Bad advice, learning to trust and the awful love life of The Mother of Feminism.

PART 5: WHY I WAITED 22 YEARS TO GET MARRIED. Reasons 16-20

This is the fifth installment of a thing I started writing in an attempt to figure out why I was so afraid of tying the knot with someone I’d been happily living with for 22 years. I realized the word marriage was loaded with fear for me. I decided to unpack the terror. You can find the other four parts (reason #1-15) in the archive of this page.

REASON #16:  Define BIG

 You probably won’t believe me when I tell you that I was unfamiliar with the idea of a wedding being a woman’s “BIG Day.”   I guess I didn’t assimilate enough pro-wedding propaganda in my formative years.

Before learning about this, if you had asked me to design myself a “BIG day” I would have planned something around rescuing elephants and if there was time left over, I would have tried to fit in a few hours of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.  The truth is, most things seem ‘bigger’ as possible fantasy content for a theoretical big day than organizing, paying for and then showing up at my own wedding dressed like the prom queen.

“Every little girl dreams of growing up to be a Disney Princess.” is a sentiment that is frequently spoken to camera by the female contestants on the reality television shows I am embarrassed to admit I have watched. It usually takes place around the time they are agreeing to participate in the beloved reality show trope where the female participants will try on possible wedding gowns in front of all their family and friends. Just seeing that last sentence written down conjures enough upsetting imagery in me to give me a stomach ache.

I definitely grew up in the United States, yet nothing about Disney princesses ever seemed like something to which I might want to aspire. Nowhere inside me did I yearn to be that kind of translucent, wan, humorless, gown-wearing, moonlit maiden, as weightless as a helium balloon with a singing voice filled with far too much vibrato. Also early on, I’d interacted with enough versions of magical princes, animated and in real life, to know they were definitely not the kind of guys who wanted anything to do with the likes of me, no matter how puffy my dress.

As far as I could tell, the only thing worthy of envy about Disney princesses was the way they seemed able to magnetize bunnies, birds, and deer into voluntarily helping clean the house and do the laundry.

 It also didn’t escape my notice that on occasion, said princesses were found hiding out in battered cabins in the woods where they were required to dust, clean, cook and make beds for 7 old men sporting nicknames like DOPEY and GRUMPY because they had earned them. Were these guys supposed to be husband proxies, competitors for her love in case the prince didn’t work out?  And if that was the plan, wasn’t she in a certain amount of danger sleeping in the same room with a guy with a nickname like Grumpy? Mightn’t he have an aggressive unpredictable side? Who in their right mind would sleep night after night near someone whose friends called him Dopey? Or Sneezy?

 The way I saw it, if falling in love required adopting a cartoon as a model, it made far more sense to aim for Bugs Bunny. At least with Bugs, being mischevous and making wisecracks would be part of the expectation. And now that I think about it, running from an inarticulate guy in a red cap wielding a shot gun is something that has really come into its own in recent years.

REASON #17: NO GOOD LOVE ADVICE.

  There is never any good love advice available. And this definitely goes back to the earliest versions of civilizations.

Starting back in 600BC, the love advice was rather expansive with the publication of The Kama Sutra. In my UCBerkeley days, this oddly explicit yet very confusing book was the go-to exotic love advice manual. I bought a copy but most of it made no sense to me. And I finally understand why. A recent, closer examination of the text revealed that not only was it was written exclusively for men but it also contains just the teensiest bit of for-men-only bias.

 For example: “When a girl becomes marriageable, her parents should dress her smartly...and having decorated her in a becoming manner, …show her off to advantage in society, because she is a kind of merchandise.” But what if this pre-pubescent girl-turned-merch isn’t all that thrilled with the much older guy with whom her parents made a deal? What if she tries resisting his advances? Well, then the Kama Sutra offers some cagey advice to help that old guy out. It advises that he “should place her in his lap, and if she will not yield to him, he should frighten her by saying ‘I shall impress marks of my teeth and nails on your lips and breasts, and then make similar marks on my own body, and i shall tell my friends that you did them. What will you say then? In this and other ways, as fear and confidence are created in the minds of children, so should the man gain her over to his wishes.” Small wonder the Kama Sutra refers to him as ‘the man.’

 It is difficult to imagine a relationship that begins under these auspices not going spectacularly well.

Scooting ahead a bit to 2 AD, a poem called  ‘Ars Amma-toria’ by the Roman poet OVID,  teaches an assortment of relationship techniques that make him the ancient Roman version of Irma Bombeck or the advice columns of E. Jean Carroll.

