601 posts tagged with marriage.
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"Is this real? And does that matter?"
Of the more than 20 users I spoke with, many noted that they never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their 60s, married, divorced, with kids and without, looking for romance, company, or something else. There were people recovering from breakups, ground down by dating apps, homebound with illness, lonely after becoming slowly estranged from their friends, or looking back on their lives and wanting to roleplay what could have been. People designed AI therapists, characters from their favorite shows, angels for biblical guidance, and yes, many girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and wives. Many of these people experienced real benefits. Many of them also got hurt in unexpected ways. What they had in common was that, like Naro, they were surprised by the reality of the feelings elicited by something they knew to be unreal, and this led them to wonder, What exactly are these things? And what does it mean to have a relationship with them?The Verge sensitively explores the fascinating, heartbreaking, and rapidly evolving rise of AI relationship apps and the people who love them. [more inside]
Raw material
Exactly how fully this event defines either book is something that the authors at times fiercely dispute — an argument that will seem sometimes to be about writing, sometimes about the contested debris of past relationships. But let’s use a term that both books employ in different contexts: the “inciting incident.” At the very least, these two books share the same inciting incident. And often much more than that. from Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It [Vulture; ungated]
"The photos will be our treasure"
When you love a man, don’t spoil everything by marrying him
For those who have started down the road of matrimony and remain on it. For others who left, came back, and found themselves broken, free, or enlightened. And for the many who dream of what marriage is or curse what they imagine it to be. This one's for you.
The Cut Has Done It Again
"He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it." [more inside]
What if you suspect your husband is fantastically evil?
Shot: "The Lure of Divorce" In which Emily Gould writes: "Seven years into my marriage, I hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it." (continued inside) [more inside]
Two weeks before my 23rd birthday, I explicitly practiced widowing.
If you like it, don't put a ring on it.
For older women with money, it’s yes to love but ‘I don’t’ to marriage. Money is, of course, only one of many considerations. But for many, the answer is clear: Date, fall in love, even live together. But make it legal? No thank you.
Only 90s kids will understand
Pulling Yourself Up by Your Ball and Chain
Rebecca Traister discusses the latest matrimony as economic policy push for The Cut. New York magazine/archive: It’s easy to see why the marriage solution is so appealing. Like telling people that it’s their responsibility to address the climate crisis by using paper straws, or advising Black men that they need to pull up their pants and be better fathers, it off-loads the responsibility for broad and systemic reform by tsk-tskingly placing it on individuals and their intimate behaviors. [more inside]
I was looking for a new direction in life.
She hired him as a caregiver for her family. They fell in love. Sanhai’s husband had died a few years earlier of a heart attack, leaving her to raise her two sons as a single mother. Not long after they relocated, the family faced another crisis in 2014: Sanhai’s father had a stroke, sending her on a desperate search for a caregiver. Her job as a scientist was demanding, and Sanhai needed someone to tend to her father — who moved in with her family after the stroke — as well as help out with her two sons, then 16 and 10. [more inside]
Access to a certain inner experience of love
“We’ve often had the kind of stress and struggle of, like, is this working?” Rachel Aviv (previously) writes about professor Agnes Callard (previously) and how she integrates philosophy into her marriages.
meat, raucous spectacle, custom, Chaucer, and wedded bliss
There's a now-revived old tradition that happy married couples are eligible for a "flitch" of bacon (basically half a pig), as decided and awarded at "the Dunmow Flitch Trials -- "if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in 'twelvemonth and a day', they have 'not wisht themselves unmarried again'". The trials involve counsel for the claimants arguing against counsel for the bacon, cross-examinations, and a lot of laughs. 2-minute clip of a trial from 1930; 43-minute video of a 2016 trial (spoiler for results). [more inside]
Same Sex Couples From China Get Married Over Zoom in Utah County
As sexual minorities in China face suppression at home, Utah County is allowing them to officially marry and celebrate their love — all for around $100. The state of Utah in the United States has no citizenship requirements for marriage licenses, and Utah County is the only place there that allows international couples to register their marriages online. Since the county rolled out virtual weddings during the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a wedding haven for same-sex couples who are not able to officially marry in their own countries.
Cindy Gallop is not a relationship person, and can't wait to die alone
Cindy Gallop discusses her website Make Love Not Porn and her aversion to marriage and relationships Cindy Gallop, age 60, discusses her sex life, her aversion to relationships and marriage pressure, and her website, Make Love Not Porn (NSFW-ish)
All I really wanna do is kiss you one more time
This is a story about my wife
My sweet wife, her name is Grace
I met her in 1953,
she had freckles on her face
a poodle skirt: it was navy blue
saddle shoes: they were black and white
My sweet wife, her name is Grace
I met her in 1953,
she had freckles on her face
a poodle skirt: it was navy blue
saddle shoes: they were black and white
Scenes from an Open Marriage
there are just marriages, made up of people
If that is not at all a unique type of marriage, in the history of marriages, it nevertheless is not What Marriages Are Like. If I believed that marriages were like that, that marriage, categorically, was just Like That—that a marriage was doomed to sadness and failure and guilt and dissolution—then I would never have gotten married in the first place. Thankfully, there are other types of marriages. There are good ones. Maybe your marriage just sucks. [via the Defector].
