I can’t sleep at night.
Why?
It’s the problem of the heels.
I can’t win this fight.
Why?
It wasn’t part of the deal.
All I want is to feel the same
We could be walking on the ocean
But something’s always wrong ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hey!
You married him.
He’s always and in all ways gonna stay him.
Means he won’t leave ya,
But he’s prolly gonna grieve ya
Again and again and again. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Finished reading: How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (2023) by Harrison Scott Key. A breezy, raw, comic, winsomely Christian cuckold’s memoir.
If something matters to Carla, then it matters to me.
At the level of the individual, there is wisdom in my friend’s aversion to marriage, which she stated the other day as “I don’t know why people would want to get married.” I prefer to reword it as: “Don’t make a commitment you don’t think you can keep.” But at the level of society, there needs to be a complementary wisdom: Cultivate people who are capable of making lifelong commitments.
“We are sending our young people into the marriage bed as virgins (good) but also as morons (bad).”
No, no, no, your ridicule is quite powerful. I appreciate it, actually.
— Scott, to Carla
Romance has been this sort of…odd side project for us.
— Scott, in a large campfire discussion at his tenth wedding anniversary party of how friendship is the basis of his and Carla’s relationship
I bought Carla some flowers today. Consider it an improvement on the one cut rose per year we’ve been married.
While walking with God through a nearby neighborhood in the wake of a few spats this morning with wife about housekeeping, it finally clicked: The housekeeping and homemaking is her work. It may even be helpful to compare the house to my computer and desktop workspace. Before I do any of the following again, it would be best to consider how it would make me feel if anyone came to my computer or desktop workspace and did the same:
- Leave items in places they shouldn’t be
- Move items that are not mine
- Change settings without asking
- Argue forcefully about the proper place or protocol for something
- Complainingly refuse to help when asked
Scott: What would life be like without screens?
Carla: Buggy.
[pause]
Scott [slightly annoyed]: Could you just answer the question, please?
[pause]
Carla [gathering what he meant]: Well, we know what life would be like without screens. We didn’t have screens the first year of our marriage.
Scott: What did we DO?
Carla: We fought.
Carla: Oh my God, living with you is like living in a legal document!
Scott: Oh my god, living with you is like living in oatmeal!
Carla: [playfully flicks dishwater at Scott]
Scott: What did I do to deserve that?
Carla: You married me.
Hey, it was definitely hard, but I really enjoyed spending time with you this evening.
— Scott, to Carla
If I were married to myself, I’d be divorced.
— Carla
Carla: I’ve gotta get in shape for the wedding. Scott: Whoa. Weird. Normal woman-talk just came out of my wife’s mouth.