Marriage is on my mind today. There's a good reason for it -- Joe's cousin is getting married this evening, and Molly's wedding is a mere eight days away. One of my cousins is getting married in October; her shower is actually tomorrow, although I won't be attending since I'm three hours away. But anyway, marriage is at the forefront of my thoughts this morning so I feel like saying something about it. It's something I hope to be a part of myself one of these days. :)

I've been planning my wedding for years. It reached obsession point a little less than two years ago, conincidentally (or not?) around the time that Molly and Grant decided they were going to go ahead and get engaged. I had the time of year picked out, location, color scheme, ceremony music, reception meal, flowers... my dress and the bridesmaids' dresses... the 'maids themselves... all sorts of little details. Many of them haven't changed. Ceremony location, for example: my grandparents and parents were married in the church I grew up in, and I want to follow in that tradition. (But I have backups in case my intended conversion to Catholicism interferes with that dream. :P) I still want the same girls standing up with me, although I've added one to the list. I intend to walk down the aisle to the theme from "Beauty and the Beast" (played on piano, violin and viola) with an armful of of red roses.

I have all sorts of other little ideas in my head too but I'm getting off-track. ;) The point is, I've been obsessed about the wedding for a long time. But for most of that I was missing the bigger picture: the MARRIAGE. You know, the part that comes after that one day I spend years planning... the part where I spend the rest of my life with the groom. Yeah, yeah, I knew about that. I knew it would be binding and I was okay with that. I figured once we actually got to the wedding part we'd know we were right for each other, "for better or worse" and so they say. I was partially right. I realized Ryan and I wouldn't work in the long-term BEFORE we got to the wedding point... but in some ways I think we're lucky things turned out the way they did... if he had gotten his TAP money last fall, for example, things might have panned out a lot differently, and I wouldn't have seen we were wrong for each other until it was too late. And it WOULD have been too late.

I don't believe in divorce. I get in trouble for saying that and have often added a cap to that statement to make it PC. "I don't believe in divorce for ME. Whoever marries ME needs to know ahead of time that it's a lifetime thing and we're stuck in it. BUT that's not necessarily the case for other people." Yeah in a way that's true, I mean I can't tell other people what to believe and they might not agree with me and so on. But it's also a cop-out because I'm a crowd-pleaser and I hate to make people mad, so I'm wishy-washy most of the time so that everybody will like me. ANYWAY. (I'm straying WAY off subject today!) :) I don't believe in divorce. I think divorce itself is a cop-out. Things get too hard and people give up. Something comes along that looks better, so they feel they should be able to go for it. "For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part." That all means jack shit nowadays. It's more like, "Until irreconcilable differences do us part." They're only irreconcilable because people don't bother to reconcile them. They don't HAVE to anymore, because divorce is a social norm now.

There are exceptions, don't go chewing my head off, I'm open-minded and take things case by case. But in general this is how I feel. :P

And what of marriage? I think my take on it used to be something along the lines of having "the ultimate boyfriend". When Molly used to talk about how much her life was going to change when she got married and had to learn to manage a household, I would snicker. I pretty much viewed marriage as being pretty much the same as where I was, except that the words would change. Ryan and I lived together and I think to some extent we both saw ourselves as basically married. Being married wouldn't really be much different than that. I will say though, that I DID have an inkling of something more. I knew we WEREN'T married. When I first broke up with him last fall, and we got back together, he told me he was committed to sticking with me, and wanted the same from me. And I tried to give it. And then when we broke up for real in February, it was like, how could I break up with him when I'd committed to stick by him? But it wasn't the same... it wasn't a marriage commitment, and that's the one that counts.

Since I've been dating Joe I've been thinking about what that marriage commitment means. What makes a marriage? Why do people get married? Two relatively obvious (or you'd think so) words entered into my thoughts this spring: "husband" and "wife". Oddly enough I'd never thought of marriage in terms of that before. When two people get married, they become a married couple. That's how it always worked in my mind. But I was wrong.