Love and Economy. The Business of Marriage
Linda Besner Takes a Look at the Marriages of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Romance is famously a form of lunacy, irrational to the core. But historically, marriage is a business deal. Building a shared life seems to demand a sophisticated form of double-entry bookkeeping, in which a column counting cash and a column counting feelings are somehow reconciled. [more inside]
Three and/or Sixty-One Literary Bears
Patricia Lockwood (LRB, 08/12/2021), "Pull Off My Head": "Is Bear one of those 1970s books about growing out your armpit hair? Kind of, but not only. Is it a metaphor for our relationship to nature? Fuck off." Marlena Williams (LitHub, 10/23/2020), "Sylvia Plath... Nature Writer?": "'The Fifty-Ninth Bear' taught me about the darker, sulfuric thing bubbling under the surface of love, and I became a person suspicious of heterosexual romance, uninterested in marriage." Naomi Ishiguro (Granta, 02/03/2020), "Bear": "For a moment I was almost proud of her, even if it did mean we had to bring back this vast sixty-five-pound bear, to share our home with us."
Flipping people: upgrading and dating
What happens when people constantly upgrade love? NY Times author Kelly Sundberg is tired of "flipping men": bonding with men who then immediately dump her and commit to others. This seems especially cruel for those who have been with someone during a sickness, unemployment, or during a rough time.
The shopping/upgrading mentality might have some roots in capitalism: everything is a market, why not love? Modern dating and relationship games seem to beat the hope out of decent people.
God in Love Unites Us
The Methodist Church in Britain allows same-sex marriage in 'momentous' vote: Following a half-decade of consultation, and in an overwhelming 254-46 vote in favour, the Methodist Church is now the largest religious denomination in Britain to support same-sex marriage.
Today Is Loving Day
Each year on this date, "Loving Day" celebrates the historic ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which declared unconstitutional a Virginia law prohibiting mixed-race marriage — and legalized interracial marriage in every state. (Previously.)
It Took Divorce to Make My Marriage Equal
Lyz Lenz in Glamour from September 2020: I was 33, a mother of two, and bone-tired. I didn’t want the laundry and chores to be the rest of my life. I didn’t want to always be drowning in work and childcare and housecleaning and dinner, bearing the brunt of the labor. I’d spent the past two years begging for help with the kids and housework, only to be told that I could just quit my job if it was all too much. “It’s not too much,” I’d said over and over. “It’s just not all my job.” Standing in the dining room, overwhelmed with the weight of my life, I broke. The next day, in couples therapy, I asked for a divorce. [more inside]
There was a vast demand for Patinkin-related content
Scenes From a Marriage, Patinkin-Style | Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody’s charming, irreverent pandemic-era posts led to unlikely social media stardom. Will the vaccine end their run? Sarah Lyall writes for the NY Times about the past Patinkin year. “There’s no question,” Patinkin said. “Being with my family holed up for 11 months has been one of the true gifts of my life.” (psst - the photos/clips are the best part) [more inside]
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
Rhaina Cohen writes about the people who prioritize friendship over romance for The Atlantic Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we as a society might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care. [more inside]
The Health Insurance Plot
The Health Insurance Plot is a cousin to the Marriage Plot, which refers to a story that concludes in a marriage. All of Jane Austen’s novels, for example, end with weddings. At the time, marriage was essentially permanent and offered Austenian heroines domestic and financial security—a kind of happy ending. The characters embroiled in a Health Insurance Plot may have a specific ailment amplifying the stakes of needing insurance, but they are rarely the primary plot. These characters are usually millennial women, struggling with life things: love, sex, the gig “economy,” racism, having a body, making art. These novels aren’t stories about women with diseases. They’re stories about women who—much like their Austenian predecessors—are seeking security.
