Livin' La vida Marriage

The news of your friends breakup always hits in a strange way, part of you always saw it coming, that part that remembers every single flaw your friend has, along with the flaws you noticed with this new person in their lives... but also in another way.

You start to look at your own significant other in that manner.

As you get older, this gets easier to deal with, hell in high-school, the moment one person broke up with someone, the entire hierarchy of relationships in the school was weakened. Everyone re-evaluating their own social and relation standings based on this new development.

Past college, you hardly notice anymore. One day, that other person just isn't there anymore.

Then it happens... one of you gets married, and the world shifts. Marriage is sort of a strange happenstance for all friendship circles, because now, you've a new recruit that isn't just going to be tossed away after a bad fight. You marry the person, you marry their friends.

Making a significant other disown friends as a part of marriage is the fast track to divorce/shallow graves, because they were here first. I luckily don't have this problem, but I know those that do.

So I think about the oddities of marriage, how now I get up on my day off, and decide to do the dishes. Not because they need to be done, or the smell has finally pissed off the mechanics across the street to the point where they're leaving passive-aggressive notes, no, I do it because I want to see the look on her face. And because she's kinda scary when she's angry.

The weird part of wandering around my apartment, knowing that while it's mine, she'll be back to it. She won't knock, she won't call before hand, she'll just walk in like she owns the place. Key Note: She does.

I see my non-married friends now, and they're alien to me. They do things I can't comprehend anymore. They get numbers from girls... I haven't asked a girl for her number in six years.

I don't sit around, talking about things with them anymore as an equal, something I loved to do. Now it almost always turns to marriage talks... and they lead me into it. I used to think that married men seemed to always talk about it, but now that I'm the married one, I notice just how much they don't know about things that are obvious... and they ask questions about it I didn't know I asked then, but do now.

I think about Hannigan, me a married me with no kids, him a single father. Our conversations are just weird these days... and no one else understands it when they're there. It's unique to us, two men who understand eachother in ways usually reserved for married couples, with completely different lots in life, our conversations are light years beyond what others can know.

The strangest part, that so many of my friends don't understand from either of us anymore, are the choices we make, or really, don't make. So many comedians make a living off of joking about "women making all the choices and being in charge" and single guys laugh and say that marriage is about losing control, and married men laugh at those single guys.

When I was in college, in my dorm, my computer was against the wall, why? Fuck it because. It was there when I moved in, it stayed there till I moved out. No need to move it, because I didn't care about it. Why should I care? I put things where I wanted them to be, and that was it. It either looked good, or terrible, but it looked how I cared it looked. If I didn't care where something went, I just put it someplace and ignored it.

Now, there's someone who might just care about where that is, so I let them do it. It's addicting. I don't care what's for dinner, as long as it's food I'll eat. If I want a pizza, I'll bring that up, but it's not really something I'm passionate about. I have all the power I never had as a child in my parents home... and I give so much of it away because I just don't care about where the TV goes, as long as I can plug my Xbox into it. I think people forget this when they talk of marriage and loss of choice. We don't lose anything that we want.

So, these days, I don't do much with my unmarried friends... because they're just not up to speed. It's like hanging out with an unemployed person, when you work full time; they just don't understand why you can't go out at 2am to a bar. Same concept, but it's not that I work in the morning, I just don't need to go to a bar to get drunk. I can do that at home, watch tv where I can actually hear it, and the food isn't shit. What's the point of dropping $20 at a bar? When it's free at home? Because at the bar, you can pick up girls.
At the club, the concert and all other manner of places I went as a single guy to find a girl... I don't do anymore and they all still do. You forget how much of your time was spent trying to find a girl... that you've got so much extra once you're married... that you end up just doing the dishes between episodes of Scrubs, just because.

In the end, I find a lot of my old hobbies have been shelved... like the SCA, my wife isn't the biggest fan... and you'd be amazed how much of my time was spent just... trying to get a girl to take off her corset. My unmarried friends don't understand this at all... which is fine for them now. But remember, I now have introduced this idea into your lives, you can't hide from it. By just knowing me, you're more likely to get married... your time is coming...