Choices

JJ Santana is one of my very good friends. I say this because I respect her choice not to get married and to live with her sweetie for the last 300 or so years. I am also very certain that she respects my choice to be married. They are both valid and socially acceptable choices, even if I disagree with "shaking" from a religious standpoint.

I was watching Public Broadcasting the other day and caught the end of a documentary about couples and one of the last couples interviewed was a couple that lives together. It was clear that this couple had been together for quite a while (like decades) and that they had no plans on getting married. In general, that is not a problem for me. God gave people free will and I can't take that away.

My problem is when that pompus woman looked into the camera and said that "life is about choices and every morning I wake up and choose to be with him. There is nothing binding me to him." What?!? Do you think that I wake up with shackles of some sort or that Husbandis keeping me at gunpoint? I make a choice to stay married just the same way she makes the choice to stay unmarried. I make the choice to be an unspoken point of contact, heir, and approved decision maker on his behalf, should he ever be unable to answer.

What really burns me is that this crazy woman thinks that she is less enmeshed than I am. I find it very hard to believe that these two do not share a mortgage or children or friends. I am sure that they know each others family and coworkers. Do you know the hardest part of dissolving a marriage is for most people? It is usually dissolution of property and custody fights. That means that she would have the same problem if she wanted to make a different choice as I would. Her friends would ask her the same questions about what went wrong and trying to rebuild a life.

I made the choice to get married. I am happy and I love it. She made the choice to stay a live-in girlfriend. All the work and none of the legal benefits, also none of the debt sharing. We all make choices. Don't poop on my parade just to make yours seem like sunshine.