Courtship

It seems unlikely I will remarry because courtship seems out of fashion. People date rather than court.

That seems to boil down to they essentially jump into bed with the first person they can get into bed and this becomes an easy answer for getting sex at all and that becomes a habit and that becomes a reason to enter into the serious contractual arrangement called marriage. It seems to me to be a recipe for disaster.

I am currently writing some about my sister whom I stopped having real conversations with years ago. Some months ago I had an epiphany about an ugly incident in my life and it has me rethinking a lot of my assumptions about her.

She went through an ugly divorce and she began dating someone else before the divorce was finalized and slept with him when that was legally kosher though the divorce wasn't finalized.

The divorce was never finalized. Julius died from a gunshot wound after brutally assaulting her and supposedly said to her there was some technicality wrong with the papers, so they were still married.

So basically her second husband is, as far as I know, the first guy she slept with while her first marriage was ending and I never liked her second husband and I think she made a big mistake to marry him. I never told her that. 

It's not really my business. She's a grown assed woman and can decide that stuff herself and if she wanted my opinion, she would have asked.

I also knew a couple via an online forum where some guy got divorced and seemingly married the first woman he slept with. And I thought he deserved better and made a mistake.

Those two examples that I was aware of informed my decision to make damn sure I didn't do the same thing and I haven't.

So good for me, I didn't somewhat promptly remarry whomever got lucky and was the first guy to get me out of my clothes post-marriage. And I still have absolutely no idea how you establish a healthy relationship when most of the world isn't even talking about that as far as I can tell.

Courtship is about figuring out how to mesh two lives together without harming either person.

It's a process of learning how to do this dance without stomping on each other's toes too much and definitely without breaking their foot and expecting them to just accept you will break that same foot in the same way repeatedly until they can't walk at all but for some reason stay anyway.

Like where will you go on crutches with a broken foot, incapable of standing on your own two feet? 

Even if there is no language barrier and they have substantially similar cultural backgrounds as was true in my marriage, all people are creatures of habit and trying to figure out how we do stuff together requires a lot of doing stuff together to figure out how to have that go smoothly for both parties.

And that's not what many people do. They sleep with someone, marry them because it's the person they routinely have sex with and then put up with a lot of drama because they aren't on the same page about a long list of things.

I guess we are collectively so hung up about sex that just getting someone in bed seems to be the single biggest hurdle in the minds of a lot of people and then they just accept that this means we won't be on the same page about a lot of things and it will be a train wreck and we will just muddle through while we keep metaphorically breaking each other's foot in the same way.

That's not the pattern I followed for my first marriage. If I ever remarry, I am hoping to improve on things, not accept something worse, and I have no idea how two adults get to know each other well in this world where talking to a man for thirty seconds is viewed as hitting on him.

And then the next step in the minds of a lot of people appears to be "And now we need to get married!" And I see no hope of getting any breathing room into the process for allowing a real relationship to grow and blossom.

Because that methodology appears to birth unhappy, dysfunctional marriages which have no hope of becoming healthy relationships.