When Reality Knocks

Greetings, Steve here, with another When Reality Knocks Lifestyle post. Today I’m going to talk about marriage proposals.

I’m in my late 20’s and at my age, it seems like everyone is either talking about marriage or doing it. I’ve had several conversations with friends, both male and female about this and it seems like there are some fairly large misconceptions out there on both sides, which I will try to clear up today. Men and women think about marriage in fundamentally different ways. Women think about marriage as a union, a coming together of two people in a way that brings them closer together, a monumental growth experience of a maturing and deepening relationship. Men, on the other hand, tend to think of marriage as a life sentence with no chance of parole, with a very pleasant cell mate.

It’s not that men don’t want to be in a deep, committed relationship, or that we don’t love our girlfriends. It’s not even the whole wild-oats thing. It’s just that we’re horribly, wretchedly immature. Men tend to view the world external to the clubhouse as a series of unfortunate necessities that are forcing them to behave in a vaguely mature manner, such as work, relationships, car insurance payments, court summons, etc., but if you took all of these external forces away and had only men in a closed environment for more than three hours, you’d find that the highest expression of cultural achievement and personal bonding they’d come up with would be to push a grand piano into a lake. Guys are hardly ever able to act this immature in everyday life, but they hold out hope of a coming golden age
when they can essentially live likes Visigoths.

Women don’t seem to entirely get this. I mean, clearly women see men as immature, undisciplined, silly, smelly, frequently unreliable creatures, but they seem to believe that we can pull ourselves together if we just try hard enough. This sounds good in theory, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you look at the history of the world, you see that the normal result of men trying to pull themselves together are things like war, religious persecution, ethnic violence and disco. We’re really only going to decide to settle down when we we’re forced to. I’m not defending this behavior, I’m just pointing it out. It doesn’t matter how together a guy is, he’s not going to do this on his own.

The thing is, ladies, you boyfriend views you in completely different ways, depending on the situation. In normal, everyday situations, he looks at you and sees a warm, caring, fun-loving, supportive person with whom he wants to spend time and grow. When the subject of marriage comes up, he sees you as the Dark Lord Sauron.

Sauron, you will remember, was the dark lord from the Lord of The Rings who lusted after the ring of power so that he could expand his dominion over all the Earth. It may seem unfair to say that your boyfriend sees you this way, but there are many parallels, for example:

-All her mind and will is bent on obtaining the ring.

-She sends out her minions to threaten violence in search of the ring.

-Women talk about the ring in a language only they understand (cut, clarity, etc.)

-If a man puts on the ring, he becomes invisible to all but her.

-If she obtains the ring, she will cover all the lands in darkness.

This is the unfortunate truth, ladies. It’s not that your man is innately bad, it’s just that he has the emotional maturity of compost. I’m not trying to justify it, I’m just telling it like it is. Clearly this marriage thing is going to be uphill work.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 1:15 am and is filed under Relationships, Lifestyle and Technology, How to be Cynical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.