In addressing topics like 'Not forgetting her birthday', and 'Not asking about her age'!” he offers weirdly contemporary sounding suggestions to male suitors like “Don't let your hair stick up in tufts on your head…” and “Don't have any hair growing out of your nostrils.” There’s also the timeless “Don't go about reeking like a billy-goat.” and of course,“All other toilet refinements leave to the women or the perverts.”

Apart from the general wisdom of the above, there wasn’t a lot of Western love advice for anyone to reference until the 1200’s when an official document was written by the King’s Physician. Unsurprisingly, it was for Men Only. And considering the advice he gave, he sounds a bit like the 11th. century version of Ronny Jackson.

It opens with an optimistic “Every woman can be won.” But here are some of the techniques he suggests to achieve this: 1.Press her with burning kisses. 2. If she resists, “Lift her dress and place your hand on her sex.’ 3. If she yells, just ignore it and have your way with her. (In other words: Lighten up. It’s not RAPE because afterward you can force her to marry you! Everybody wins!) 4.If she tries to escape, remember you have God on your side. The BEST MAN will be standing right beside you at the wedding, ready to grab her before she tears your union ASUNDER.

But what advice for the gals? Well, many years later, someone in Europe finally got around to offering love advice for women. The advice was, of course, written by a man. And the approach he recommended for the ladies was radically different than the King’s Physician’s hands-on approach for the men.

Where the gals were concerned, they were advised to avoid anything that could be interpreted as a decisive or aggressive move.  After all, the ladies, with their simple brains, had exactly ONE card to play: Come Hither Coquettishness. There were a few stylistic variations such as side-long glances, subtle eyebrow movements and some kind of coded language for flirtatious people involving the positioning of fans ( And by fans, I mean the old- fashioned pleated kind, made of paper or silk. Not the ones connected to the word ONLY.)  There was also a caution offered that, in the event of rape, the ladies not go getting all loud and negative because horror of horrors, it may keep the man from wanting to marry you.

Let’s cut ahead now to the 1950’s when the popular women’s magazines of the day (all of (which were edited and managed by men) were full of features with titles like ‘Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.' that offered suggestions like “Stand in a corner and cry softly.”: the key to doing this properly was probably found in the word “softly.”since no man seeking female companionship wants a noisy weeper.

Another advice column from the same period advised that “The average man marries a woman who is slightly less intelligent than he is. However, the college men want a wife who is intelligent but makes them feel that they are more intelligent than she is!  That's why so many brilliant women never marry. If sufficiently intelligent men are not be available, these women ruin their chance at love by failing to disguise their intelligence in the presence of a man of somewhat less intelligence.”

So thank goodness the women’s magazines of the 1950’s swooped in to explain this complicated piece of behavior to all the marriage minded women so that they had time to figure out how to skillfully execute the confusing but apparently critical “Ask me out. I’m much dumber than I look” trick.

I guess what I am saying by skipping through history in leaps and bounds like I just did is that there never seems to be an era of human civilization that was not packed to the exploding point with really terrible love advice. I am thinking now of 1995 when plenty of people who are alive right now read a best selling book called The Rules and took it as gospel even though it was so full of passive-aggressive techniques for manipulating men that it might as well have come with a script, three cameras and a laugh track.

REASON#18: LEARNING TO TRUST

Finding a mate that you can actually trust is one of the most challenging parts of this whole ‘choosing a mate for life’ saga.  As far as I can tell, there is no good way to know how to accomplish this.

Here is a story about a steep learning curve that should have been a Grimm Brothers Fairy Tale. To make it more fable-like, let’s pretend it is about a naïve young peasant girl who toils in the kitchen of a big castle, known for serving delectable banquets to feast hungry aristocrats in the 1500’s. When we meet the maiden, she is hard at work making desserts and savory dips for a big upcoming banquet, but her mind is elsewhere. She is distracted by day dreams of love for the handsome prince who lives in the castle. They have been seeing each other exclusively for about six months.

HARK! The sounding of trumpets and the clip-clop of galloping hooves alerts her to a courier who has come looking for her. He approaches, bearing a message from the prince on rolled parchment.  “He requests your presence in his drawing room immediately” reads the courier. “It is urgent. Go now.”

Naturally the maiden drops everything she is doing, worried though she is for the prince’s well-being. She races across the castle court yard and over the drawbridge to The Prince’s drawing room, where she finds him, stretched out on a fainting couch, looking very unhappy.

