Study says that men prefer being solo over a bad marriage

Here it is, June already! And how fitting that this article appears on the traditional month for marriage.

The title of the article is: Men prefer being solo over a bad marriage.

I am in my 40's, and have never been married. An age, in other words, that many people - even men - have usually already been married. When people are in their 40's, they are often divorced from their second marriage, or preparing for their third. Hell, I know former classmates who are already grandparents. So let's answer the big question first: Do I WANT to be married? The answer is definitely yes. The idea of growing old with someone, and the idea of raising kids appeals to me, and it always has.

BUT, with the right woman!

The article linked above stated that the #1 reason why men don't marry is not because they don't want to marry or that they are afraid to marry, but because they are afraid of a bad marriage. That is me, to a "T". During my adult life, I have seen one example after another, time and time and time again how to marry the wrong way. I have seen divorces, remarriages, redivorces, and of course the ugly child custody suits. I have seen one ex have their asses handed to them by the other. I have seen the kids being used as ammo by the parents, with little or no regard to the feelings of the kids.

In my life, there have been very few examples of good, happy marriages for me to look up to. The examples I've seen of marriage send the message that "marriage is for sex for a few years until you have a child or two, then you divorce and fight over the kids". The marriage, divorce, and custody suits afterwards seemed to have become a bizarre rite of passage. It was painful, ugly, and senseless. So you see why a bad marriage scares me.

Not only do I not want to put myself through that kind of pain, I also don't want to do that to my children. It would kill me to hurt my kids the way that I've seen kids hurt by divorce, and I might agree to something stupid in order to spare my kids from being hurt. My logic then is still my logic now: I'd rather wait and be married right the first time than to rush into it and screw up. Rushing into marriage just because you don't want to be UNmarried is a very sure path to eventually being unmarried again.

Another thing that the article stated is that many who are single are not unhappy or lonely. They've accepted their current state. This may or may not suggest that they want to stay that way, but that if they do, they can live with it. That's how I feel. Another common criticism is that my standards are too high. The way to answer that is to ask "If I make my standards too low, for sure I'll find someone, but what are the odds that it will be the right one?" Judging by what I've seen during my adult life, the odds are not good at all. In fact, low standards and rushing into marriage are what caused a lot of the problems that we see today. If low standards and rushing into marriage didn't work in the past, why would they work now?

Another couple of things that I would have added to the article are that 1.) unlike women, men don't have a loud "biological clock" that pressures then into a decision, and 2.) unlike women, men don't generally share their feelings with their friends - at least not feelings of this nature. If any of my buds wanted to come cry on my shoulder about how lonely he feels, I'd probably tell him to go tell Dr. Phil. This is not out of meanness or a lack of concern, it's just that dudes don't do feelings with other dudes.

The only acceptable feelings that men share with other men are usually related to sports, like anger over a stupid call or joy over winning the championship. In any case, the lack of a loud biological clock and the hesitancy for men to share their feelings with other men can be both a good and a bad - but mainly it just shows that men and women are different - and despite the frustrations that it causes women, there's nothing wrong with the differences. It's what makes women women, and men men.

Let me finish this by saying that marriage is still a goal of mine. I would still like a wife and kids. That still appeals to me. Have I made mistakes in the past? Absolutely. I'd be deluding myself by thinking otherwise. But I do want to go to sleep every night with the woman that I love. I do want to hold my son or daughter (or both, if I ever get to that point) in my arms. I want it strongly enough that I want to do it right the first time, and there's nothing wrong with that. I want those arms that embrace me and whom I embrace with my arms to do so forever. That's a goal worth fighting for, and it's worth waiting for.

That's Amore! Pt 1 of 2

I had initially hoped to post this on Valentine's Day, but I had some stuff to take care of last week, plus I ended up saying more than I thought on this topic. Thus, I'm posting the first half today, and the second half possibly later this week.

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The power of love is a curious thing. It makes one man weep, and another man sing.

Sorry. For some reason, I started singing that old Huey Lewis song.

Anyway, love is indeed a curious thing. And it's also hard to pin down a definition! Love means, basically, caring for another. But there's different forms of caring. I care for my family and friends. I care more for family than for friends, obviously, but even within family, I care more for some family members than for others. Parents and siblings, in other words, should come before aunts, uncles, and cousins. Then there's the caring for another in the special way that can lead to romance, and then possibly to marriage.

Romantic love is probably the ultimate puzzle of our human existence on this mortal sphere (sounds rather deep and poetic, eh?). There's infatuation, which is basically a type of uncritical and unreasoning form of idolizing, and then there's the true and mature love. When one is infatuated, then the idolizer can't see any faults in the object of their adoration. That can get problematic (to say the least!) in that we all have faults, and some more glaring than others, but while we are "in love", we are blind to those faults - and often to our dismay later.

I've been in that state before. "Goofy in love", I mean. But it wasn't love, it was infatuation. I know this, because if it had been true love, then I would have married that woman, and I would still be with her to this day. And maybe I would have already had a child or two by now. I might also be in debt up to my eyeballs as the wife buys yet another pair of shoes from the most expensive shoe store in town while son Johnny is charging up a storm getting the latest electronic gizmo that will gather dust by the end of the month while daughter Suzie is dating some weirdo named “Skrattch” who’s wearing so much metal with his body piercings that he can’t go through airport gates without tripping all of them off at the same time.

Ahem. Sorry. Got off on a tangent there. Anyway, those infatuations proved to be just that – immature infatuations – and not true love. In other words, it wasn't meant to be; and perhaps it was for the best. It's entirely possible that "Miss Right" has already come into my life and gone.

Possible…

....but I don't think so.

Why do I doubt it? Because I think I would have known by now that “Miss Right” had come and gone out of my life. In other words, right now I'd be ruing having let her go. But I have no such regrets over any woman of my past. Actually, now I can see that those I had been infatuated with in the past would have been wrong for me for one reason or another. While I do regret not having gotten to know more women in the past, there is still not anyone from the past that I now regard as “Miss Right”.

So what does that mean? That means two things: 1.) "Miss Right" is still in my future, or 2.) I was not meant to get married. Thing is, not being married for the rest of my life no longer scares me. I've come to accept the possibility. It's not something that I necessarily desire, but at the same time, I'd rather be single for the rest of my life than to be miserable from being married to the wrong person. People marry the wrong person because of different reasons. Among those reasons (and this list does not pretend to be complete) is a lack of patience, a lack of maturity, being "goofy in love", or being afraid of NOT being married. None of those reasons will ever lead to a happy marriage.

This, I know, because I have seen many, many examples of how to marry the wrong way. Ain’t that sad? I can’t count the numbers of marriages and divorces just among the people I know or have known. And the lesson from those failed marriages is that there is such a thing as marrying the wrong way. There’s many examples of marrying the wrong way, actually. Fortunately, there are some people I know that are still in their first marriage. For those folks, it looks like it’s going to stay that way, too. They’re examples of mature love, and it’s such people that gives me hope that I, too, may one day know the truest and best form of caring for another.

I shall be continuing this topic later.

Coming soon: Part 2