Thought Catalog

12 Things You Must Say Goodbye To After You Get Married

1. Getting blackout drunk.

No one thinks a blackout drunk married woman is worth their trouble. No one. Not even their husbands.

2. Sleepovers.

Unless you’ve told your husband in advance, a spontaneous sleepover is out of the question.

3. Texting people of the opposite sex.

If you’re married and you text people of the opposite sex constantly, your husband/wife will think something is up. And I swear to you, if you put a lock on your phone, that’s going to end up in a huge fight.

So, a married woman writes a post about what it means to just be a grown-up and be married — and not be a substance abuser. It’s sane, reasonably intelligent and, in and of itself, disturbing that she should even have to write something so obvious, to begin with. Surely something so patently responsible and healthy should be well received???

Or something…

Here’s just a chunk of the start of the comment section — which basically goes on like this forever:

Thank god I’m never getting married! The more my boyfriend and I hear about marriage, the worse it sounds!

It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s whatever you make it.

I mean… I get the idea, but I didn’t realize being married meant you automatically jump into super-responsible-adult immediately. If I got married to my boyfriend tomorrow, we’d still be doing the same shit, like buying things online instead of proper groceries, having our friends over for sleepovers, and I would certainly still be dressing like a mildly skanky college chick every so often. We’d just share a last name.

And even sharing the last name is optional!

I think you’re the one that shouldn’t be married. This is ridiculous. My husband and I do all of these, minus the nudes and maybe dressing like a”slut” because we’re grown adults and have a loving trusting relationship. And honestly, single people need to delete their nudes too. And your honey, quit giving marriage advice and maybe call a marriage counsellor.

I sincerely hope this article is a poor attempt at a satire because it’s absolutely ridiculous.

This paints a pretty negative picture of marriage and articles like this are what propagate this message even further.

If you perceive marriage in this way, you probably shouldn’t be married.

The author of the linked full article — she’s likely to be married for life. Why? Because she understands one of the basic foundations of marriage: Couplehood.

She understands that marriage is about taking those two candles, (Or beakers of sand) lighting the large centre candle (entirely emptying them down the sand race) and then blowing the two smaller candles out.

She gets that marriage is about we-ness, not I-ness and that it is an agreement to the lowest level of every sort of distance and autonomy any society has to offer.

No one here is forced into it but, if you decide to get married, that’s what you are picking. Many societies have tried all sorts of other options — they’ve usually ended badly.

Anything else is like committing to learn to swim — but refusing to move your arms.