Anybody Want A Peanut?

I don't really expect this to amount to much. It's 11:26 on a Friday night and I drank caffeine and ate entirely too much red meat too recently to be entering my second REM of sleep like I normally should be. Like most nights recently, I am up listening to my wife snooze and thinking about distant things; Baseball, vinyl, records being released this year, what I would do if I stumbled on a small loan of a million dollars, when will my wife finally have watched all the episodes of Teen Mom so we can stop watching that tremendously terrible show or I am going to cancel Hulu, and so on. While I lay and solve the worlds problems on my 1/4th of the bed, I have been having a pretty recurring thought recently.

I was thinking recently about how much I hated being engaged. I know that's brash to begin with, but hear me out. I was working 45 hours a week at an $8.50 pay scale. I felt like I was working my ass off and couldn't even afford to get a sandwich for lunch. My fiance was working as a flight attendant and was living in Minneapolis. She would come home every 2 or 3 weeks, but would stress about making it back to work in time, so we never really enjoyed ourselves. Not to mention, I hardly had time to spend with her anyway, I was working so often. So we planned this wedding from 1200 miles apart. To be fair, her mother did a tremendous amount of the work, I picked up the things I was trusted with. But I was trying to relay messages to everyone, pick things up, make invitations, get everything situated, and try not to stamp on anyone's toes in the process. I was so stressed. I was trying to impress in-laws, get my own shit together, try and make enough money to fund moving across the country, and dealing with a fiance that was even more stressed than I was. It was all I could do to not fall apart. And while that was totally and completely exhausting, I think the thing that was more exhausting was everyone's "advice." Offering nuggets of foolhardy information from a bitter marriage of 40 years that's solely consisted of not strangling your significant other. "Don't do it." was the one I heard the most. And I think it's partially in jest, I always kind of took it like: "I'm only joking... please help me." The only response I could ever muster was: "Wow. sounds like you married a real asshole, congratulations."

I guess I do understand it to some extent. Marriage means a few things. No more shitting with the door open, No more frozen pizzas for dinner every night, no more potato guns to shoot the neighbors, no more showering every third day, no more partially dirty laundry, no more only attending sacrament meetings, no more video games in your underwear and on and on and on. Getting married really means refining the edges in your life. And some people just aren't really cut out for that, and that's fine. Some people thrive on being single and meeting new women/men every night. some people don't like change. And I totally get that.

I guess what my rebuttal to all of that is a couple of things. Just because you are unhappy with your asshole of a wife/husband, doesn't mean that everyone will be. That's like suggesting that because you don't like vanilla ice cream they should stop serving it all together. What an dumb shit thing to suggest. Did you ever take into consideration that maybe you're the asshole in your relationship/for not liking vanilla ice cream? Just a thought. Being self aware is totally important.

I guess I should relay that the gist of that paragraph is that everyone is different. We all will have totally different experiences and things will work differently for everyone. So regardless of what information you hope to push across to those who aren't married, you should be aware that your advice could be rendered totally useless and a waste of breath. And more importantly, why would you ever raise a voice of warning about marriage to someone who is engaged? Is your sense of humor that terrible, or do you truly believe the bile you've just spilt? Saying someone shouldn't get married when you are married speaks volumes. Don't speak poorly of your wife ever, even if it's jokingly.

I also truly believe that if you marry the right person and for the right reasons, it's like taking all that shit that you love to do, and making it better. Sure, you may not get to do it as often as you would like. And you may have to put up with watching some painfully terrible dreadful and loathsome reality tv. But that is what makes it all worth it. Imagine your favorite thing, whatever it is. Eating ice cream in bed, sneaking $40 worth of McDonalds into a movie theater (looking @ U Kasey), Going to the beach, shooting bottle rockets at someones house, going to a concert, throwing water balloons at the Steck's house from the back of Jens' truck while their oldest son chases you with a gun to the outskirts of Ephraim, whatever it is, envision it. Now imagine doing that thing with someone you care more about than anyone in the world. Like, you don't wanna spend time with anyone else, or do anything without them because they're your best friend. And they feel the exact same way about you. it's like doing all that weird sadistic shit that was mentioned and making it 400000000 times better. That's how I feel about marriage.

I guess in some ways you do have to compromise some things. Unfortunately, that's what growing up means. Sometimes you have to not buy a bunch of useless stuff because you have to pay rent. Sometimes you have to sacrifice time you would like to be using swimming or doing fun stuff because you have to go to work because bills are due at the end of the month. Marriage is a similar concept. Sometimes you have to do dishes because your wife cooked. Sometimes you have to go out of your way to buy flowers to make your wife happy. Sometimes you have to watch Teen Mom because you keep farting in bed and that's the deal.

(Her way is not very sportsman-like.)


May God have mercy on Donald Trump's soul.