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New York, 2:41 PM
Tue Nov 10
73 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/22/09
Love is love, sex is sex, money is money. But marriage has represented all these things and more. At times the ideal has been to marry for love, or to marry to move up in life, to make an advantageous power-play for the sake of your family. To keep the family name going within itself. Now it seems the ideal is to marry for love, but also to seek all fulfillment from the person you marry - you're supposed to find your "soul mate." It's funny, isn't it, that it's just another arrangement that we've told ourselves is the one right choice, when we've had several "right choices" throughout history and across cultures?
I'm not advocating for a return to marriage where women were treated like property, but I do think it's interesting to see how much the expectations of marriage have changed across time. In some ways, it seems like there would be less pressure if we weren't encouraged to find "THE ONE" and live "HAPPILY EVER AFTER" only to have our dreams shattered when we find our expectations were set too high. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
The 50's housewife 'tradition' is just a re-tread of that rather Victorian ideal. #whenyoumarry
10/22/09
It was more "what work was good for each gender" that ruled the day as opposed to "women shouldn't work."
It was really the generation after WW2 that decided it needed to go back to a "simpler time" that never really existed. #whenyoumarry
10/22/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
I've been married to my husband for 10+ years and sometimes the thought of sex with him really is revolting. Not all the time, just sometimes. Am I a terrible wife? #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
Just to clarify I mean about a week before the event and the week after I totally am NOT in the mood.
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
I love my husband. We have sex quite often but sometimes the thought of sexual intimacy is actually disgusting. I feel kind of awful about this but the one other person I spoke to it about (also married 10+) said she feels the same way sometimes. It isn't personal. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
It's easy to forget that for women, sex drive really is cyclical, whereas men's is fairly constant. For some reason, we tend to just assume that women have a low sex drive and then we read all of those awful magazine articles about how to "fix" it. Yuck. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
it appears this 50's suburban WASPs did as well! #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
I have a weird fascination with them. I find them interesting and kind of hate that they get thrown into the "wacky news" category, when they're this cool little peek into social controls of the past. It's like letters from Big Brother. Maybe I'm just a geek about source material type stuff.
If you're looking for more fun go to archive.org and search for "Boys Beware!" to learn about the homosexual and his disease.
10/21/09
I have a DVD series-- The Educational Archives-- that has all those old film clips. I got it after being captivated by the hygiene films that MST3K used to mock. One that I remember vividly was about the importance of having good posture, and that you should have a "posture pal" at school to help each other remind to stand up straight. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/22/09
BTW, the "Girls Beware!" rebuttal is all sorts of horrific (though not about lesbianism) as well.
I got a collection of cult classics off of Amazon a bit back and it was a great collection of awesome scare films from the 30's-50's.
10/22/09
10/21/09
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10/21/09
03/25/09
03/24/09
It is no one's business why I do not want to have children. That said, genetics is a huge part of it (there are a lot of other reasons, but they are not important here). I find it painful, insulting and uplifting that so many commenters seem to not have the same experiences that my family did. It's painful because it's a reminder of what happened, insulting because I feel like judgment is cast on me for my choices (hello, hypersensitivity!) and uplifting because it means it probably didn't happen to you.
Two of my sisters died of a incurable genetic disorder. I may or may not be a carrier for it. I more than likely am. I do not care how small the chances are of having a child with the disorder - my sisters were small chances, too. There will not be any likely advances in this particular disorder - it's very rare and while research has and is being done, there are very few treatments available, much less a cure. I do not care if I "should" or "should not" worry. I watched my youngest sister suffer through a debilitating disorder and die. I saw what it did to the people around me (and obviously me, too), and I cannot go through that again. I cannot imagine anything more painful than watching someone you love suffer and die, knowing you can't do anything to help them.
I was called selfish once for this attitude. The girl told me that "even if he lives for only six years, he has still lived!" Fuck that. I don't need to have a child biologically. I don't care if I'm "denying" some child a life or if "all families pass down something, so [I] should stop worrying". Some people can handle these odds. They are stronger people than I, because I can't. And I shouldn't have to. Knowing what the possibilities are and knowing your own limits (or guessing, since you can't really know) can change your mind. Maybe adoption is a better answer. Maybe it's not. But I think genetics is a strong reason to not have biological children, and there is nothing stupid or shameful about using that to make a choice.
03/24/09
In the other gene pool, my girlfriend is a bundle of depression related largely to, in my pre-med-school opinion, endo. She scores higher than average, though thankfully not quite as ridiculously high as I do, on autism-rating scales, and has some social anxiety that is largely due to her mother holding her back because she has CP. Her family has a number of genetic diseases present (various cancers, mostly).
Our kids are screwed no matter which of us carries--plus if she carries, there's the known risk of bedrest/early birth.
03/24/09
On the other hand, some of the best writing/scientific discoveries/art has come out of introverts. You don't exactly congeniate well with labs, beakers, and typewriters (okay, computers, but it doesn't sound as cool) when you lean towards extroversion. So I guess the world needs all kinds, and nobody is free from bad character tendencies that we wish we didn't have to pass on to the next generation.
03/24/09
I come from a long, long line of addicts and depressives, with some endometriosis thrown in for good measure, and I have (so far) managed to dodge most of those bullets. I want very badly to reach out to all of you and give you the love and support you deserve, but of course I can't.
So instead, I hope that what you're taking from this post is how entirely not alone you are, and that there are options for help and a healthy life.
03/24/09
03/24/09
I honestly think that this kind of sharing is what is best about the Internet. These are the kinds of conversations that were all but impossible, absent a designated support group, throughout the vast majority of human history.
03/24/09