This is something I want to talk about. I can’t really talk to anyone I know about it because they would get all wierd. My mother especially. People don’t really like the word marriage over here so much anymore. I am not married to my partner and I have no intentions of ever doing so. The truth is I don’t believe in marriage. I don’t believe it’s a life long plan especially since divorce came through over here. If it was such a commitment, it wouldn’t be so easy to get out of so what’s the point? I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a wedding day either. I just don’t see any…upside to being married.
I just wanted to get that out there first before I explain things a little more. I have always said throughout my entire life that I don’t want to get married. I don’t really have any happily married couples as role models in my life. I’m not including the blog world in that because I know a lot of you are probably happily married but I’ve only come across you recently so that doesn’t really change my lifelong view of things 🙂
My parents were very unhappily married. They got engaged a couple of months after they met. She was 19 and he was only 17 (he had lied about his age at first). They had gotten pregnant and decided to get engaged. My mother was extremely naive and was pretty much led astray by him completely. She also wanted to get out of her home as quickly as possible because she felt like her mother was insane controlling. They lost the baby but they got married two years later when she was 21 and he 19.
I’m not sure of the timing but maybe around this time, maybe beforehand, he had a son with somebody else. That somebody else, let’s call her the She-Devil ended up stalking my mother and making her life hell. She was also a lot older than my parents. My mother miscarried quite a few pregnancies but when she was 23, she gave birth to me. The She-Devil gave birth to my father’s second son about five days before I was born. She named him after my father so that my mother couldn’t if she had a boy. I think that my mother was aware of this woman by then but again, I can’t be sure on timing. Fast forward a number of years and my father is in jail, has four sons with the She-Devil and two with my mother. My mother went to visit him in one of the most notorious prisons in Ireland and was told that his wife had already visited him. Turns out the She-Devil had already been there and laid claim therefore using up his visits. For the record, he refused to see her but the visit still counted.
My father was a loser. A charmer, but a loser. He almost single handedly managed to ruin my mother’s life, making her a nervous wreck and a complete looper giving us, his two children, a really fucked up and crappy childhood. Today is not the day for it but let’s just say that I reminded my mother of my father and I paid for his wrongdoings. I was his only girl at this stage and I was the only one he gave attention to so at the time I thought he was only wonderful. I soon learned. I keep getting tempted to tell the wrong story, sorry! Marriage, Claire, it’s about marriage.
When he was in prison, she left him and moved us back into my Nanny’s house (it was her sister’s house really, they live together). Neither of these women were ever married. My mother’s father had fecked off home before my nanny could tell him she was pregnant/after she told him she was pregnant and later on the love of her life was a widower who proposed. His children stopped the wedding so my Nanny remained a single woman even though she looked after him til he died (his children remained firmly against the relationship). My nanny’s sister had her heart broken by a man in London who turned out to be already married and never went near a man again so it isn’t really surprising that i’m not interested in marriage.
My mother remarried but they both think that they were happier before they got married, go figure. My father since remarried too but I have no idea how that relationship is going. I do know that even after he had kids with that woman he cheated on her (and before she had kids he got my mother pregnant, wonder how he would have explained that one if she hadn’t miscarried). So basically, I don’t think a whole lot of marriage. There have been a few married couples that I thought were happy…until they divorced the second that it was made legal over here.
So back to me. My partner and I have been together for five years and have two children. He did propose to me before but it was sort of a stupid, desperate, last resort thing that he put no thought into at all. He did buy a ring but it was probably the first one he saw that day, he was in a hurry to embarrass himself with a completely desperate act, you see. He tried to propose another time with the same ring but we agreed that it was a bad idea…he does things sometimes because he thinks they are romantic….or what I want but that isn’t my idea of meaningful. He says things like, one day I’m going to marry you and calls me his Missus. He has my name tattooed on his body. We plan on having more babies and we are completely in love. I don’t doubt his commitment and at the moment I feel very comfortable the way things are.
I don’t like it when people judge me for being unmarried or consider my relationship to mean less because I’m not married. Once, online, a man said to me that I was very young to have two children (that pisses me off too by the way). He asked me was I married and I said no and he turned around and said – “Oh, he didn’t ask you then.” I can’t remember what I said back but it probably wasn’t very nice. It bothers me that people assume that women are unmarried because nobody wants them. It’s a bit backward but whatever.
Anyway, Mr. Claire has been talking about marriage a lot more lately – a sure sign that he is having a lovey dovey stage. It’s just a phase 🙂 Yesterday, he pops in after work and gives us all hugs and kisses as usual. Then he looks at me with this majorly guilty face and I’m thinking, uh-oh, what’s he bought now. Because that’s usually why he looks guilty 😉
He goes all red in the face. “I want to marry you.” We both started laughing. If you saw his face when he said, you would have too. He told me that somebody from England was over in his job today (it happens sometimes). This guy got married a couple of months ago and is expecting a baby in a few weeks. He asked Mr. Claire when he was going to get married and God knows what Mr. Claire said back but the man said, “Ah, you need another child, then you’ll get married.”
Am I the only person is totally confused by that statement? Sometimes I worry about how men think…I hate when people put things into his head by the way.
I was like, what’s the difference if we have one, two or three? What’s that going to change? He kept saying I don’t know and hugging me. I’m a little bit suspicious that he just blurted it out to cover what he was really feeling guilty about. You see, I think he says things like that to make me think we’re going somewhere – I think that he assumes it’s something he’s meant to do. But I’d really rather if he didn’t. It makes me a little bit nervous. So, anyway, I’m not into getting married, neither is he. But he feels like he has to bring it up now and then. We have absolutely no plans for that type of thing. Even if we did and we got engaged, the engagement would last forever. That’s just the sort of people we are!
I know that marriage works for a lot of people but I can’t see any way that it would improve or change our lives. I wouldn’t take his name, that’s for sure! Our children already have his name. So the only thing that would change would be the major debt we’d be in after forking out on a wedding. It said in the paper that most people spend at least 20,000euro on their weddings. Feck that, I can think of a lot more things to do with 20grand 🙂
There is one thing that takes the marriage thing from being 100% no to maybe 99% no. My aunt. She’s getting very old and she has alzheimers but my mother told me that she told her that she would love it if Mr. Claire married me. My family idolize Mr. Claire by the way, it’s pretty sickening. The fact that she says things like she wants to live to see me get married makes me feel extremely guilty about being adamant that I don’t rather than I do. But the rest of my family would be upset if I got married. My brother was engaged and my mother still doesn’t know because she would have flipped out. Most of my family do not want me to get married – to anyone, not even Mr. Claire 🙂
So that’s my thoughts for today. I had nobody else to talk to about it so I launched it all on you lot. Now before you all attack me, I’m sure there are lots of happily married couples in the world…I just don’t know any of them 😉
Mad House 