and I are getting married!” As any proper friend would at such a moment, I should make a face like a three year-old does when he sees an ice-cream, and say: “Congratulations, buddy! I knew from day one she is the woman of your life! She is perfect for you and you will be very happy together!” Instead, I say: “Jesus Christ, how can you be sure she is the woman for you? You’ve only known each other for six months!” This, however, makes me the truest kind of friend there is, because the function of a true friend is not to support their buddy’s insane idea, but to reveal the possibility that he is most likely making a colossal mistake. My romantically inclined friends, however, simply cannot comprehend this and they become angry with me and start calling me a depressed pessimist. I also often get accused of being envious of their true love, but several months after I leave a thousand bucks at their “Till Death do us Part” soiree they do not want to let me know they are getting a divorce because they do not want to hear the words “I told you so.” Most divorces and short marriages are a consequence of wedlock as a validation of unwanted pregnancies, but they also occur simply because people marry individuals they just do not know. I do not actually understand why they do it so I just attribute such actions to romantic insanity that overcomes them. I see no other realistic justification for marrying an individual you have not lived with for at least a year, and it is quite difficult to have lived together for a year when you have only known each other for six months – this is a matter of elementary mathematics. I don’t know whether the people who rush into marriage are extremely rich or whether stress turns them on, when they behave as if guided by a motto: “Why just break up with someone without major drama, when you can pay a lawyer to do so and, if you’re lucky enough, lose a bunch of property in the process?” In other words, why should anyone get to know each other before marriage, when they can wed first, only to realize six months later they are not quite right for each other and get divorced so their friends would have something to talk about for an entire year? If your move is so stupid it gives people inspiration for a whole year’s worth of conversation, then it really is dumb enough to make an equally bad movie about it. Bad movies are those films that are so stupid one can only watch them for about half an hour before unplugging everything and calling someone, anyone really, to complain for an hour about the stupidity of a particular movie. That’s exactly what I did today after watching 29 minutes of a movie called “Arthur”, which nearly made me quit honoring the personality and work of Russell Brand, best known to wider audiences for his two minute marriage with Katy Perry. I was so overwhelmed by the movie’s stupidity I had to call my girlfriend in order to tell her all about it. My girlfriend, not wife! She is not my fiancée either, even though we have already known each other for a whole month, but I simply will not risk having a movie made based on the story of my life; a film so stupid audiences would leave the theatre within 15 minutes, developing a sudden urge to call people at random in order to tell them about the stupidity they had attempted to watch. In fact, let me be honest with you… I don’t want to experience the same situation my romantically inclined friend Vladimir found himself in last year, when he married Mary from the beginning of this story after only knowing her for several months. They went out for half a year, spent a week together on holiday and got into such an argument they had to cut their trip short and return home, only to make amends and decide to get married soon thereafter. Overly romantic, but an entirely logical turn of events (sarcasm)! I tried to explain to him that marrying a person whom he had a major argument with after only a couple of days’ holiday in ideal conditions (sun, sea, cocktails, holding hands and eating candy-floss) might not be a great idea, but he would hear none of it. “You don’t understand”, he said, “We’re perfect for each other!” He continued explaining: “Our sex is fantastic!” I find it funny that his main pro-marriage argument was great sex. I have nothing against sex, especially when it is fantastic, and I do not suggest marriage with frigid women who agrees to have sex just when it’s your birthday (they are reserved for closet homosexuals in need of an alibi), but sex simply cannot be the main motive. Long, boring story cut short, only once he has gotten married did Vladimir realize that Mary’s childhood dream is to become a dog breeder. Her plan was as follows: she will not work, but she will breed dogs and sell them for sheer billions. The first thing she had to do, however, was procure one male and one female Irish wolfhound. She had to go get one from Germany (why not Ireland?!) because she was planning a serious business and could not risk working with inadequate examples of such a sophisticated breed. Vladimir would pay for it all, and all of this was to ensue in his… I mean, THEIR apartment. Since their sex is so fantastic, Vladimir immediately splurged 5000 dollars for two dogs which his wife would take care of for the rest of their lives. Her idea of caring for the dogs, however, consisted of sitting behind her computer all day long, wearing her house-robe, sipping coffee, smoking her cigarettes and watching movies, while Vladimir took them for walks at 7a. m., before he went to work, then again at 5 p. m. when he would come home from work, and once again around midnight, before he would go to bed. In his spare time, he trained the dogs and cleaned the house from their mess, while Mary went out with her friends. Sure enough, the canine couple soon produced four adorable puppies, so Vladimir had to settle an adorable vet bill, not to mention acquire another hobby as a pet sitter and resident poop cleaner. The fantastic sex was no more, because the man was too exhausted to live due to his round-the-clock engagements with the Noah’s Ark his household had become. After four excruciatingly long months, Mary managed to sell the puppies. “I really spent an arm and a leg on all this”, he said, “Now that you have 10000 dollars, let me have a couple of hundred to pay for the phone bill.” The phone bill is not the point of this story… Her reaction, however, is: “But that’s my money!” It all ended with an argument in which she accused him of being a stingy animal hater that dedicates none of his time to her. In the end, she found herself a lover, a boy-toy 10 