Posted by
Ben on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:13:02 PM
No fancy introduction for me.
I'm getting married in 46 days. Everyone tells me that I'm too young, and I simply don't understand that. I did the dating thing. I had my own fifty first dates. I suppose I went about it all the wrong way. See, I thought that dating was a sort of preliminary step to finding a mate. What was I thinking? The good news is that college enlightened me. Now I understand that dating is about beer, about random hook-ups at the frats, and about burying emotions with physical sensation. It's not about marriage, and it certainly isn't about finding an appropriate mate with whom to start a family.
I'm a baseball fan. I like to joke with my friends about having enough kids to field a baseball team. That's why early marriage is such a key, because I'd rather watch than play. I'm kidding, of course, but one of my friends (at a top ten school!) told me that having so many kids was socially irresponsible. Really? Four or five children born in wedlock to someone with a guaranteed job and a shiny new college degree? If anybody ought to be reproducing, it's me. The best argument for my withdrawing from the gene pool are my looks, but my future wife (God help her) is beautiful, so with any luck we'll have a whole flock of young ladies with their mom's beauty and wit and their dad to meet boyfriends with a shotgun. Take note, gentlemen.
But my friend's real problem isn't an overly active social conscience (as if those exist), but an overly active ego. Of course he doesn't want to have children; they are hard. They require work. They require money. They require attachment and roots and responsibility. He doesn't want any part of that. But I do.
My parents settled down to a shack on the bottom of one of our rented farms in my hometown. They married young and had kids young and now have barely broken fifty before they have four grandchildren. Nice, conservative grandchildren, who will work hard and throw down roots and have a whole flock of nice conservative great-grandchildren, whom my parents will likely live to see.
I'm not upset about my friend withdrawing from the gene pool, because his kids would likely end up voting for four-hour work weeks, public school starting at age two, and mandatory hybrid cars. Not mine. If I can't field my own baseball team, I'm at least going to get to vote four or five times in the 2028 presidential election.
But for the next 46 days I'm just going to keep my head low and speak when spoken to. I learn quickly.