“I have spoken with The Royal Physician about the fact that I now have what are commonly known throughout the kingdom as ‘crabs.” He tells her. His big pale face is becoming distorted with rage.

The maiden looks puzzled. What relevance can these harmless sea creatures, members of the phylum arachnid, have to the prince’s health and well being?  She scans the room but does not see an aquarium.

”No, you simpleton. Crabs are Lice.” He snaps at her, impatiently, as he holds out a piece of paper that he means for her to cross the room and take from him. “Here is a prescription for a preparation called Kwell, which the doctor has assured me will kill the ‘crabs’ quickly. And since this is all your fault, I command you to go to the town pharmacy and fetch it for me. I have far too many important things to do right now to waste more of my valuable time on this.”

The confused maiden approaches and takes the prescription from him, afraid to get too close because of the fury she sees growing upon his face but at the same time a little bit flattered that he is trusting her with such an important task. Taking it from him, she turns to head for the door but then suddenly stops and turns back toward him. “But if you don’t mind me asking,..”she says, before she takes her leave, “ Do you mean lice as in…crawling insects? Are you sure you’re not mistaken? Because how could you, of all people, ever…?”

The prince glares at her and beckons her come to his side. He then lifts up his shirt to reveal that there is a small but visible colony of live bugs crawling in his chest hair and also forging a trail down into the top of his pubic hair. “Oh my God” says the maiden, taking a step back to catch her breath before she resumes her rapid exit toward the door, ”I’ll go quickly to the pharmacy. How in the world did this happen?”.

“Transmitted through sexual contact” The Prince sneers with contempt, staring directly into her eyes, “So here’s a little suggestion: while you’re waiting for the pharmacist, why don’t you go through your appointment book and see if you can pinpoint where you got them before you gave them to me.”

The maiden gasps, frozen in her tracks and now thoroughly confused. Could he really be implying that she was somehow responsible? But knowing that her duty to The Prince’s medical concerns came first, she figured there’d be time to answer that later. So, putting everything else on hold, she sprinted to her mule cart as quickly as she could and headed for the pharmacy in town.

As she traveled, the details of what just happened ran around and around in her head. If The Prince was accusing her, that meant she did something wrong.  “If it’s true that I, too, have these so called ‘crabs’ , ”she thought to herself, “then where would I have gotten them? I haven’t been with anyone else in the six months since I have been in love with The Prince. “

This was all so distressing that the moment the maiden handed the prescription to the pharmacist, she headed to the The Maiden’s Restroom to examine herself, terrified by what she might find. But after a close examination of her own body, she became shocked, though also relieved, to discover that despite The Prince’s harsh accusation, she could not find on her person a single louse or other insect of any kind.

“How can this be?” she wondered to herself, “Perhaps these ‘crabs’ are so microscopic that they cannot be seen by the naked eye? But why would he say he got them from me if that were not true? So perhaps they are hiding inside me somewhere, like in my bladder or my intestines? Or is it possible that I could have done something untoward some time in the past, on an occasion where I had too many glasses of wine? That seems unlikely. No way I wouldn’t remember sex with a stranger. ” The maiden continued to ponder these troubling questions as the pharmacist handed her the prescription. But then she decided to put The Prince’s well-being ahead of her own and so rushed back to her mule cart, and then back to the castle, on a mission to save The Prince from his worldly torment.

As she approached the castle, she could not stop herself from continuing to ponder. “‘If he got them from me, and AND I don’t have them, there is only one more possibility: Perhaps the last time we were together, all of them that were on ME jumped OFF OF ME and ON to him, in unison, no unlike lemmings racing to the sea. How else would I have been able to give him ALL of my crabs?”  

Upon arrival, the maiden hurried as fast as she could, back to The Prince’s drawing room. There she found him, still on his fainting couch, still looking peevish and full of contempt. As she quickly approached to hand him his medication, she paused for a minute, hoping to talk. But he declined to look at her or to say thanks.

But as she was about to depart again, she felt compelled to set things right. So she turned toward The Prince to offer a final word.

“My dearest Prince,” she said to him, as calmly as she could, “If I somehow wronged you, I beg you accept my I apology.  But please understand, I don’t know how this could have happened. Not only have I not been with anyone else…not even one single time… but I have examined myself closely and it appears that I don’t have any of these so called ‘crabs’. Which brings me to my theory. It’s the only one that seems plausible. Perhaps all of the ones that were on me jumped off of me and on to you at the same time, like lemmings. ”

As she spoke, she felt the harsh glare of his rage filled expression descend on her. And when he said nothing at all, the maiden took her leave.