years her junior, whom she moved in with. She justified her actions by saying: “We don’t even have sex anymore, so this marriage is pointless.” As a keepsake, she left Vladimir with the two dogs, which she didn’t take with her as it was “too complicated” to do so, a bunch of bills and chewed-up furniture. People now write columns about him in various magazines, while he writes Facebook statuses: “I’ve decided to quit having meaningful relationships with women, and start paying for sex or, better yet, do it all myself since I have no cash, but I do have very soft hands.” There is no risk he might read this because he cannot afford a few bucks to buy his own copy. He cannot afford a haircut either, so there’s no danger he might flip through one at a hairdresser’s salon either. His fantastic sex cost me only a thousand bucks, which is what I left at his wedding. The whole endeavor cost him much more. A second example is my roommate from college, George, whose travesty only cost me 500 dollars, since we’re nowhere near close enough to pay a thousand. George had to get married in order to find out his bride, the love of his life, is an obsessive control-freak, and that living with his mother is infinitely less stressful. I realized this woman was suspicious during my own birthday celebration. I was preparing dinner for my friends, seeing her for the first time in my life, when she took advantage of my relaxed state of mind and put so much pepper in the food it was edible only to her. “It has to be on the spicy side”, she boastfully defended herself… No, it does not have to be on the spicy side! In fact, the food was not just “on the spicy side”, because ten hungry people spent my entire birthday party trying to eject the pepper from their noses and throats by downing gallons of water. I know women must not be hit even with a bouquet of flowers, but this one could use a few spicy slaps. After a grandiose wedding, the couple started living together, but George developed a habit of running back to his mom, instead of running away from her, which he did frequently throughout his youth. “She is out of her mind! She throws my stuff away according to her own criteria”, he complained. At first I wasn’t sure I understood what he was saying, but he listed all of the things she had thrown out over a period of just one month: His Metallica t-shirt, because “it is infantile to wear such rags”, a scale model of a German military base that he had been building for a year, because “he is too old for that”, his collection of Tarantino DVD’s because “those movies are dumb and only incite violence”, his baseball bat because “what’s the point of having that?”, and the spare tires for his bicycle because “they are taking up too much space and he isn’t using them anyway”. After less than a year spent arguing about throwing stuff out and the pepper in their meals, they filed for divorce. The deal is not yet settled because George is currently in hospital waiting for surgery on his peptic ulcer, caused by stress and his 360 spicy lunches. Guided by Vladimir’s and George’s examples, hearing that someone is getting married always causes me to ask: “Whom against?” This question is ideal, because examples from life have shown that a spouse is usually one’s greatest enemy, greater than one could ever have dreamed of before wedlock. I don’t think I’ll come off as much too arrogant when I say I consider myself smart for not marrying every single woman I see for more than two months. On the contrary, I end every relationship as soon as I sense a whiff of trouble about the young lady in question. If something bothers me, and I think I won’t be able to deal with it over a longer period, I do not see myself married to that woman. And one day I want to be married to a woman, not against her. I broke up with Claire because she was obsessed with dieting, and would not talk about anything else. Calculating the calories she consumed made me more proficient at mathematics than any schooling ever would. I left Dorothy because she kept bragging about having Arabic friends, which made me conclude she is quite shallow, because how very few friends must one have in order to think that having Arabs in their social circle is something extravagant and out of the ordinary? Our sex, however, was fantastic. Maya, on the other hand, overly insisted on having a child as soon as possible in order to prevent me from dumping her, having heard that marriage validates unwanted pregnancies. Needless to say, I left her as a result. It is particularly bad if the unwanted pregnancy is a result of terrible sex, which was the case with Maya. I did not dump Victoria, but I launched her to the moon when she took my credit card without my knowledge and splurged on a pair of Fendi shoes with high heels she couldn’t even walk in. I’m not cheap, but a woman who signs others’ credit card bills and spends others’ money to buy things she does not need is not the woman of my life. The sex wasn’t that great either. I told “farewell” to yet another Maya in my life when my cellphone was blocked after she erroneously entered the pin-number three times, hoping to spy on my messages and browse through my contacts. After that incident I had to call customer service of my provider several times, but I never called her again. Speaking of messages and spying, I sent Catherine off after she hired a friend of hers to hit on me and send me provocative messages in order to test my fidelity. I smoothly ceased all contact with Laura after her unfounded accusations of me hitting on every woman I lay my eyes on, including ones on TV, the ones I never met in person. I cannot yet tell how the current one will do, but it does not look promising. She was somewhat upset when I called her to tell her just how dumb the movie “Arthur” is because she finds it “quite cool and funny”. I’m not too sure I want to spend the rest of my life arguing over the remote control or sleeping at cinemas. I thank all of the gods I am not a hopeless romantic. Otherwise I would have been divorced three times by now, suffering from unbearable heartburn caused by spicy food, and most likely writing Facebook statuses about being broke but having soft hands, which I can make love to myself with, while the Russell Brands of the world earn billions making dumb, entirely unfunny and downright repulsive movies inspired by the story of my life. I’m not quite that full of myself to think Hollywood has ever heard of me, but all I’m saying is that a bad reputation has a far reach. In the end, I come to a conclusion: Marrying against someone is an expensive hobby.