my head was full of bad<\/a> ideas like that, and I think I spent most of my 20’s un-learning all the wrong things I’d picked up in adolescence. For some reason, it took me a long time to realize how much control I had over my own destiny. <\/p>\nLots of people are down on marriage. My generation certainly wasn’t crazy about it, and the next generation is even less inclined to take the plunge. I didn’t think it made sense. I mean, half of them fail, right? And some portion of the other half are probably unhappy, right? Those odds suck, so why bother? It’s just a piece of paper. It’s so expensive. It will fail anyway.<\/em> But I did it despite this cynicism, and it was one of the best decisions of my life. <\/p>\nYou don’t often hear about people who are in happy, stable marriages. I can understand why. “They lived happily ever after” is a terrible beginning for a story. And maybe you think, as I used to, that it can’t work for you or is an outmoded idea. My advice: Marry, or don’t marry, but you shouldn’t let movie dramas inform your image of marriage any more than you should let action flicks inform your perception of driving and firearm safety. <\/p>\n
I can’t promise you that marriage will be a happy time, or that it will work for you. And I can guarantee that it won’t make you happy all the time<\/em>. But if you’re young and suspicious of the institution, I can say that it does work for some people, and the payoff is a rich life and a steady supply of self-sustaining joy. <\/p>\nHappy Anniversary, Heather. I won’t post the gushy stuff here on the blog, because you’d hate that. But, you know, I do<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had this [semi-] joke I use to tell: I always said it would be a cold day in hell before I got married, which is why we’re getting married on January 25 in Slippery Rock. The little guy is my new brother-in-law. He was born the year Heather and I met.This wasn’t strictly true. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landmarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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