 The Kwell worked quickly. By the next morning, The Prince was completely crab-free.  But as the hours passed, the mystery of the sexually transmitted lice kept circling around and around and around in the brain of the maiden. She could not stop trying to unravel how she’d managed to be the sole cause of The Prince’s awful problem. And then, a light went on in her brain and the dark corners became illuminated

“Wait a second…” She said to herself, “If I haven’t been with anyone else. AND ALSO I do NOT have any of these so called crabs ….then the only way that he could have caught them is…if……No! Wait…Can it be possible? That it was HE who caught them from …from..…somebody else?” The maiden began to fan herself while she contemplated further. “Can it be that HE was accusing ME as a cover- up because he wanted to hide the fact that HE….”  Lightheaded, she fetched herself something to drink, then sat down.

“Nah” she finally said to herself, as she sipped some cool, refreshing water. “What am I thinking? Of course that can’t be it.”   And so from that day forward The Prince and the maiden never spoke of this mysterious infestation again. The circumstances around it remain a mystery. To this very day, no one has any idea what actually happened since women were not allowed to publish anything until the 1600’s.

In the fullness of time, only one lesson still remains: It is impossible to underestimate the lunk-headed short-sightedness of love-struck young maidens .

REASON #19: THE MOTHER OF FEMINISM HAD TERRIBLE TASTE IN MEN.

Mary Wollstonecraft, sometimes called The Mother of Feminism, was born in 1759 . Of the brilliant early feminists, Mary is the one with whom I bonded most closely because, like me, she was a rebellious teenager with a tendency to depression who discovered the joy of being defiant, ate no meat, wore dull rough clothing and let her hair hang long and limp . Also like me, she declared that she would never get married. If I had met her in high school, we would have been best friends.

Mary had plenty of reasons to be angry. In the words of her kindred spirit Dr.Samuel Johnson, (a man called "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history") Mary was “A very good hater.” This is a useful quality for a girl destined to be a social protest leader and a writer.

It is also a nicer way to describe an aspect of her personality than the one chosen by William Godwin, the passive-aggressive pain-in-the-ass to whom she was married for ONE YEAR, which was also the last year of Mary’s life. In what he claimed was written as a tribute to her that he published after she died in childbirth, Godwin described her this way: “She was occasionally severe and imperious in her resentments and when she strongly disapproved was apt to express censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against who it was directed.”

Let me cut to the chase: William Godwin, her husband for ONLY ONE YEAR, did to Mary what no one ever did to her during her life: dragged her name through the mud so completely that he ruined her reputation as The MOTHER of FEMINISM, FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS. And for added fun, he did it in the NAME OF LOVE. This is not my judgment. This is what it says in the official biographies written about her by others. The book he wrote about her as a supposed homage screwed her reputation up for ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

This is a whole new wrinkle in terrifying ramifications of being married.

“Mary had an extreme aversion to be made the topic of vulgar discussion”, Godwin tells us in the opening pages of the book he wrote, which was titled ‘Memoirs of The Author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’ a book that he claimed was a celebration of her life. Yet it is packed with the kind of content that is going to instantly make her the topic of vulgar discussion.

To back track a little:Mary came of age in a world where there was a wide-spread taboo against female writers. A popular book from that period had a father advising his daughter “If you happen to have any education, keep it a profound secret.”

Female education was thought to be useless. Common wisdom had it that the female brain was poorly adapted to learning. Nevertheless, Mary Wollstonecraft, a girl of many ideas, was encouraged by her closest colleagues to pursue a writing career. “I am not born to tread the beaten track. The peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.” She said, after having looked around and seen women “in every state of life the slaves of men.” So, she went ahead and bucked ALL the trends and jumped into a writing career head-first with a forty-nine-page treatise called “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties in Life.”

“All minds are receptive to knowledge.” Said Mary,“ Women are only inferior due to an inferior education.”

Around the same time, she became so enraged at the celebrated, popular philosopher Rousseau and his newly published “Vindication of the Rights of Man,” that she was inspired to write her most famous essay, ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman” It is often considered the first feminist manifesto because she took a stand “in defense of half the human species laboring under the yoke which had degraded them from the station of rational beings and sunk them to the level of brutes.”

