First comes the dating. Things are looking good. She’s — if not exactly funny — someone who appreciates your brand of humor.

You kiss a lot. It’s nice. Making out never seemed before like a good substitute for sex, but this time’s different.

You hold hands as you walk down the street. Older people smile indulgently at your young love.

And eventually — after a year or two — thoughts of marriage start to crowd into your firm masculine head…

Marriage. Is it worth it? Here is a by-no-means exhaustive list of pros and cons concerning the whole institution. I’m inclined to be against marriage, so I think that’s the only way to have a balanced view of the whole thing. You shouldn’t be rabidly anti-marriage — I’m not — but you should be skeptical of this female-centric institution.

First a couple of complaints. Weddings are for the bride only. The groom is given space as an afterthought, a mere accessory. This is her special day. His needs are quite secondary. The more expensive the wedding, the more she’s going to coo.

Then, there’s the ring you almost are forced to buy. The ring is a waste of money. Jewelry in general is a waste of money, but an engagement ring and then wedding band or ring tops the list of bullshit expenditures of money. De Beers advises you spend “three months” salary on a ring. !!! You can buy a decent used car for that sort of money. And again, this is an obligation on the man by the woman. But women are hooked on it. Mariah Carey, the singer, spent millions of dollars of her own money on a wedding ring that she pretended to herself was a gift from her beau. Because he couldn’t afford it, you see, and she could.

pros of marriage: reasons to go for it

Sex is on tap under normal circumstances. I have to hedge this one, because we’ve all heard horror stories of women getting frigid and freezing their hubby out of the bedroom. But in general women have a sex drive and they want to indulge with their significant other. So I’m going to put this one firmly in the “pro” category.

You grow and develop and mature and intertwine with your wife. Stephen King says a long marriage is the best means of getting to know someone, insofar as such a thing is possible. If familiarity breeds contempt, this isn’t true. But I believe tentatively that couples do in fact achieve a greater sophistication of understanding and love in longest-term relationships that a single marriage suggests. It isn’t hard to see how this is so. If you’re lucky, the flame of love doesn’t completely die out, and it warms both of you on cold winter nights as you are wrapped in each other’s arms.

You have a wife to help you through difficult times. If you get sick, or lose your job and need support, she’s there “for better or worse” (the title of a comic strip by one of the few female artists out there). Dean Koontz was supported by his wife for years while he went about the business of seeing if he could establish himself as a pro writer. He could, and he repaid her with lavish living. But that’s the nature of an equal marriage. You share. *slightly sickened and sour expression on my face*

Now let’s turn to a few negatives, shall we?

cons of marriage — reasons to say “hell, no, I won’t!”

The sex is with one person only for all time and you can’t “cheat.” It seems to me that the same old pussy, the same old face, the same routines that get engraved in the brain like bad dope escapades, lead to calcified boredom and a general problem with boners and getting it up.

You’re committed to one woman. You can’t trade her in. She’s yours, warts and all, and if she grows worse over time, what can you do? You’re not supposed to divorce her.

The next issue is divorce. If the two of you divorce, the courts look kindly on the holy vagina and give it everything, absolutely everything, in almost every case. This includes everything from alimony to child custody rights. The father is treated as an ATM with a shriveled up dick sticking out of the cash slot. It’s horrible.

Women get lazy after marriage. They tend to get fat, knowing you’re stuck with them. They cease to take care of themselves, drop the makeup application, stop treating you as if you’re special.

If you were a player before marriage, dating multiple chicks, marriage typically closes off that beautiful avenue to you. (If you’re really good you can marry and still date around, while mate-guarding your woman, but that’s not to be expected for even the hardened player.) A life without a harem is a dry one.

They assiduously avoid “boosting your ego” whereas before the wedding bells pealed they might have actually said good things about you. Now you’re a husband to be restrained from becoming arrogant and self-centered, a full-time task by the shrew.

Speaking of shrews, women tend to become meaner, naggier, nastier in general over the passage of time. They get more aggressive like a man (an unpalatable change). They tear you a new asshole without hesitating. They grow more comfortable with punishing you psychologically. The whole relationship is poisoned thereby.

And lastly — for now — she’s heard all your stories and you’ve heard all hers. The novelty has worn off, not just storytelling, but the conversational life in general. You can only take a beat-up Chevy so far down the road. Chevy is the mainstream, old-fashioned car, and marriage is the mainstream, old-fashioned institution. Just a metaphor for y’all.

The lists of pros and cons could be longer.

I find it interesting that Brad Pitt, the sexiest man alive for decades, continually vested his time and penis in single-woman relationships. Did he never stray, never sleep around? All he had to do was take off his sunglasses and beam that famous smile directly at a stranger and she’d fall into his arms for cheap, convenient, easy sex.

Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with 2 very young chicks. He got cast in “bad boy” movie roles after that, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Hugh Grant cheated on Elizabeth Hurley with an American whore. He was abashed about the whole thing, but perhaps secretly pleased to be considered a “cad.” (Men, as the saying goes, are fond of being thought of as worse than they actually are.)

Paul Newman was supposedly monogamous with his wife: [graying, older] but in actual fact he cheated on her with a cutie journalist named Bacon. It was a cruel twist of fate, because Newman had espoused “why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home”? The secret joke making the Hollywood rounds was that Newman wouldn’t go out for hamburger, but he’d make the trip for Bacon. Ha ha ha. Ta Hah!

Only Leonardo DiCaprio seems to have had contests involving who could screw the best and most chicks with his friends. Of course, casting reps are largely female, and the general global audience for hot males is female, so there’s pressure to conform and not be seen as a womanizer, even if moviestar fame is the perfect lubricant for female thighs and involves the bare minimum of necessary effort. Only rock stars can compare.

This raises an interesting question. What is it about celebrities, movie and music, that gets chicks wet?

I propose there is a short-circuit in the sometimes-robotic female brain. The modern mass media mechanism triggers a spurting burst of electricity in the positronic caverns of Ms. Thing’s head. The mass media involves making Him special, powerful, emotional — the ideal mate, in a word. He is approachable, too. You know him in the privacy of your home and in the public spaces of theater or concert stadium.

If you are a young girl particularly, you can imagine easily you are in a real relationship with your phantom lover. You can elaborate and filigree this relationship in your mind as time passes. The shock of meeting the actual guy is like an animated .gif of a burly man swinging a mallet at a carnival attraction and zipping the object up to the top of the pole in one fell swoop. It’s that potent.

Bill Maher, former host of Politically Incorrect and comedian, says that marriage is “for poor people.” He is shocked that a famous man would ever get married. He certainly didn’t, not even close in his lifetime. And he was careful not to flaunt it, however. When Howard Stern radio shock jock pressed him on how many women he had — “Twelve? Sixteen?” — Maher demurred from answering and changed the subject. Wise man.

Bill Clinton didn’t let marriage stop him from cheating around. Apparently Kennedy was the same way. A joke among one political couple is that an animal is seen copulating with a female opposite energetically. The political wife goes, “Tell my husband about this creature.” The husband hears the statement and asks, “Is the animal always banging the same female?” The answer is no. The political husband goes, “Tell my wife that.”

Overall, the final tipping point to having a marriage is children. If you want kids, you tend to get married, although that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from getting it on and getting buns in ovens: [multiple different]. I guess the rich are different from you and me.

The powerful have tended to have mistresses (European) and whole huge harems (Middle Eastern and North African). They do this because they can.

The original flavor of Mormonism was as a religion that allowed you — nay, encouraged you — to marry a bunch of gals in one happy huge family. It took the U.S. Army to change the minds of the Mormons — a nifty trick, that.

Islam allows you to have up to 4 wives. Note that with multiple wives you set up a natural competition matrix where the wives compete for your favor and approval and even your financial gifts. If you don’t want her getting fat, if you want the blowjobs to remain tight and efficient, consider moving to a Muslim country and when-in-Rome’ing the situation heartily and mightily.

A male photographer of fashion models said, “I don’t mind being married but I don’t want to think about it.” As a contrary example, a female DJ in Canada calls herself Shelley Marriage. Women get all power and security from marriage, men get dreary routines.

In one text on social studies I read, the woman was asked how they got married, her and her husband. She enthused, “Oh, we fell in love and decided to take the next natural step.” The man was asked the same question and gloomily replied, “The hell if I know.”

It’s almost like men are programmed for marriage from a very young age. They don’t seem to particularly relish it when they’re in their right minds (whereas women love love love stable and permanent relationships of all kinds, as long as they get to move in and co-habitate) and when they do think of it, they’d rather be thinking of something else. And yet married men are continually telling their single friends how great it is and how the single ones should take the plunge.

Is it a case of misery loves company?

society

Society compels us all to do things we don’t want to do, but have to. Sometimes you really have to take a shit but cannot in public, outdoors, because that is verboten. Sometimes you want to swing your arm and hit your girlfriend or wife, but cannot, because society’s beta males have made up a rule that it’s wrong. Sometimes you just want to stand in an elevator and scream (people will hear you; I once did that in Ottawa and was found out — I was frustrated over a stupid girl) to the high heavens.

Society is the Soviet Union, circa 1935. Things are bad, but they can always get worse.