Sad article on marriage...

I found this article on cnn.com, and its tied to oprah.com

"She's Happily Married, Dreaming of Divorce"

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/26/o.divorce.dreams/index.html

At first, the article starts off with a light side, and I found some of it funny.

"I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m."

"It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing ("Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?"); when he lies to avoid the fight ("What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!"); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.
It flicks me, hard, just under the eye when, during a parent-teacher conference, he raises his arm high in the air, scratches his armpit, and then --then! -- absently smells his fingers."

She tells us, he isn't a bad man, just like every other man, and they have every marriage.

But then, the article takes a turn that I think is far too common of an opinion in our society. That our marriages are disposable.

"The more readily we acknowledge the solid utility of marriage (as one friend's husband put it, "I'm essentially a checkbook and a sperm bank -- but I'm okay with that!"), the more ably we can splinter the box of marital fantasy that makes us feel stuck, trapped, obliged. One eloquent swing of the ax and happiness is thrust firmly back into our own hands."

This is really scary to me. The man is only the $$ and sperm???!! What kind of marriage is that?

She goes on to say a lot of things that bother me, but at the end of the article the author says this : "Maybe one day, marriage -- like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes -- will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete. Our great-great-great-grandchildren's grandchildren will ask each other in passing, "Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted? Yes. Yes it was."

That is her hope for the future? That marriage will be obsolete? How scary is that?

Now I think the spirit of her article is to be funny. But unfortunatly there is usually nuggets of true feeling in comedy.

And so many people look up to Oprah, and how many people will read stuff like this and go, yep, they are right. Why try...its an "obsolete" insitution after all. I saw it in the O magazine.

Well folks, my Bible tells me otherwise. There is a picture of an "ideal" marriage there. Sure, there are ideas about that union that our current society tells us are old-fashioned and just plain stupid. The first one that comes to mind is the submission of the wife to the husband, that one is so misunderstood, abused and misused that it isn't even funny. But thats one of the hardest things for a lot of us to do, to truely submit to the husbands leadership biblically. I know its hard for me, and I've been in conversation with lots of women who say its hard. This is an area I've had God almost audibly tell me to "SHUT UP VALERIE, let him lead, thats his role" (subject was buying a house, I'll talk about that more some other time). My question, is it hard because its hard, and we are prideful, my way or the highway people, or is it hard because of the pressures we feel from society? Men and women are the same, society tells us. Which everyone really knows isn't true, but most people hide those feelings because they don' t want to be considered "old-fashioned".

Anyway this article really bothered me so I'm rambling on and on about it. Feel free to post your comments in a discussion.

Also brought to mind the Casting Crowns song "What if his people prayed" --"and stopped asking Oprah what to do"