Call Me a Chauvanist Douchebag, but...

Note: This is not my post on militant feminazism, that may or may not come later.

Disclaimer: This post will probably be offensive to everyone, especially married people, women, and double especially married women. If you tend to be offended by things, please refrain from reading this post... Don't say I didn't warn you.

If there has even been a deterrent to me getting married, it has been the way that married people interact. More specifically, the way that many wives treat their husbands makes me want to join a monastery and never see another living woman as long as I live. The following is probably the best explanation of why I may very well never get married and why, for years, I had absolutely zero desire to do so.
A week ago, literally on my birthday, I was blessed to give a sacrament talk on the family. This has made me think about the relationship that I had with my parents and the relationship that my parents had with each other. Naturally, the first marriage relationship that I had the privilege to view was the one between my parents. My parents really didn't have many friends, (surprise surprise) so I didn't see much in the way of other marriage relationships until I was about 16, when I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Knowing that I didn't see much in the way of marriages between birth and age 16 is crucial to understanding my skewed views of both women and marriage.

To start off, I suppose that my mom has an IQ of between about 70 and 75. I don't mean to disparage her, but she is just not a very intelligent individual. On the contrary, my dad has an IQ on the order of 115 to 125. He has always been a very intelligent man and is probably the best-read mailman that you'll ever meet in your life. It's sad how he ended up not being able to go to college, but that's a story for another day. Anywho, the point is that there was quite a disparity in intelligence between my parents, my mom being on the lower end and my dad being on the higher end. Additionally, it is important to note that my mother had very high quantities of both pride and paranoia. She always believed that she was right, regardless of how preposterous or poorly founded her claims were. And, oh gosh, how my mother had other issues, but I don't feel the need to turn my blag followers into a psychiatrist.

From my perspective, this was not conducive to producing emotionally healthy and chemically well-balanced children. In most of the arguments that my parents ended up getting in, my dad almost always made more sound arguments because he just had a dramatically higher IQ. With my IQ and logical pattern of thought, I generally ended up relating more with my dad than with my mom. These arguments most often focused around my mother's inability to stop spending money like a drunken sailor on a 3-day pass and her inability to hold down a job. At that point, my mother was often left with nothing left but emotional responses and unfounded claims. She would usually resort of one of three possibilities: 1) Threatening to divorce my dad and take half of everything he owned. 2) Accuse him of having an affair with random women (this has actually gotten worse since we joined the Church and my dad got a home teaching assignment.) 3) Threaten to never again have sex with him. And was I in the room when these things were happening? Most of the time, yes.

All of this glorious marriage relationship goodness led me to believe that no woman really liked men and women only got married for financial incentives and that non-masochist men would only get married for one night of guaranteed sex. As my dad liked to say, "So, we've already established that you're a prostitute, now we're just negotiating the price."

Since I joined the Church, I've seen many more in the way of marriage relationships. I've seen some relationships that give me hope for the future, still the majority of them fail to inspire me to truly want to become a part of this sort of relationship. Amongst the youngest generation of Latter-day Saints that I've met, especially those who have been married for more than about 2 years, I've found that women seem to treat their husbands like an old, used tampon that gave them TSS. Women generally command their husbands as if they are indentured slaves with no agency to act for themselves, but only to be acted upon. I've seen many a dog that are treated better than most husbands of Mormon women out there.

Allow me to submit that I absolutely despise being told what to do. I'm okay with being asked to do something, but when someone commands and expects me to obey, the uncensored words, "F-ck you!" will eventually come from my lips. The Gospel teaches that we have agency and that the spirit of love will ask and exhort a man or woman to do things and never seek to force and extort. And I'm all about the Gospel.

To sum it all up, I have a really distorted view of marriage, how it has fit into my life so far, and how it might continue to be a part of my life. The marriages I've seen have not been pleasant in my eyes. I'm sure that the people who are in those relationships are happy, but I would not be happy in their shoes. I'm really unsure about how I will be able to view women and marriage in the future. I try to retain optimism, but it doesn't seem to come very easily. We'll see how it goes...