“Dear Editor, I’m so in love that I’m going to ask her to marry me. I want to tell her that I love her in 100 different ways, one for each day that I have known and loved her. She is without a doubt, the one. What should I do?”
Mark is proposing to his girlfriend of two years. He wants to tell her he loves her in 100 different ways, "...one for each day that [he] has known and loved her." What Mark does not fully understand is what he is getting himself into. Year after year, thousands of young couples tie the knot and with it a few years of their lives to one another. Wooed by the romantic ideals of our society, they are not yet ready to commit, but feel that, with time, their love will grow and endure. This is unfortunately, not the common case- as 1 in 2 marriages end in a divorce in five years or less and 3 in 5 adults have been married at least twice. The best lifestyle that provides the most happiness and the least heartache is a lifestyle where marriage is conspicuously absent. Our society has disfigured the love that marriage is based on by commoditizing affection and throwing its excess into the recycling bin. The idea of love in our modern day society has been acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized and sold off piece by piece. Love does not exist without reason. The level of love we feel for each other is determined by our compatibility. Compatibility can be calculated online for you in less than an hour through a series of complicated math algorithms based off of how desirable you are as a person on a scale of 1 to 10. We no longer seem to have a choice in our marriage partners as society is predetermining them for us. Marriage, in this day and age is a very poor investment indeed. But if we must, this is the reusable process that will help us to get it over with as quickly as possible so as to move on with other, more productive ventures.
The first step to marriage is to find someone to marry. Go in what will now be referred to as ‘stalker mode’. In order to arbitrarily choose a person to marry, proceed to stalking everyone you may or may not know at a distance for a few days. Base your decision on your level of affection for a person or pick a name out of a hat. It doesn’t really matter. Take notes on their habits and activities and one day show up at the exact place where they are going to be. Proceed to step two, and begin showing up everywhere so that you are constantly on their mind. If questioned do to your suspicious actions, pretend that you have suddenly developed the same interests as this person, because you have so much in common; you just never realized before. Do not appear to be stalking them. People generally do not marry other people who stalk them. Step three: get in contact with this person. Try to talk to them. Try to get in touch with them. (Do not touch them before talking to them.) After establishing dialogue with the person jump into dating. Loiter around in the relationship for around two to three years. Then quickly initialize step four: tell the person you love them as often as possible. Sign your emails and texts with your love; end your calls with ‘I love you’. Tell them you love them until they are desensitized to it. Tell them you love them until they agree to marry you just so you will stop wooing them. Marry them and don’t look back.
After the first few happy years of marriage, begin phase two, a quick and virtually painless (painless for me, very painful for you, actually) series of three simple steps. Step five: begin to revert back into ‘stalker mode’. Distrust your spouse. Hire a professional stalker (also known as a private investigator) to sneak around in bushes and take sketchy shots of them. Once you have these photos, keep them in a file along with the divorce papers. Proceed to step six and make it your duty to aggravate them as much as possible. Yell at them over silly things like whose turn is it to dump the trash or who left the toilet seat up. Cry about how they never really loved you at all. Disrespect their personal items and throw their stuff around. End, successfully, with step seven: dividing of assets. Remember to forget any love you may or may not have developed for this person and make it your personal goal to get everything out of the marriage that they care about. Children, pets, boats, anything and everything that they have ever cared for. Because if you cannot have them and they cannot love you; they do not deserve to have anything or anyone. Make post-divorce friendship impossible. That ship has sailed. Instead, wait a customary three weeks and then begin the process from step one. Repeat until you’re satisfied.
Although this does not seem like the path that most married people followed, it does lead to the same results. Everywhere people are unhappy. Marriage makes them even unhappier and then they fight until they can find a person to make them less unhappy. The only way to pursue happiness is to not let propriety get in the way. Don’t let math tell you who to marry or how to live your life. Love should be based on more than compatibility and reason. Love has no reason. Love should exist for the sole purpose of the pursuit of happiness. The best way to avoid the commitment cycle is to not avoid marriage, but divorce. Take one chance and make it last. Don’t marry someone because someone else tells you to- marry someone because you can’t live another day without marrying them. Marriage should be based on love and not math. The only place that math should have in your marriage is to count the distance you are away from each other and how many minutes it will take to get you home.