Shot gun weddings and such

I was seventeen or eighteen when a guy named George asked me to sleep with him. I think he was about eighteen months older than me.

I bluntly said to him "My parents are willing to put me through college. If I sleep with you and they kick me out, will you put me through college?"

Nope. He was struggling to support himself. No can do for a little short term fun.

He never bothered me again.

Somebody told me

"Boy, everything she wants

Is everything she sees"

I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old. I came into the marriage with enough household goods to adequately furnish a one bedroom apartment.

He was a loser with no life whose only assets were a devoted girlfriend and a dream of being career military. 

My father was career military. My uncle was career military. My cousin was in the military. I knew a military career came with excellent benefits that would make it hard to screw up so bad we couldn't keep ourselves in a middle class life.

It's a lyric about a man who is six or eight months into a marriage which obviously isn't going well. He's faced with the 'happy' news of an arriving baby. So he's in that situation where he can't back out. [The song] talks about the situation [in which] many men find themselves, working really hard to support a family… and see it as a kind of trap. 

Historically, it was fairly normal for older men to marry young women in their teens or twenties. I've talked about that on this blog.

The two above block quotes are about a song from Wham! The two members of that group were born in 1963 and the song came out in 1984. They would have both been twenty or twenty-one years old.

I interpreted the song as specifically being about a YOUNG man who has gotten married and feels in over his head. His salary isn't that high or he's a wage slave and he works sixty hours a week or more or works two jobs and it's NEVER enough.

I don't think my ex really experienced that. I supported his DREAM career and he loved his job and it's a salaried job with good benefits, not wage based. The hours you work are not related to the pay you take home.

I spent a lot of years trying to figure out how to make the apples to oranges comparison of military pay and benefits to civilian pay and benefits and never could figure it out.

I had almost ZERO medical expenses and I didn't need to figure out how much to put into a retirement account because if you make it to twenty years, you get a retirement check. I needed to figure out how to cover food expenses and basic household expenses and keep my husband showing up for his job on time everyday.

My father was twelve years older than my mother and was probably an E6 when they met, so he already had a few pay raises and promotions when they got together. She MADE him open a bank account when they had so much cash on hand she was scared of being robbed of two months salary or some nonsense.

My life was never as cushy as the life my parents had together. There were many factors impacting that outcome and my father being older and having a few promotions before they met was just one of them but I was very frustrated with it and it took me YEARS to catalog those differences and make my peace with it.

Looking back, I think I did well for myself, all things considered. I didn't marry for money but I also wasn't some fool who was oblivious to survival issues of that sort and didn't think my parents owed me financial support without having any say in who I dated or what I chose to do.

I have a hypothesis that hippies from the hippie era were spoiled, over entitled brats born to the World War II veterans who took peace for granted and protested war as an expression of their parents subconscious baggage. They took a lot for granted in terms of having material security and their parents seem to have not really explained to them how ugly things were before the war during the Great Depression nor during the war.

I believe that because I've done the research and it's not common knowledge and people act like I'm making stuff up when I try to provide context. 

I read an article recently about the child of a big name celebrity being angry at the person who bought their childhood home for not preserving it. I'm guessing that was the best years of their life and they aren't making enough money to buy the house and daddy is no longer as stinking rich as he once was.

And this over entitled bitch thinks someone unrelated to her has some kind of moral obligation to PRESERVE her childhood home that she cannot afford to purchase and preserve. 

I'm guessing quite a few kids born into wealth don't really get adequately prepared to earn the kind of money their parents made and don't really get adequately prepared for living on less. I was never even TOLD my parents were well off. I basically got LIED to and told constantly that "We're working class stiffs."

I've commented on that and blogged about it.

I was homeless for over a year in my forties before I realized how upper class my mother's expectations were. Her mother came from a low level noble family that sold the title and I didn't understand that my expectations of always having food on the table and never having the electricity cut due to non-payment was some cushy expectation that a lot of people cannot count on.

Historically, we had a lot of social expectations related to sexual morality that were rooted in trying to guarantee material survival. These days, a lot of people seem to have hippie style ideas and ideals that they fail to understand require certain basics and that their parents are supplying those basics.

I saw a gal complaining on Reddit about her mother criticizing her hobbies. You read through the comments and learn that she's unemployed, living with her parents and her mom's criticism is rooted in her having hobbies -- AKA expenses for personal pleasure -- when she doesn't have any earned income.

Her take: My mom's hobbies aren't monetized. She goes to the gym.

My take: Your mom has a man paying her bills who wants her to have a flat stomach and she's willing to go along with that. Also, not really your business because they are paying your bills, you aren't paying their bills and so shut up.

These ideas and ideals about free love or being able to pursue your identity or lifestyle as you see fit etc. frequently overlook the COSTS involved, so it frequently boils down to wanting to do anything you feel like and expecting other people to pay the bills for it.

That's not realistic and it's not sustainable.

My mother reacted to news of pregnancy like it was bad news, another mouth to feed and how could you do this to her. She also provided most of the clothes my kids wore for a lot of years and personally took responsibility for the material welfare of all her grandchildren to a substantial degree, so I eventually quit feeling like that was an unreasonable reaction on her part.

I had a cushy life in many ways. I NEVER developed some sense of entitlement to all the free stuff my mother did for me.

I don't know how to forge a path forward on a better world different from our current heteronormative culture. I do know it won't be based on "I can do any damn thing I want and someone else needs to pay for it or materially provide for it and cover all consequences and costs involved."