Even I'm not immune to wedding propaganda. I'll happily watch Four Weddings and Say Yes To The Dress, sitting there in stunned silence, mouth agape, oozing schadenfreude at the shrill shenanigans on Bridezillas. There are very few American women who aren't seduced to some degree by the whole white dress-fairy tale-belle-of-the-ball myth we're fed like candy from the time we're old enough to toddle. Every little girl wants to be a fairy princess and sooner or later that usually evolves into a near-bloodlust for things like pastel candy-covered almonds, ice sculptures, gold charger plates, and peach polyester napkins. Take even the most sensible woman and scratch the surface and chances are you're going to find a petulant princess who will go postal over aisle runners and cumberbunds. What very few women or men are obsessed with, however, is marriage itself. It's as though we're raised to view the wedding as the marriage. That's one piece of the puzzle, and the other big secret that no one is telling us as often or as loudly as they tell us that our worth as a woman is inherently hinged on a Vera Wang gown or a sparkly rock wrenched from the earth in some oppressed developing-world country: marriage is business deal.
If we paid as much attention to the harsher realities of marriage – the daily grind of dealing with the same person with the same habits and the same foibles day after day after day without stabbing them in the neck with a fork (you know you’ve been there, don’t lie), the challenge of coping with life’s curveballs with someone who might have a vastly different temperament or set of priorities than oneself, the grim reality of the possibility of a spouse descending into a nasty habit such as, say, gambling or internet porn or compulsive E-Baying or what have you, and cover our own asses accordingly, the bloodflow of divorce, financial instability, and family disintegration might be staunched a bit. If we were all taught to vet our potential spouses as rigorously as we do our babysitters, hairstylists, or brokers, if we were able to be honest about the sometimes-gory aftermath of those glitzy wedding receptions, if we raised our daughters and sons to love freely and generously but sensibly, and to always cultivate personal and financial responsibility for themselves first and foremost, perhaps we could change our obsession with glitzy ritual into a healthier cultural approach to what it is to be in love, to commit, and to build a life with another person.
This simple truth - that under our legal system marriage is not an expression of love or faith but is, in fact, a unique and binding legal contract that gives another individual an almost-bizarre and potentially-devastating access to one's resources - is the first thing we should be teaching people about marriage. Let the handmade lace and the Swarovski-crystal studded Cathedral veil come after that.
There is another popular myth that women benefit financially from marriage more than men do and often take their husbands to the cleaners in the event of divorce. Certainly most people do benefit financially from marriage - the combining of two incomes if both partners work, the health insurance that has lured more than a few folks down the aisle - but in my experience, when the house of cards falls and the marriage comes crashing down, often as not it's the woman left holding the bag.
A colleague of mine, ironically an attorney, came to me yesterday and told me of her afternoon at the divorce mediator. They essentially recommended that she, a full-time white-collar employee who moved into a two-bedroom apartment after her hard-drinking, underemployed, abusive husband made life in their 2,000-square foot Marin County home unbearable, remove her children from the parochial school they attend so that she can afford to pay him spousal support (otherwise known as alimony) - while he lives in their house and drinks away his job opportunities. He also wants half of her retirement account, paltry as it is.
Another friend of mine married her now ex-husband after a decade together. They met as housemates in a large Mission District flat in the early 90s and he was with her during her $7-an-hour-schlepping-bagels phase of life, and all through her years of grinding away at thankless, low-paying production assistant jobs and working her way up to being an executive producer - while he fiddled in his art studio and took up part-time (meaning: when he felt like it) massage therapy as a trade. She married him when a change in EU-citizenship laws forced them into a 'use it or lose it' situation and a few years later, when she realized that she didn't want to spend her life with a man who wouldn't even make her a bowl of soup while she was pulling 18-hour workdays and left him, he took her to the cleaners, claiming rights to everything from a share of her father's inheritance to her secondhand Honda. She walked away, leaving him with a house full of spanking new, quality furniture (to replace the shabby thrift store/art school aesthetic he'd been rocking) and felt lucky not to have been forced into paying him alimony.
