Obligatory Valentine’s Day Column

"Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Everywhere I turn, some senator or preacher -- or this one particular, nosy neighbor lady -- is telling me that I’m supposed to be married by now. They paint a picture of this blissful marital wonderworld – where the sun shines indoors through fuzzy lens filters and it always snows on Christmas morning.

I just don’t understand this huge societal shove toward the institution of matri-money. It’s outrageously overrated and overpriced. And now you have these poor sots -- who wed three, four, even five times -- racing around, frantically searching for misalliance number six.

First off, Mr. Senator and Mrs. Nosy Neighbor Lady – do not presume to know best how I should live and love. Secondly, marriage is bunk: A connubial hamster wheel where you meet, marry, ball-each-other-in-every-room, bicker, procreate, bicker, cheat, split, remarry another, ball-each-other-in-every-room, bicker, etc. It is a symbol of humankind’s overpowering need for everlasting love, and our inability to admit that maybe it doesn't exist, so we try to legally bind somebody into loving us -- forever!

It’s called "wedlock."

But you can never lock anyone into loving you. We fall in and we fall out of love -- betrothal be damned. So I snub my nose at marital blisters. Why make life so complicated? When you are in love -- and you (think that you) want to spend the rest of your life together -- then spend the rest of your life together. You certainly don’t need a blood test, or a thousand-dollar wedding cake, or an R.S.V.P. from Jesus, or some legal certificate to pull it off.

What’s law got to do, got to do with it?

And if by chance you fall out of love, you won’t have to submit a reason to the judge. Just put the Sega machine under your arm, hoist two indignant, middle fingers like frothy mugs of beer, and shout, "Here’s your ‘irreconcilable differences’ you skanky, old twat!" and stroll out the door.

Matriphony is completely divorced from reality. How can anyone "solemnly swear" to love someone until death do they part? You can’t predict the future. What if your yokemate decides to cheat incessantly; or worse, starts scratching his anus on the couch during football season? What wedding vow prepares you for that?

This is how a realistic wedding vow should look: "I promise to love and honor, until death do us part, or if she sucks off my softball team, or develops a coke habit and starts carrying concealed weapons, or Britney Spears finally returns my phone calls."

And why the big shove to have children? Maybe it’s fine for the Senator and Nosy Neighbor lady, but why would I trade this wonderful existence of bartending, boozing, babbling, and balling -- for some grotesque organism that invades your lover’s body, turns her into a horrific, leaking, obese, marauding, horny, thorny gargoyle; which crawls out of her womb like a full-gorged flap dragon spewing forth unspeakable toxic fluids, and grows up to torture the neighborhood pets?

Why why why would I want any of this?

In search of answers, I posed this question to my people -- "How does the institution of wedlock benefit society?":

1) Tony (wife and son): "Married people work harder to save the relationship."

Donkeyass! People who are still in love work to save the relationship. People who aren’t -- don’t. Ladies, if your husbands are out screwing every waitress that serves them a gimlet, what’s to save? Screw the marriage and find some randy bartender to lick your wombs.

2) Dave (married, two daughters): "Marriage is important for the well being of the children."

Noooo. Loving and sensible parents are important for the well-being of the child. Dr. Laura would shit a lit Menorah if she heard me say this, but -- unmarried, single, gay, or even Martian parents can raise completely normal, happy children. The legally espoused do not have a monopoly on familial love.

3) Suela Decker (my mother, married, three kids): "Children suffer stigma from society when their parents are not married."

If this society would stop scarlet letterizing anyone outside the nuclear family model -- there would be no stigma. It’s people like Dr. Laura who create the stigma when she demands that we love according to her narrow-minded guidelines. (I’d ask you to blow me Doc, but I don’t want your jagged, parched mouth anywhere near me).

4) Dave (separated, two daughters): "Because God says so!"

That’s quick Dave. If you believe in an invisible man in the sky* who presides over who and how we love, then you are a moron.

5) Willow (my girlfriend, unmarried and hot): "You don’t need a piece of paper to prove you love someone. Then you can always look at each other and know you choose to stay together."

Hallelujah baby. That’s more romantic than all the picket-fence monogamaniacs combined. Because love cannot be defined, bottled, sold, or presided over. Love is its own law. Love is an end unto itself.

But that’s just my opinion. Mostly, I just object to the bridal brainwashers -- be they in Congress or be they next door. Instead of me getting married, Mrs. Nosy Neighbor Lady, how about I thrust the Torch of Hymen up your rectum and barbecue your fallopian tubes?

Tie the nuptial noose if you want, Mr. Senator. Just stop goose-stepping over anyone who doesn’t need to validate their romance to the police, or the invisible man in the sky, or an Elvis impersonator with a midget organist and a license he ordered from the back pages of Juggs.

Happy Valentine’s j’all.

*phrase stolen from George Carlin

EJD

2/13/02