Marriage, Divorce and Living in Sin

Divorce is traumatic. I don’t care who you are, divorce hurts. It leaves scars that may never heal. It leaves you feeling abandoned, distrustful and generally pissed off, and not just at the people involved in the divorce. No, you’re suspicious of the whole human race. At least that’s how it has been in my experience.

I am a child of divorce. I married a child of divorce. We had a child, and then we divorced. I got involved with a man with five children and an ex-wife who was also the child of a divorce. We’ve date for a year and a half and now he wants to get married. Is he insane?

I know that marriage is the next logical step in our relationship. We’ve lived together. We know each other in and out. He’s like a second father to my son. I’m having his baby. It seems like it makes sense except for one tiny detail: I hate the institution of marriage.

Marriage makes my skin crawl. It’s not that I don’t love him. I know that I do. I’ve proven to myself again and again that I don’t want to live a life that doesn’t include him. That’s what marriage is anyway, isn’t it? It’s a lifelong commitment to one another. Somehow, for some reason I can’t fully explain, I am just afraid of the dreaded marriage licence. It’s the marriage license that really screws everything up. It’s a license to rip one another into tiny little pieces and stomp all over them when you get really angry.

In a dating relationship, if you break up you both take what you own and walk away. Later on, when the fight blows over you are free to try again. If you both really want it to, you might be able to make it work. Once you get married the same fight takes on immoderate proportions. Before you know it, lawyers have gotten involved, bank accounts come under scrutiny and custody agreements are being negotiated. You invest so much time and money that you can’t call it off. Even if you do, lawyers still have to be paid and the wounds you’ve inflicted to one another may well never heal. There will always be a sense of betrayal.