irreconcilable differences

every single day, someone else is failing at marriage. i see it all over the place. when i talk to people back home, i hear "_____ is getting a divorce" or "_____ broke up" or i'm seeing the constant changing of facebook relationship statuses. it's totally in my face all the time. as a newly married person, it's a little scary.

i realize that not everyone who gets married is going to stay married forever. in a perfect world, yes, people would find their "soulmate" and take that love all the way to the grave. nobody in my family has been divorced, so i always considered us to be the kind of people who "mate for life, and as a result, i take marriage very seriously - on the flip side of that, my husband is previously divorced, but i DO think that he gave it the best shot that he could have. i can't really say that for most people who get divorced. i think a lot of people get married for the wrong reasons, and as a result, set themselves up for eventual failure....some of those reasons (in no particular order):

"it's the next logical step"

WHAT does this even MEAN? it's a lifetime commitment, not a math problem. just because you've been with someone for 3, 5, 10 years....it doesn't necessarily mean that they are the person you are intended to marry. sure, it sucks to think "wow, i spent a lot of time in that relationship for it to have not worked out" but sometimes, that's just the way it goes.

"i really want to get married"

what's missing from this sentence? the words "to him" or "to her" - just really wanting to get married is NOT a reason to actually get married. if you're having wedding fever, hang out around your friends who have been married for a few years and snap back into the reality of what happens AFTER you take off the 10-layers of tulle. i do something similar any time i think i might want to have a baby - i hang out around other people with babies, and come to my senses.

"if i don't marry her, she'll break up with me"

then odds are, if you DO marry her, she'll eventually still break up with you. i don't know why guys have YET to figure out that ultimatums are just thinly veiled hopes that you'll fail at whatever we've challenged you to do, so that when we dump you, it's YOUR fault - not OURS - and you end up looking like the bad guy. if a girl is giving you a time frame in which to marry her, then odds are, she's got one foot out the door already. i'm just saying.....

i guess my point here is that marriage shouldn't be a matter of convenience, or a business deal, or something you do so you're not the only single person at parties, or because "if i don't get married THIS year, that wedding gown won't be in production anymore" or because it's part of your three, five or ten year plan, and you're cutting it close to your time schedule...it's something you should want to do because you are so sickeningly in love with someone, that you are willing and ready to go through hell and back with them (because at some point in your marriage, you will). forever. until one or both of you is dead. 

anyway.....

every day i read about 2 or 3 celebrities who have gotten engaged, and immediately follow that up by reading about the most recent couple who is getting divorced. most of them use the good old "irreconcilable differences" excuse, and leave us all going "i wonder what THAT means" - seriously, what DOES it mean? did he never do the dishes or walk the dog? did he buy you the wrong harry winston necklace for your birthday? did he forget to thank you when he received that award? do you not like her new vegan shoes? seriously? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? we may never know what it means, but you can pretty much be certain that at least for the first few weeks after the divorce is announced, there will be enough rumors, speculations and careless tweeting to give us at least a tiny little bit of insight as to what went wrong with these couples in their marriages. marriage is hard enough for ordinary people. it's a lot of work. i've been married less than a year, and i already know that every thing people said to me about marriage being hard is true. it is. i often find myself wondering how celebrities - with all their money and resources - can fail so often at marriage. i mean, statistics tell us that MOST marital issues are centered around money - most celebrities have plenty of it, so that's gotta knock the odds of divorce down at least a little bit, right?

the most recent "hey, we're divorcing" couple is Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz. never mind the fact that the pairing of these two made me gag in the first place (i remember thinking "what the hell is HE doing with HER" - don't get me wrong, she's a nice looking gal, but her i'm pretty sure her music is the kind that is the bane of his existence. they seemed a little oil and water to me....), but after a while i got used to seeing them in magazines and crap together. they had a really cute alice in wonderland themed wedding. i started to think they were a cute, tolerable couple, and i kind of dug the way i saw them interacting with each other and their kid. despite being in tabloids from time to time, they really seemed to be more of the types of celebrities who tried to keep to themselves. they weren't all in our faces ALL the time, and i appreciated that about them. it seemed mature and sensible, like they respected their personal lives enough not to whore themselves out to the media and become a giant spectacle. i really did think "these two people are probably going to make it" i mean, in my head, any two human beings who would agree to name their child something as stupid as Bronx Mowgli just HAD to stay together forever......

just in the past few weeks, i'd noticed an increase in the number of times i saw their pictures in magazines, or on online gossip blogs - pictures of them having coffee, pictures of her heinous new haircut, pictures of them pushing their kid in a swing - so i kind of felt like something was coming. i was hoping ashlee would drop some horrible single (L-O, L-O, L-O, L-O-V-E!) but instead, today, we got the news that she was divorcing pete after less than 3 years of marriage.

LESS THAN 3 YEARS.

why? oh, you guys had some irreconcilable differences. OF COURSE!

first off: 3 YEARS? are you serious? you didn't even give your marriage a CHANCE to succeed, much less figure out that you HAVE differences SO monumental that they are unable to be reconciled. i'm only 7 months into this, and i can already tell you that it's going to take me at LEAST three years to get fully adjusted to being someone's wife. unless there was an abusive situation, infidelity, or some other heinous crime committed (like, he snuck into your bedroom in the middle of the night and did that to your hair), staying married for 3 years and then giving up is pretty much a slap in the face to the institution of marriage. i don't personally know mr. and (the soon to be former) mrs. wentz, so i don't know if they fall into the abuse/infidelity pile, but something tells me that they don't. something tells me that they just had some normal issues that everyone has, and things stopped being fun 100% of the time, and they thought "well, we're certainly too young, rich and pretty to put up with THIS shit"

in my wedding vows, after i said "til death do us part" i threw in "...or until ashlee and pete get divorced" - THAT'S how much i believed in these two. with that said, i'll be filing for my own divorce citing "pete and ashlee's irreconcilable differences"

RIP, Pashlee