zombie marriage
And now, a bit of romantic advice for all you sad students tearfully preparing to bid adieu to someone special for the summer.
In a post on zombie dating I called dating the living dead. Turns out the effects of zombie dating are being realized by some in… duh duh DUH!… zombie marriage!
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One? Lori Gottlieb | The Atlantic
(ht: steve lutz)
That’s right, when your end goal is to suck as much life out of a relationship as you possibly can, when you’re bound and determined to find and consume the one person that will make you happy, when you spend your young adult years hooking up to satisfy your desires or desperately clinging to one person after another like an oozy parasite of love, the only way to arrive at a marriage you can tolerate is to drastically lower your standards and settle for good enough.
The full text of Gottlieb’s depressing article (which you should read, along with Naomi Lakritz’s critique in the Calgary Herald), argues that the most sensible thing for a woman to do, and the surest road to happiness, is to skip out on love and settle for a man, and to do so earlier rather than later, lest you end up yet another unhappy hipster. The problem with her views (both her original insistence on finding The One, and her eventual desire to “settle”) is that they are both so incredibly narcissistic as to make me question whether she’s ever looked outside of herself long enough to know who else was standing in front of her. I write this because this is a common malady on university campuses: students desperately looking for The One, that one person who will make them happy, that one person who is made for them. Why is it that everybody wants to find The One, but nobody wants to be The One?
This brings me to my advice to you students: The One, doesn’t exist; that person’s not out there, but there’s a better way to deal with this realization than “settling.” You can look for someone who’s right for you and for someone for whom you’re right, for someone to make you happy and for someone that you can make happy. Rather than looking primarily for that relationship that will pay out the highest possible dividends, you can look for a relationship in which you can invest deeply; the kind of relationship that would even be worthy of sacrifice. That is to say, you can seek to be The One; you can actually be driven by love. According to the Apostle Paul, to do so is to follow the way of Jesus (which is, of course, the point).
And now, the same lesson in satyric verse:
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