What I'm Reading: Even Cowboys Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. As I turn the page on page 72 I find a little slip of paper from the corner of a sheet of letterhead for the company my recent ex-roommate works... and I think 'that's weird... Steve didn't finish this book or som'n? this is such a bad bookmark..." and then I read this paragraph on page 73 and it dawns on me that just maybe someone wanted to remember this. Steve? Dan? Someone else?
"...relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much---then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. Shit O goodness, how I do go on."
shudder...
eta... not that anyone believes that marriage IS always like this or even that it has to be. but in all honesty I think I have never rushed to be married and that I ran from the one time I came even remotely close is that this sort of idea has always been my fear. Because this is definitely not an impossible or unrealistic picture of what it can become.
I know that there are people who have - or will have - marriages that are nothing like this, that are or will be what marriage can and should be. And I know that if I do decide to get married someday it will be nothing like that above picture. Partnership. Love. Respect. In the trenches fighting the battle together. Interesting and significant life together ...and that's what it's all about!
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2 comments:
I don't of course remember since that was over a year ago at least...but
It does strike me as something I would find interesting to talk to someone about.. lol.. maybe u Kristin because Dan would have only grunted then and gone back to playing Star Wars back then :P
yeah, jedi knights. definitely.
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