My Grandma Dottie and Grandpa Charlie were married in 1939, in a time when prenups were unheard-of and divorce unthinkable, especially to an Irish Catholic. He came into the marriage with nothing but his good looks, considerable charisma, and ganas, whilst she had shrewd business skills and the crumbs – a single residential apartment building – of her family’s holdings, most of it lost in the Crash of 1929. They used this initial capital to invest in rehabbing homes, one after another, all over Los Angeles, capturing a tidy profit to supplement his earnings as a property master at a major studio. Twenty years later, when he left her for his secretary (so cliché as to be laughable), he walked away from his marriage, high-ranking job, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of construction contracts, a considerable sum in 1959, all to spite her. The judge in the case told him he was a sorry excuse for a man and threatened him with jail if he did not become gainfully employed tout de suite, so he hit up his buddy at the studio and asked for most menial, low-paying job available so as to avoid giving her any real money.
He then demanded that my grandmother sell the house she and their three children were living in – the family home that he’d left – and because California is a community property state (ironically, this is most common in states that were part of the Spanish empire and thus Catholic, and its intent was to protect deserted wives) there was little she could do, so she went back to work as a decorator, stuffing her worn-out shoes with newspaper, while he took off for the wilds of the Sierras to live his ‘mountain man’ lifestyle and left her to finish raising their kids. She happily remarried a man, my Grandpa Bob, who was measured, successful, and faithful, but she had been burned and would never forget it. As I grew up, she bred into me the principle of keeping your own money in your own name – especially when it comes to your house.
Years ago, my own ‘starter marriage’ disintegrated and I found myself holding the bag of a pretty-but-pricey Dolores Street flat in the middle of the dotcom boom. The departure of my estranged spouse left me solely responsible for the rent and necessitated the bringing-in of housemates, a phase of life I’d thought I’d left back in my twenties. I got very lucky and had a succession of very good friends stay with me until I found my own place nearly two years later, but I decided then that I’d never get myself hooked on a lifestyle or a home that I couldn’t afford on my own.
Perhaps this mindset sounds cynical or pessimistic, but what I do know is that my lifestyle will never depend on the earning power or largesse of another individual, and that’s just good business sense. I wouldn’t have my security and well-being depend on a business partner, and I won’t depend on a romantic partner either – and I find this simply sensible. Too often people see marriage as a step up the economic and social ladder, without realizing what it might cost if the ladder gives out from under them – via divorce, separation, or even just an unforeseen illness, disability, job loss, et cetera. I’ve seen friends stay in unhappy marriages because they have investments and/or a home together, and to leave the spouse that makes them miserable means giving up the comforts of their lifestyle. Both choices suck and arise because of our mass illusions regarding marriage, permanency, and security.
I’d like to see parents school their children, and we as a culture (with the myriad aspects of marriage being so hotly debated in public forums these days) acknowledge that legally speaking, marriage is the entering into not of a grand love story but a mutual business enterprise, and so to embark upon it accordingly – one might love another all day long, but if one wouldn’t start a carpet-cleaning business or open a restaurant with one’s beloved, one probably shouldn’t be walking down the aisle with them without attendant precautions, if at all.
If we paid as much attention to the harsher realities of marriage – the daily grind of dealing with the same person with the same habits and the same foibles day after day after day without stabbing them in the neck with a fork (you know you’ve been there, don’t lie), the challenge of coping with life’s curveballs with someone who might have a vastly different temperament or set of priorities than oneself, the grim reality of the possibility of a spouse descending into a nasty habit such as, say, gambling or internet porn or compulsive E-Baying or what have you, and cover our own asses accordingly, the bloodflow of divorce, financial instability, and family disintegration might be staunched a bit. If we were all taught to vet our potential spouses as rigorously as we do our babysitters, hairstylists, or brokers, if we were able to be honest about the sometimes-gory aftermath of those glitzy wedding receptions, if we raised our daughters and sons to love freely and generously but sensibly, and to always cultivate personal and financial responsibility for themselves first and foremost, perhaps we could change our obsession with glitzy ritual into a healthier cultural approach to what it is to be in love, to commit, and to build a life with another person. 
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