fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3767 ]

[ SECRET POST #3767 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3767 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[HBO's Silicon Valley]

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[Princess Nightmare]

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[Little Witch Academia]

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[Broadchurch, Mark Latimer]

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Notes:

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Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not literally, but as an unmarried woman, I feel like I've heard so many women claim that they love being married, then mention how they used to have more freedom before they got married. (Not necessarily that they had kids kids, just that they got married.)

Is there any credence to this that isn't alarmingly Stepford? Because while I can see it being true in the sense that you have to compromise more, why stop living? Why can't you still see your friends outside of formal/couples-only events? Am I missing something?

The people who complain about this are either in a shitty relationship or have personal problems they need to deal with.

The thing is the people who complain are the only people you are likely to notice.

AYRT - Yeah, but they don't even really say it as complaints. That's the thing.

NAYRT

If they're not viewing it as a negative, it's probably mostly a choice they're remarking on? IDK man

I've been married awhile (20+ years). And when one is married, one can't always jump up and go do something on a moment's notice, one has a partner to consider. You CAN actually see your friends outside of a couples-only setting, but single folk do tend to stick together and married folk tend to do the same, and married folk with kids do it too. You in no way "stop living" (and really, if you don't feel that marriage is for you then you shouldn't get married, but please don't imply that life stops when you do, lmao....You sound like people who love to tell childless folk how empty and bereft of "real love" their lives are because they don't have kids). Bottom line is, marriage is what you make of it. You can still do all the stuff you did when you were single (with one or two exceptions unless you've got an open marriage). It's just that you're with another person now who is your spouse, and that person needs to be considered.

when one is married, one can't always jump up and go do something on a moment's notice, one has a partner to consider.

This was my thoughts exactly. Life doesn't 'end' it just changes. Just like having a pet means you can't go fuck off to Maui for three weeks without hiring a pet sitter, being married means you should probably consult with your spouse before you blow your paycheck on partying with your friends.

Yes, exactly. Things take more planning because you have someone else's schedule and feelings to take into consideration - as it should be. It's not a complete dealbreaker in terms of socializing, but it makes it a little trickier and maybe less spontaneous.

I think as soon as you tie that much of your life to so!one else, you can't help lose some freedom. If you are still as free as you were before marriage you've lost nothing but you've gained nothing. Freedom, as always, is on one side of the see-saw with security. The more freedom you have the less security and vice versa. Marriage is partly about love but also about the security of having someone who HAS to be their to help with the rough times. You each lose the freedom to say ”Fuck it, this isn't my problem" But you gain a commuted ally for your problems. Male of female marriage is a trade of freedom for security.

Women who say this are either being overdramatic, joking, or they shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. Marriage is not actually a ball and chain to your spouse. I have known people who act like this in their marriage (only going out as a couple in particular), and they're all either divorced or fast heading in that direction. Not because they want to spend time together, but denying yourself independence and space away from your spouse is just a recipe for resentment. Or it's seriously co-dependent.

There are things that change, of course. In some ways it's *completely* different. But different is not over/ended/done. I just have someone in my life that I consult on major decisions, particularly financial ones. It's a partnership that I chose to enter for the rest of my life, and recognizing that is important. I don't fly off to Mexico for a random weekend with friends without first talking with my SO. We often do things together with other couples, even ones that used to be single friends from our own single days. But both of us have activities and friends that we will do on our own on a semi-regular basis. Less frequently than when I was younger, yes, but I think that mostly has to do with the fact that my life in general is busier, and I do want to spend time with my SO too.

Well, yeah, you have more freedom before getting married and/or cohabiting because you've arranged your schedules to match each other and changing one can sometimes affect the other.

I don't get how that's Stepford.

I loved having a dog, but I totally had more freedom before I had one, too, because having a dog came with responsibilities. Pretty sure the dog wasn't brainwashing me.

muh toxoplasmosis meme - oh, wait, you said 'dog'. Never mind.

Or replace getting a dog with buying a house, or starting your own business, or having a baby, or any other change that means there is something else besides your whim that always must be taken into account as you move through life.

I've been married 10+ years and while I personally don't feel like I've sacrificed my freedom for marriage, I can sort of understand how others might feel that way. It's not as simple being in a "shitty relationship", it's... complicated. For starters, marriage usually brings with it a fresh set of responsibilities and that takes some getting used to. It also means that when you're at home, your alone time is significantly diminished. You're sharing your personal space now, and even in the context of a good relationship people don't always know how to negotiate their own personal space/time separate from their partner. It's not something you're taught and everyone's needs are different. Finding time to see friends as an individual (as opposed to half of a couple) can be tricky because you're still figuring out how to be a couple so you're juggling two things at once.

