So I don’t care if you care about celebrity gossip. People swear off celebs all the time as making silly choices for press attention, fame, another role, better sales, etc etc etc.
We were all a little shocked when this happened after only a few weeks of dating:
Then, after 1 month:
And now, as of yesterday, 2 months:
Now, I can’t say from experience that I’ve been married or know how to have a successful marriage, but I do have a mother. A mother that went literally 30 years of her life without getting married, stayed married until she was widowed and beat her reasoning into my head like a pinata when I was younger.
Every time I dated someone she’d give me the same spiel. Same with relatives. Cousins. Pretty much everyone. I’ll paraphrase.
“If you’re going to be with the asshole for 60 years, you want to see them at their best. At their worse. When you really can’t stand them anymore and would love to push them off a cliff.”
I added some dramatic flair there, but you get it.
Here’s the thing.
Marriage is, as James Sexton calls it, a technology.
This dude is a long time divorce lawyer.
Translation: He’s seen some shit.
“If I’m signing up to live with another human being, to share my finances with them and to only have sex with them for the rest of my life — these are important questions…We’ve convinced people of this idea of a soulmate. You should just meet someone — instant chemistry- and if you don’t have instant chemistry and perfection you’re doing it wrong”.
I don’t really care all that much about Ariana Grande’s love life. Nor do I care much about the other two, but I do think about the commonality of all of it. What better representation of how cheap and fast love has become these days?
And not just love, but marriage. You know that silly little life-long commitment we’re spending thousands of dollars and decades of our lives on knowing full well that there’s a good chance it all goes down the drain.
I never said these relationships won’t work, of course.
They probably won’t, though. And until we stop believing in marriage as a bright pink and blue fairy-tale land, I’m really not all that hopeful.
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Originally published on Medium. Republished with permission.
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Photo by Hutomo Abrianto on Unsplash
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