Two of Joe's friends were married last summer. One has a three-month-old baby, and one has a baby on the way this fall. Both of the husbands work, and work hard. Both of the wives stay home. That's just the way it is. This is something I thought was cool when I first was hearing about it even last fall. I always pictured myself wanting to be a stay-at-home mom but I never really thought of it as a "duty" or a "role". Being a part of the women's empowerment generation, staying at home was a "choice", a "sacrifice". People have children on their own terms, and before they're ready they use birth control. That's just the way it is now.

Joe has a very different view of it, which I admit I had a hard time with at first. Like I remember talking about how I'd want to stay home with my kids when I have them, and of course he agreed that it's a good idea, children should be with their mother, etc. But more than that... listening to him I got the impression that he wasn't "supporting my choice to stay home and raise the family". He was saying "It's your JOB to stay home and raise the family. That's what you're expected to do." THAT caught me off-guard. My gut reaction was "I don't HAVE to do it if I don't WANT to." But since I DO want to it wasn't as though we were having a disagreement. He was just giving me a new way to look at it.

Marriage is more than just an evolution of a couple. People don't just go from "dating couple" to "married couple" like I used to think. "Couples" are made up of two different people, and they have different roles. "Married couples" involve a husband and a wife. The husband has certain duties, and the wife has certain duties, and they're not the same. I think that's a fundamental flaw with marriages today: the two people involved don't take the time to figure out what their roles are, and try to carry them out.

I think the roles of husband and wife can vary from couple to couple. Some very successful marriages can be had where the wife goes out and works and the husband stays home with the kids, for example. The point is that there ARE certain things expected of each party, and they need to figure out what those things are.

So, over the course of the past few months, my thinking has evolved from "I want to get married!" to "I want to make a good wife." In this relationship, that means figuring out what things Joe would expect of me as his wife and whether I can live with those, and what kinds of things I would expect of myself as a wife, and of him as a husband, and of us as a unit. Who will be responsible for what? What do we need to do now to put ourselves on the right track for the day we assume those roles? He's known how to do that since the beginning. I've been a little slower in coming around to it, but I'm learning. Believe me, after last month, I'm learning. :P (But -- July stays in July!)

The Catholic Church has a lot of good things to say about marriage. The Christian churches, in general, agree on most the fundamentals. The relationship between husband and wife is supposed to symbolize the relationship between Jesus and the Church, which I personally think is a cool analogy. If you view marriage this way the roles become a little more obvious. The Bible says that wives must submit to their husbands, and husbands must love their wives. The Bible really has a lot of good things to say about husbands and wives.

Joe and I were reading something a few weeks ago about the Catholic view of marriage, which I think we both agreed was pretty cool. Marriage, according to it, has its main purpose in producing a family. The reason people marry is to have and raise children. Obviously there are very serious responsibilities that come along with that, and the marriage has to produce the best environment for the children, and the husband and wife have to work hard to maintain it, and such like that. Sex, to further that thought, is the act that makes this possible. Most people know that the Catholic Church is against birth control, and I can see why: contraceptives make it possible to have sex because it feels good, without having to worry about the consequences. But the point of having sex is supposed to be to have children. Yes, there's more to it than that, but that's pretty much what it boils down to. If you're going to open yourself up to sharing yourself completely with another person, then it has to be in circumstances that allow for the child that can result. Which is why you should only have sex when you're married. Further, they say, the reason to get married is to produce a family -- so don't get married if a family isn't what you want. I'm just summing up... I wish I could find the link to that article we were reading, because that writer does a much better job. :)

What it comes down to for us, is that we know why we can't get married now, no matter how much we love each other and feel like we know that's what we want -- I mean, if that's what we want then why shouldn't we just go ahead and do it? But we know we're not ready to be parents right now, and by becoming husband and wife what we'll be saying is that we're ready to accept that responsibility. So for now we wait. :)

And in the meantime, we talk about what we're doing and where we're going and how and why, and what we're going to do when we get there, and when we're going to get there, and... yeah. :) I want to get married. I always have, but my attitude has changes slightly... I want to be Joe's wife. I want him to be my husband. We want to do it the right way because we know once we're in, we're in for life -- we're stuck until death do us part, so we'd better be prepared to make the most of it. :) The wedding? It's just one day. It's just the beginning of all the really cool stuff. :)