Then there's this:

http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor

In marriages, women often end up taking on a greater percentage of emotional labor without even realizing it or intending to. People take it for granted that you will, so many women fall into these patterns and it becomes the new normal. It's work that's unpaid and unrecognized, and calling attention to it often puzzles the people around you, like... what did you expect? This is what women are supposed to do.

I've never been married, but most successful couples I know (including my grandparents, when they were alive) seem to A) have lots of fun *together* and B) be capable of maintaining independent interests and social connections. Their lives didn't end, they just continued together.

I suspect the women you hear say your life ends may have thought this is how it is *supposed* to be, but they secretly worry it isn't, and saying this is their way of reassuring themselves that it's like this for everyone.

I'm sure no marriage can be all thrills and bliss all the time, but if you think marrying a particular person would, on balance, make your life less enjoyable then don't marry that person.

After marriage, my life got better. But then again I've always been more of a hobbit than a manic pixie dream girl. Now there's someone else to cook and take out the garbage and scoop the catboxes.

Plus we share the same interests to built-in companion to go craft shopping or go to an aquarium or something. I see my friends more often. Heck, today I got to go do something fun because he volunteered to wait for a package instead of me having to (which never came because FedEx is the biggest pile of shitheads in existence and the lazy bastards prefer to just click that they attempted delivery without ever trying, but that's their fault not his)

I have a friend who bitches about this, but she caters to almost every single of her husband's whims. She does all the shopping, cooking, cleaning and financial stuff. She goes to work and takes care of the baby. She used to take the baby to daycare when her husband was unemployed because "men don't know how to take care of babies", which made me go WTF pretty loudly since her dad was the one who helped her out after his grandkid was born. The bizarre things is, her husband does try to do more, but he either half-asses it or she ends up thinking it's more trouble than it's worth to show him the right way to do stuff.

My mother is kind of like that. She's a micromanager and control freak, because nobody ever does the job good enough for her standards. But then she's also unhappy and angry that "nobody ever helps me" and we're all lazy and incompetent. Nope, we just got tired of trying our best only to get yelled at...

Maybe they married young and so marriage happened to coincide with the onset of adult responsibilities they would have had anyway, even if they stayed single?

Well I recently read "Wifework: What marriage really means for women,"
by Susan Maushart, and let me tell you...read it before you get married and go into things with your eyes open.

If a woman marries a man and ends up taking care of him, i.e. working full time but also raising the children, taking care of home, providing the food, and tending to his emotions...that marriage is likely to end in divorce. Because she is working harder than being single, and at some point, the resentment builds.

An actual equal marriage (where both share work more equally, or divide work up completely separately but in a more fair manner--i.e. one works outside the home, one tends to home and children mostly), or something that takes away the incredible burden of super-responsibility many modern women who marry and want to have it all seem to carry...it can certainly work. But a level of huge inequality will usually cause big trouble down the line.

Lest you think she's just anti-marriage, she admits (as a divorced woman who hates to admit it) that pretty much every study shows children fare better with married parents. That staying married for the children...that old fashioned idea...has some merit, and she might have worked harder to stay married if she'd known that before divorce.

It was a fascinating book, and gave me some new perspectives. I was raised in a very much "Women are helpmeet" culture, which I found pretty toxic, and from a young age, I never wanted to marry to belong to a man. (Before i realized I was ace, btw.)

And...yeah. This is from pretty much the opposite perspective, modern feminist etc, talking about how women shouldn't be the one who takes care of the man, or rather that labors should be shared more equally (emotional labors, etc), but it still came to some of the conclusions I've heard all my life from childhood about marriage and sacrifice and children. So I'm definitely still mulling this all over.

The bottom line is that someone getting married and expecting to be taken care of (consciously or unconsciously, letting the major burden on their partner's shoulders) is putting an undue burden on their spouse, and this will cause trouble in the relationship, and possibly divorce. Marriage is a partnership, whatever the details, and if one spouse always feels like the "parent" and has to take care of everything, it's going to be really hard to have a healthy and lasting marriage.

It's interesting to me to look at my parents' marriage and see things they do right, and wrong, and how they've manage to stay together for over fifty years, and still love each other, despite the frustrations. I suspect that if I did get married I'd have some better role models there than I used to think.

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[ SECRET POST #3767 ]

"After marriage, my life ended!"

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