A Treatise on Marriage
In response to:
If your love and attraction must be negotiated, your marriage will 100% end in divorce, estrangement, or worse, suspicious death.
I respectfully disagree with the tragedy of your statements and anyone who believes them. We marry the soul. If you cannot survive poverty, hunger, acquired disabilities (think spinal cord and brain injury), physically altering injuries (think burns, amputation), if you cannot live in a pothole or a tent or your car with them, if you cannot clean up their sick or their excrement, if you cannot wipe for them, should they lose that ability, if you cannot love the soul and outward, because outward is only a mask, then I would not marry at all. It is a commitment and should not be taken lightly.
Now let me back that up. Here are the facts for you and your readers.
Consider what happens when we age. If you are a male, you will likely lose some, most, or even all of your hair where it ought to be. Instead, it will grow in abundance where you don’t want it. Out of your nose and ears, for a start. That will happen, even if you don’t lose much hair on your head. You will also likely be the proud owner of a flabby potbelly. A flabby body, even when you posses a thin body, when you lose muscle mass. Tell me, sexy men, who will want you then?
You likely think, “Oh! I’ll be wealthy and women will throw themselves at me.”
Piece of advice, given posthumously by my father. Always be worth more alive, than dead.
If you are a female, your body may very well be destroyed by carrying just one child and birthing it, or getting a C-section. Just one. Your navel will look like it’s had a flagpole in it. Breast feeding. Your breasts will swell, and reduce. They will swell and reduce as you gain and lose weight, whether you have children or not. Eventually, they collapse with age, menopause, or for any number of reasons. The hormonal changes, alone, during a woman’s lifetime, leave nothing to be desired, whatsoever, not even to the woman herself. Hormones in men, aren’t much better. At the very least, it causes a “flat line” in sex drive. As does menopause. Pity. Female hormones are so complex, though, the changes that occur affect a variety of organ systems, will change how you feel, how you think, your reactions to the everyday, your emotions, your sleep, nothing is sacred. You can suddenly become incontinent. Most of all, it accelerates changes in physical appearance. For women, being so invasive and pervasive, the changes are traumatic, especially the more your identity is wrapped up in how you look. That is our culture. It’s all about appearance. It is the crass nature of your statement, which provoked me to respond to its gritty insensitivity and fatuousness. That is the future for your daughters. They can marry for love, or for money. It won’t matter. They will be replaced with a younger woman, eventually. That is the future your statements support.
There are parts of the body that will appear to continue to grow throughout our lifetimes, however long that may be. While the mechanisms aren’t technically growth—increased cell division—they do result in larger body parts. The feet will increase by 1/2 to 1 full shoe size. Due to bone remodeling, the lower jaw continues to grow forward and widens. Other facial bones lose some volume and recede. Combine this with shifting fat, and our faces will be altered over our lifetimes, and not a little bit. The nose and ears, all seem to continue to grow in size as well, though it is because of a combination of cartilage loss and gravity.
Gravity is inescapable, as are changes in our bodies over time due to cell senescence and other natural aging processes. Gravity, alone, is unkind to both sexes. The skin will lose its shape. Its firmness. And it begins to smell.
You have heard of “nonenal smell”, haven’t you? It is also unflatteringly referred to as “old people smell”.
You won’t be subjected to it, you say?
Wrong. If you live to be 40, or beyond, you will. It’s perfectly natural. Haha! It’s caused by a chemical compound called 2-nonenal, which is produced when the skin's natural fatty acids break down and oxidize. Because it is oil-soluble rather than water-soluble, it cannot be scrubbed off with regular soap and water.
Finally, while science progresses all around us, there will be no “cure” for old age within your lifetime, sir. You’re already too old.
That is what awaits us all.
I mentioned my father earlier. He was married several times, and eventually murdered for his estate. It may surprise you, but it wasn’t his last wife, though she inherited everything. She was roughly my age. She loved him. She was never the same, after that. I watched her suffer. I watched her withdraw. I watched her try to find something, anything to hang onto, that remotely resembled the happiness she had until the day my father was killed. She was broadsided. Torn asunder. She had trouble relating to people much anymore. I was the child most like my father at one time. She clung to me, when we had not been at all close during their relationship and marriage, which surprisingly lasted nearly 20 years. She was murdered, after she had completely probated his estate, two years to the day after his death. She loved him.
The Song of Solomon 8:6-8 (MSG) best describes love, in my opinion.
The Woman: “Hang my locket around your neck, wear my ring on your finger. Love is invincible facing danger and death. Passion laughs at the terrors of hell. The fire of love stops at nothing—it sweeps everything before it. Flood waters can’t drown love, torrents of rain can’t put it out. Love can’t be bought, love can’t be sold…”
Perhaps you’d rather have your shallow nothing, where you must negotiate getting laid as you age. But that scripture, is the love I know with my own Beloved. I doubt I will survive him more than hours, should he die before me. We are like congenital twins, even when far apart.
If you’d rather dispense with scriptures, though I’d wager you were given incorrect information, that’s perfectly fine. Plato was also known to take a shot at it, though presumably he didn’t really agree with his own assessment.
Plato’s Symposium, written around 385 B.C. is at the below Gutenberg.com link, after a lengthy introduction.
The tiny section I’ve read, and it was only a fraction, is indeed true of My Beloved and I, though it isn’t inclusive of the whole experience. Again, I’ve not read enough to speak in general terms about the contents of the Symposium. Only the following quote, is what I can attest to as truth.
“And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment.”
—For My Beloved
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