kdo@lucid.com (Ken Olum) (01/20/90)
In article <9060008@hpfcso.HP.COM> daq@hpfcso.HP.COM (Doug Quarnstrom) writes: >My male friends are all slowly being sucked up and devoured by the >evil disease of marraige. Marraige. I hate it. It steals your >friends and makes them dead to you. No longer can you do the things >you did. They are gone, and it is never the same. I don't think it's an intrinsic problem with marriage, but in the way your friends view it. Marriage doesn't have to be an exclusion, where you leave your friends behind. There are lots of reasons to get married and marriage doesn't have to mean that you merge identities with someone and give up all your unshared friends and interact with the world only as a couple. I get irked whenever I hear a group of people described as "2 couples and 3 singles." That's 7 people, and just because some of them are married to each other doesn't mean that you don't still have 7 individual human beings. Anyway, if your friends stop acting like your friends when they get married, then it's your friends to blame, and not the institution of marriage. They don't have to act like that. Still, I've seen people get swallowed by marriage as you describe. I guess it's the sterotype that you are supposed to give up your former life and "settle down" when you marry. But as in many cases, if you buy what society wants to sell you, you'll end up with a load of garbage. Ken