reason for getting married

Reason Number Whatever for Getting Married

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…or for getting your hands on some school-aged children in some other manner (artificial insemination, adoption, etc).

Back when we were in school, the lead-up to any holiday was full of anticipation. Even in high school, every teacher would so bemoan the fact that we didn’t learn “Yahadus” anymore that they’d mix something related into their lessons. Now… well…

Good4 has joined my annual tradition of waking up the night before Purim and going “Ohmigosh! I didn’t arrange matanos l’evyonim yet!” I’m flattering myself, of course. She’s way ahead of me. My first year out of seminary I didn’t remember until Purim day.

Then Best4 sent a video of Kinfauna #4 telling the Purim story as a musical production, complete with school-crafted popsicle puppets and pre-school level musical numbers. (And parental prompts from the class newsletter.) Best4 gets the same running start on all the holidays just from being around kids. (And he gets to watch Kinfauna #4 ham it up on a regular basis.)

And yeah, I miss that. These days holidays just happen and I show up to them as a guest. When you’ve got your own household, you own the holiday. And when you’ve got kids, that same old story becomes  fresh again, popsicle-stick puppets, Vashti songs, and all.

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Serendipity (i)

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I was searching for a specific post yesterday, but alas, it had no keywords. It was about why perfectly normal and apparently desirable people are still single, and how they’re a comfort to the rest of us that at least it isn’t (necessarily) our freakishness that keeps us single.

I never found it, but I did find a few other posts you might want to (re)visit. Here’s the first:

From two years ago about why to get married – it keeps you from slowly losing it. With no second party to moderate your behavior, it’s a slippery slope into self-approved nuttiness.

On the bright side, my prophesy never came true – I have yet to walk up to a strange man and straighten his tie.

Getting “Married”

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Do I want to get married? What does that mean? Take on someone else’s name? Live in someone’s basement for rent that’s more than I earn a month? Scrounge pennies to buy the supper someone else likes? Pick up someone’s socks? No, not at all.

I like my last name. It’s quite a good one. It’s only downhill from here, actually. My room is a comfortable size and I really don’t look forward to moving into a full apartment with the same dimensions. Besides, I’d need a full-time job just to pay the rent, let alone serve dinner. And let’s not go into the socks.

Before anyone starts howling at me, that doesn’t mean I would never do any of the above. I simply don’t want it for its own sake. When people say, “Do you want to get married” that’s what comes to mind. There’s no “significant other” in the picture. It’s just marriage.

If the question was “would you like to meet and marry a young bochur that you admire so much that you’d be willing to take his last name, live in a basement, scrounge pennies to be able to make the suppers he likes, and pick up his socks?” I would answer, “Sure. Except I’d prefer if he’d pick up his own socks.”