Over on my other blog I posted a little essay about how everyone is expecting me to start nagging Z about getting married. All his friends have done it, now, and he and I have been living together for 4 years, and, isn't it about time? Since we started dating relatives have been asking, and it's been funny, but now that I'm about to turn 27 (August) people are starting to get really insistent about it.

So I posted a little essay wherein I said that I don't think right now is a time when I should be making a big fuss about marriage. Sure, for most people, now would be a good time, but not for me. I'm in a sort of chrysalis stage right now, working hard at a job I despise to save up money for a hopeful career transition. I'm trying to write a couple novels, get them polished, and then I hope to get them published. Once I've done that, I can then be A Writer, and Quit My Day Job, and so on and so forth.
I think I don't need the distraction of The Expected Giant Wedding at the moment. (Apart from the fact that I kind of hate weddings. Please don't tell anyone, as I have been working kinda hard at pretending that I like them, since people go to so much trouble to have them, and then invite me. But oh God they're so... gay, to pick an utterly inappropriate adjective. But really! Guh!)

So I wrote this thing, saying that I'd want to get married basically to make finances and childrearing easier, but given that I have really neither at the moment, the question of marriage is irrelevant to my life.

So I'm getting comments on it now. I sort of expected people to say that Marriage Is About So Much More, but it's pissing me off anyway. Seriously-- people need to have a ring in order to validate their relationships? And the relationship, by the way, has to be The Most Important Thing in your life? (I got a lecture about Commitment, which was nice, but I really couldn't see how the marriage license was relevant to the question of relationships. You know, Z and I have gone through tough times and worked it out too...)

Well, I mean, I'd be totally lost without Z, but, uh, I mean... jeez, I sort of have other stuff to do.
And I mentioned that he hasn't asked me, of course, and in fact has humorously avoided the issue, and so of course it became the issue I was trying to avoid. ("Well," says the commenter resignedly, "if you're going to have to bully him, then you'd best not.") And when I said that the point of the essay was to separate cultural expectation from whether I really cared or not, someone questioned whether I really didn't care, or was just telling myself that. Which is kind of the opposite of what I was going for.

So now, after having spent all that mental effort on working out precisely why it so thoroughly annoyed me when people kept bugging me about getting married (like it's my only option, like if I don't then I've just wasted the Best Years of my Life), now I feel like precisely the shit I was trying to avoid. Obviously, my relationship is worthless, and the fact that he hasn't asked me means that he never will and I'm just living in denial here and will become an embittered childless loveless thirtysomething desperate barfly trying to find a babydaddy as her biological clock ticks away.
Thanks, reasoned debate!! Obviously you LOSE to cultural expectations, and I need to go start drinking heavily and dieting so that maybe a man will want me someday. (*spontaneously develops bulimia*)

And Z's post? Thanks, buddy. Thanks. I'll just go jump off a cliff now, as per your advice.

This isn't about making choices, it's about telling expectations to fuck off.

Unsuccessfully.
Your support is appreciated.

edit: I am retaliating with my own Magnetic Fields journal music, "No One Will Ever Love You".