For me I can think of two specific situations:
- A girl I liked in high school, happen stance let me see and read something she had written for an in class assignment, to be read only by our female teacher, about her new boyfriend, and about how she could not stop thinking about him and was disturbed at the prospect that he might "someday marry somebody else."
I was really surprised by this, because I had thought that after the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, the Anti-War in Vietnam Movement, and the Sexual Revolution, that the people of my age were not going to be like our parents. Man was I ever wrong.
In class once earlier a teacher was talking about primitive societies and how they have their various practices, and that some are a prelude to marriage, just like we have 'dating' as a prelude to marriage. This same girl was nodding in agreement. I was surprised, as I certainly did not go along with what this teacher was saying and I'd thought only people of my parents' generation would have.
- Some years later in college these two girls were going on and on about what it was going to be like at their weddings. They went on and on and this seemed so strange that they had nothing better to talk about. Neither of them was planning for any wedding anytime soon.
I said, "You two sure talk a lot about getting married."
"That's because we're girls."
When did you first come to see marriage as a negative thing?
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When I was very small, like pre-school, I was taken to a wedding and the reception. I didn't have any negative feelings about it all. Though it did seem quite alien and strange.
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Once at about age 8, with a classmate and neighborhood boy, he somehow mentioned the subject of getting married. By that time I had come to see it in a negative light. Mostly I think it was just from seeing married people, like my parents. The women did not keep nice looking. But also it just seemed like a trap and pointless.
So, using the language of the day, Hugh Hefner's, I said that I did not want to be married, but that I was "going to be a playboy." But in saying that I felt like I was really transgressing, almost like saying that I did not believe in God, or something like that.
- Once in school, about age 10, the subject of how different words are spelled came up and of the word 'married'. A boy said something, I don't remember his words, but it was something about girls. It was not nice. They all kind of sat their sheepishly, like they'd been outed.
The 10yo girls did not seem revolting or anything, but I did feel that the idea of being married was like being eaten alive.
My own ex-wife, she was never sexually unfaithful. Her infidelities were in the idolatrous relationship she had with money.
But even before this, she never really was with me. She had seemed to be before the marriage, but then immediately after, once it became hard to dump her, she changed 100%, and turned into an adversary. She was never a support, always a serious problem.
And so as life already has its own challenges, to be attacking from within one's personal life, she made the marriage lethal.
Where does his obsession with marriage come from? It can't all be just religion and commercial advertising. Is it the mothers, just trying to keep the girl on the straight and narrow, on the approved path?
You could say that marriage and women are the only social cohesion capitalism has left us with. And so no one really has anything else.
It would be after college, in the work place that I noted that I was for the first time having lots of contact with people who were about half way between may parents' age and mine. And most of them were married.
I noticed that they seemed to be harried too. Whereas they would have lived very cheaply in college, now they were always keeping up with normative expectations, always popping out kids, and always the next set of car payments, and on these mid-sized SUV's, and then the mortgage payments which usually required two incomes. None of it seemed appealing. Seemed idiotic.
SJG
Ginger Baker's Air Force (Jazz and Rock, 1970) Full Show youtube.com
I noticed it when after 3 years of dating, the girls would start forcing the issue.
It seemed sort of like college. As a freshmen and sophomore, it can just be a great experience, but toward the end of your junior year, you might start thinking about whether this place is ever going to give you a degree so you can move onto the next stage of life (especially if the incoming first year females stop seeing you as an appropriate mate and you're wanting the money for strippers).
I think part of the obsession is approval-seeking - does anyone care about her enough to dedicate his life, part child-rearing - kids without two parents don't tend to do as well, part the craving for the comfort of having a caring soul around for as long as humanly possible.