COLUMN: In defense of marriage
When I was 5 years old I told my brother he was a fool for kissing a girl and promised I would never do “that” with any member of the cootie-infected female gender. That was until puberty hit and it happened to me.
Later, I repeated the same mistake, promising that whoever I married I would date for at least a year.
Veterans of the Logan rat race know that single people go faster this time of year than a marshmallow Jell-O salad at a Utah picnic.
A clock ticks in the head of campus coeds which says, “If we’re going to get married this summer he had better ask soon.”
As I experienced last year during my own engagement, coupled with the buzzing of marriage plans comes the whining, complaining and mockery of Utah’s short courtships and engagements.
I heard it from columnists in the newspaper, letters to the editor, people on the street, even teachers in the classroom. It is a popular belief Utah students don’t date long enough and get married too soon.
But before you start telling people they don’t know each other well enough, or they only want to have sex, or they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, consider a few points.
How well should you know someone before you marry them? One bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman girl I met announced to a class one week that she had become a True Aggie the previous Saturday night. The next week she was just as excited to announce her upcoming wedding. Here comes the killer – her fiancé was not the man she had locked lips with on the “A” underneath a full moon the week before.
However, with that said, I don’t understand the reasoning that says you have to see someone in every possible situation before you can know they are “the one.”
I can just see people like this carrying a clipboard around, making check marks every time they see their significant other in a new circumstance.
“OK, good, it’s taken three years for situation number 371 to come up – she didn’t freak out when the baby threw up on her shirt … check. Now, as long as she passes the burping loudly in a fancy restaurant test (No. 728), we can get married.”
Next is the argument that says the couple is only getting married because they want to have sex. The reasoning on this argument is ironic and ridiculous.
What I found is that oftentimes the people who would say I was only getting married so I could have sex, were people that stayed unmarried so they could keep having sex with everyone they wanted. As Alanis Morissette said, “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?”
So far my arguments have been in response to common criticisms of engaged couples who haven’t dated the prescribed amount of time before they headed off to the middle of the block at the sign of the clock.
But these still don’t address the central issue which is that we should all mind our own business. Before it happened to me, I would have never thought I would be ready to get married after six months of dating.
So before you make any promises about kissing or marriage, be careful, because you could be next.
Clark Jessop is a sophomore majoring in broadcast
journalism.
Comments can be sent to
clarkjessop@cc.usu.edu