Marrying For Love Is One Big Mistake

Love and logic rarely show up at the same place at the same time.

Love is a lot of things. Beautiful, patient, kind and gentle. Love (supposedly) keeps no record of rights or wrongs and love is exciting. Love is soothing and love is chaotic. It begins and ends and begins again, as all fickle things do. Love is forever temporary because love is love. And for every aforementioned reason, love is NOT a reason to get married.

Now if you were raised watching fairy tales or daytime television or evening programming or cartoons or really anything on television at all, then you’re probably in a state of disbelief right now. Somewhere between Cinderella, Pocahontas, Snow White, Bella, Ariel, Rapunzel and Princess Jasmine we learned that a guy didn’t need to do anything to earn our hand in marriage other than provide a serious case of the warm fuzzies. (And ask, of course.) Because when a guy brings your comatose ass back to life with a single kiss, the least you can do is marry him. Based on this conditioning, we grew up correlating marriage with love, internalizing the idea that marriage is something you do when you love someone. This ideation makes it virtually impossible to have a conversation about marriage apart from its perceived emotional component. So for the sake of this conversation, let’s discuss the two as if they’re not joined at the hip, starting…