From: Lorin Rivers (lrivers@realsoftware.com)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 21:15:25 PDT
At 1:42 AM -0700 9/12/2000, Dan Kohn wrote:
>
>The fact is, the goals of marriage have changed. In the first half of the
>century people married to survive, reproduce, join properties, become a part
>of the mainstream community of adults. Individual happiness might have been
>foreseen and desired, but if as the marriage wore on happiness came to seem
>elusive, other goals dominated....
I married my wife because I love her and couldn't imagine spending
the rest of my life with anyone else...
There are plenty of people in the world who are miserable because
they are, well, miserable, despite having huge piles of what most
people believe makes people happy.
If having money makes you happy, why does bill gates always look like
he's passing a kidney stone?
>
><grim, economics-based theorizing about "why" omitted>
Not in my case...
>Marrying with the overriding goal of being happy for all your adult life
>with a single other (since survival, reproduction, property joining and
>being part of a community of adults can be achieved now without marriage) is
>a new experiment. Divorce is its corollary. This is an experiment that our
>children will engage in, whatever models we give them.
I think that happy people will be happy in most situations and
bummer-people will be bummed. Learning to be happy with what you've
got is a key skill for being happy for the rest of your life. Looking
for external providers of happiness molecules means you will spend
your time trying to find things and circumstances to make yourself
happy. It's all in your head, baby.
Sure, things can suck so bad that even happy people get bummed. I was
laughing with the paramedics during my chopper flight to the
intensive care ward...
I hope me and my wife don't change in different enough directions
that we no longer love each other, because I want to stay married to
her until death do us part, but then again I "married up" (I'm fat,
bald, smelly, lazy, and hairy and my wife is a paragon of virtue and
beauty).
--Lorin Rivers 512.263.1233 x712 v Product Manager 512.263.1441 f REAL Software, Inc. mailto:lrivers@realsoftware.com PMB 220 http://www.realsoftware.com 3300 Bee Caves Road, Suite 650 Austin, Texas 78746 REALbasic: the visual, object-oriented BASIC development environment for the Macintosh
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