Homemade Peanut Sauce That Was All Wrong But My Wife's Reluctant To Toss
The refrigerator is the only thing we’re forced to share that we have drastically different views on how to use. And I’m not sure how you turn a person who insists on pickling her own carrots into a person who doesn’t also feel entitled to stack jars of them eight deep on the highest shelf, but that is the person I ended up married to! Has anyone ever gotten divorced citing “too many assorted milks?” Is this the “for worse” I am resigned to? from To Love, Honor, and Share Fridge Space by Samantha Irby
Year of Polygamy - the story of Mormon plural marriage
A podcast series by Lindsay Hansen-Park of Feminist Mormon Housewives that "follows the Mormon faith through the lens of “The Principle of Plural Marriage” from its genesis in 1831 with its originator Joseph Smith, through the hidden history and governmental pressure, to today and contemporary practicing Fundamentalist Mormons. [...] Polygamy is dissected through a feminist viewpoint, with attention given to the experiences of the women [...]. Their experiences, along with interviews with experts, scholars, historians, and those still affected directly by the practice, paint a new portrait of how the west was shaped, by the hard work and toil of these invisible women, hidden away through controversy." [more inside]
Marriage Wasn’t Built to Survive Quarantine
"First Look"
how to pull off an impromptu wedding amid a global pandemic
The brides wore sneakers. The officiant read a Love in the Time of Cholera passage from his apartment window four floors above. Everyone was sobbing and trying to keep a distance. The whole event happened in just three minutes. [more inside]
Bisexuals of the Blade
After a wedding photo shared by a guest blew up on Twitter, the brides created their own twitter account to respond to their admirers, answer questions, and post more photos.
Don’t be condescending. Don’t backseat game. Don’t laugh at them.
How To Get Your Significant Other Into Gaming [Kotaku] “You play games, but your significant other does not. It’s a common scenario that can be a point of contention in an otherwise healthy relationship. To relax after work, you load up Overwatch on the living room Xbox. Your beau, on the other hand, wants to cook dinner with you. An hour watching you gun down virtual enemies is, to them, the definition of boring—even disrespectful of their time. [...] Here’s a guide on how to introduce your significant other to the wide world of gaming. Remember—compromise is key. If your significant other takes the time to game with you, make sure you try out their favorite hobby with them, too.” [more inside]
co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a U.S. Supreme Court decision
In Sickness, In Health—and In Prison A Nebraska couple fighting to marry behind bars wouldn’t be the first: Three decades ago, two prisoners took their bid to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. [The Marshall Project] [Co-published with Longreads]
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake"
Is it time for a sleep divorce? “While there are benefits to sleeping together, one partner’s troublesome sleeping or annoying bed habits can affect the other and increase production of the stress hormone cortisol, thus causing issues that impact the couple as a whole” [more inside]
The private language of marriages
HOLY SHIT WHAT A TRILOGY
ONE
My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.] (Twitter | Threadreader)[more inside]
My wife
Anatomy of the Wife Guy Not every guy with a wife is a wife guy, and not all wife guys have wives.
What a Wonderful Kind of Day
In today's season 22 premier on PBS, Arthur featured a very special wedding, between Mr. Ratburn and his new husband, aardvark chocolatier Patrick (with special guest star Jane Lynch as Mr. Ratburn's sister). You can watch the full episode here!
Girl, I asked him
A Couple That Got Married After 2 Weeks On How It Went Down: "This is about to be a buncha laughs. Just so you know, we’re a very unique couple."
“Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact.“
“The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, — and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman. But in vain these frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage.” - Anarchist agitator Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love.” 1914
DRUNK CLOWN AT THE WEDDING
There's lots of ugliness in the world right now, so I think it's important to share these photos of what happened when my friend Marvin called me & said: "I'm getting married & we can only invite 100 people. You didn't make the cut. But you can come if you come as a drunk clown." Twitter | Threadreader
The Island the Left Neglected
Imagine a small, peaceful, progressive island in Asia about the size of Maryland. Ruled until the Cold War’s very end by a military dictatorship, it is now a robust democracy, although it endures incessant hostility from its giant neighbor. Its people treasure their hard-fought equality, free press, and vibrant civil society. [By Jeffrey C. H. Ngo in Dissent Magazine] [more inside]
What's for dinner?
I'm a great cook. Now that I'm divorced, I'm never cooking for a man again.
Relationships Predictors: The Struggle Between Money and Gratitude
This study investigates the strains of financial distress on marital quality, and explores gratitude as a mitigating factor in these situations, when escalating spousal relation patterns might become increasingly negative.
The time of their lives.
Noah and PJ's wedding dance. A few minutes of love and levity. This couple absolutely smash their wedding dance mash up (SLYT), with some inspiration from Ex Machina thrown in there!
Should marrying a child be allowed?
She was 16. He was 25.
Even in an era when the median age of marrying has climbed higher and higher, unions like Phil and Maria’s remain surprisingly prevalent in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, most of whom were girls, some as young as 12, wedding men. [more inside]
Love in a time of Roe v. Wade
Jeanne Safer and Richard Brookhiser have been deeply in love for almost 40 years while being passionately committed to opposite sides of the abortion debate. [SLSlate]
They charged it to Univision because @#$% Univision
My mission to ruin a $250 Wagyu steak nearly destroyed my family --
Over the course of three days, I prepared this steak five different ways and, in the process, I developed a relationship with the steak. It became my secret lover. It even caused legitimate tension between my wife and me. Drew Magary for The Takeout