The child bride and I and assorted friends and relatives went to a local courthouse yesterday to watch one of my brothers get married…..again. Now I always thought the marriage ceremony ended with “I now pronounce you husband and wife”. I guess it was because we were in a courthouse that the celebrant turned to my brother and said “I hereby sentence you to life in marriage”. And it’s the only sentence in the civil or criminal code from which you can earn early release for bad behaviour.
His first marriage lasted 30 years and his second 98 days. Based on that trajectory his third would have lasted about 12 minutes. Fortunately a genie granted him three wishes and he got the third one right.
Not everyone deserves “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence – I’m looking at you Billy Ray Cyrus for inflicting “Achy Breaky Heart” on an unwitting populace. But my brother does having survived imprisonment for longer than your average murderer with sanity relatively intact.
Marriage is a wonderful institution it has to be said and everyone deserves a piece of it. But at the end of the day, it is still an institution and some people are quite reasonably reluctant to enter its enticing portals. I’ve been married for centuries and love it and I’m going to leave it there because the child bride reads this blog occasionally. Any sort of innocent commentary on a social compact that comes with reams of fine print is bound to attract conflicting views and generate a range of emotions so all I’ll say to everyone is “happy families”.
I can’t resist finishing on a note which links the name of this blog and the subject at hand. A woman and a man are sitting together sipping drinks when the wife says “I love you.” The husband says “Is that you or the wine talking?” She says “It’s me talking….to the wine.”
Great blog!