The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Monday, September 17, 2007
Like Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith, I also read this piece of garbage called 'The Starter Husband' over at MSNutroots, and like the good doctor, I have a big problem with the media's willing participation in the attempt to kill marriage and all forms of decency and honor in this society; this article is a perfect indication of why the divorce rates are as high as they are, and why our birth rates are barely at "replacement" level.
As a committed married man who is faithful and intends to stay that way--and who wants his wife to stay that way as well--garbage like this MSN piece, which begins with the following tag line: "You'd never buy a car without test-driving it first right? So why settle into a lifelong marriage before trying one on for size?", sends me over the edge. But Dr. Helen puts her objection to it a lot more eloquently than I could have done:
As a committed married man who is faithful and intends to stay that way--and who wants his wife to stay that way as well--garbage like this MSN piece, which begins with the following tag line: "You'd never buy a car without test-driving it first right? So why settle into a lifelong marriage before trying one on for size?", sends me over the edge. But Dr. Helen puts her objection to it a lot more eloquently than I could have done:
The article, as one can gather from the title, is about women who marry in their 20's for practice and see nothing wrong with taking a guy out for a test-drive and dumping him off at the curb once the sheen wears off--here are some highlights from the article:Dr. Helen's quote is my version of "you go girl." Her husband is a lucky man.Andi takes a throaty slug of her second raspberry martini, picks at her fish taco, then sits back in her chair. "I think marriage is the new dating and having kids is the new marriage," she proclaims loudly, as yet another woman dining with her partner turns to stare. "It's true. I wouldn't have married him if I didn't think I could get out of it...."I thought pioneers were supposed to be brave people who ventured out to discover new things and make the world a better place, not cowards who are too afraid to say "no" to a marriage that they don't want just to "have a gorgeous party, and make my parents really, really happy" as one woman put it.
[.....]
It's easy to write these women off as callous or self-absorbed. And yet on some level, they just might be pioneers [my emphasis]: Why stay put in an empty shell of a marriage — an arrangement on paper only — instead of calling it what it is? "This generation is reinventing marriage," says Paul.
A man is not a car and anyone who compares a human being to an object this way has more issues than I care to discuss in a blog post. I realize these self-centered articles and books such as The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimonyare fun to write and really make women feel "empowered" to act in the same manner as the sexist men of yesteryear who spoke of women like chattels. But in reality, women who use men for starter husbands are the opposite of empowered--they are the archetype of the weak female: afraid to say no, afraid of independence and afraid to be unmarried in their 20's. Yeah, the "you go girl" movement has really done a lot for these women--and reinventing marriage in this way is not empowerment of a new sort, it is just a new twist on an old theme, leaving a lover with a broken heart.
