5 Surprising Upsides to Getting Married
Like most of my generation, I've been soured on the concept of marriage since childhood. This was largely because pop culture showed me only three stages to love: desperately trying to stumble into it, eventually securing it with marriage and then spending the rest of your life regretting it. Even the happily wed couples on TV have no magic or mystique left to them; they constantly complain of feeling stuck, or bored, or harangued to their wit's end. If anybody tells their story at all, it's always about how the miserable married couple, via liberal application of wacky shenanigans, learned to finally love again -- never how they stayed that way from the start and everything has been pretty neat the whole time. It's obvious why that is -- contentment does not make for good storytelling -- but as a kid with divorced parents raised on a lot of television, I bought into the portrayal of marriage as a life-ruining mistake because of it.
NEVER FORGET.
Fuck your Uninteresting Hobbies, Pretty Girls
As a socially awkward, mildly unattractive man in my 20s, girls were a fucking scourge. Don't get me wrong, ladies: It was nothing you did, and I'm not blaming you for anything. I'm just saying that, if I was interacting with you at any point in my early 20s and you were an even slightly attractive heterosexual single woman, then there was something at stake: No matter how absurdly remote the possibility, no matter how little either of us may have even wanted it in the first place, there was always a slight chance that we would sleep together at some point. Again, don't mistake me: I'm not saying I'm a ladies man here. We're talking odds in the upper billions, I know. But hey, maybe I've had just enough whiskey to be charming, but not enough to start a fistfight with your dog. Or maybe you've watched enough of the same rehashed '80s TV to understand my jokes. Or maybe you're just really, really high and think I kind of look like Ed Norton caught in a time distortion.
"You kinda look like that guy from Fight Club, but y'know ... after the beatings. And with boiling skin and goat eyes."
"Yes, my penis finds your anecdote very amusing."
Your Own Buddy Cop Movie
You're so fucked that the concept of fucked has turned in on itself and formed a fucked paradox that threatens to destroy the very fucked universe.
Forced Cross-Pollination of Interests
"Yeah, I guess Dora is OK, but have you read the books? Way darker. Not just little kid stuff, like the show."
A Forcefield of Empathy
YES YOU ARE SO LOVED. KINDLY SHUT ALL OF YOUR FUCKS UP. YOU'VE INADVERTENTLY LEFT THEM OPEN.
Leveling Up into Adulthood
"Turnabout is fair play, my canine friend, though I do not recommend you turn about just now, for I have farted behind you and I assure you: It is terrible."
You can buy Robert's book, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Or you can skip down to the comments to complain that marriage is a crock because you're 19 and don't know how to be wrong yet.