This essay was written in such a brash heroic voice that it turned Mary into a celebrity. “Woe to the revolution that neglects half the human race.” Mary declared. ‘Bravo Mary!’ said the intelligent world. Yet here is the way William Godwin, her grieving husband of ONE YEAR, chose to summarize her most famous essay in the supposed tribute he wrote to her after her death: “A very unequal performance, imminently deficient in method and arrangement. When tried by the long- established laws of literary composition, it can scarcely be placed in the first class of human productions.“

Godwin went on to critique the content of Vindication of the Rights of Women like this: “Many of the sentiments are of a rather masculine description. As the champion of her sex attempting to invest them with all the rights of man, those who beheld her expected to find a sturdy muscular raw-boned virago and were surprised when they found a woman, lovely in her person, feminine in her manners. Yet along with this rigid and Amazonian temper, it is impossible not to remark a trembling delicacy of sentiments’

In other words, don’t let her coarse, angry words confuse you. In real life, she is very lady-like! And since I am making this about ME, may I remind you that a man such as myself wouldn’t ever marry a woman who didn’t reflect the kind of feminine cliches that all reasonable men prefer.

So let us review: She wrote THE FIRST FEMINIST MANIFESTO. But a few years later, after she had just died in childbirth, her grieving husband of one year, a terrible, humorless writer whose words were so filled with an effete, judgmental, haughty literary voice that every sentence he wrote damned her with faint praise, decided to honor her life by writing a book about her in which he said, of her most famous piece of work “it can scarcely be placed in the first class of human productions.”

Then, having bothered to take his dead wife’s most important legacy down a peg, he went on to add the following back-handed complement. “When we consider the importance of its doctrine and the genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.” Here I was stopped in my tracks again by his choosing of the phrase “not very improbable.”” Though he claims repeatedly that his intention was to relegate his dead wife to her proper place in history, does he say “it seems probable...”? No. He does not. Does he go for a simple and supportive statement like “It will be read as long as the English language endures.” No. Both of these were too positive for the hot-air-filled windbag William Godwin who, instead, opts instead for adding some condescension to his tone with “it seems not very improbable.” If there is a foggier less precise, more backhanded way to give a complement, I don’t know what it is.

Oh, wait. I just thought of one. How about this: Of a novel Mary wrote titled “Mary, A Fiction,” (which I am guessing was more than a little autobiographical) he writes “The story is nothing. He that looks into the book only for incident will lay it down with disgust.” “Disgust” is a word not often used as a complement in the context of an homage or a tribute.

Which brings us to the awful central point: Godwin’s main contribution to his wife of ONE year’s posthumous legacy was he published all the secrets he knew about her life. Even though he opens the book by telling us that she had an aversion to being the topic of vulgar discussion.

The rest of the book is packed end to end with dark personal details about the painful affairs Mary had before he married her. Unfortunately, it is nothing so much as a testament to her terrible taste in men.

It’s also important to note here that although Mary was a prolific writer for most of her 38 years, she never chose to write about any this stuff. The only reason I know, for example, the details of her obsessive feelings for Henri Fusilli, (a famous married, bi- sexual painter who she met in political circles) is that Godwin, playing the part of the Truman Capote of his day, decided to puff himself up with his insider status by telling us everything.

By the way, although the paintings of Henri Fuselli are exceptional, if Mary and I had been friends back then, I would have taken her to dinner, shared a bottle of wine and then told her, “Mary. Seriously? The married bi-sexual guy who painted The Nightmare? No! Listen to me: NO!”

‘The Nightmare’ by Henri Fuselli

But wait! There’s more!

In this same book that is supposedly meant to ‘honor her life,’ Godwin tells us that “in January 1796 she wrote a sketch of a comedy based on incidents of her own story.” Then explains that the reason we will never have an opportunity to read it is because he (Godwin) decided “it appeared to me to be in so crude and imperfect a state that I judged it most respectful to her memory to commit it to flames.” Thanks, obnoxious hubby, for ridding her memory of a satirical view she wrote of herself and replacing it with this overbearing, condescending and poorly written one full of judgmental gossip meant to be private.

I am tempted now to list all the incidents that Godwin details in his tribute about her misbegotten romantic liasons, but by doing so, I would be betraying my own point. Let’s me simply say that poor Mary was such an unfortunate victim of repetition compulsion because of her connection to her violent alcoholic father (for whom she felt responsible) that she wound up in a messy and passionate involvement with Gilbert Imlay, who Wikipedia calls “an unscrupulous American businessman and land speculator with a string of unpaid debts‘. And during this little slice of romantic heaven, she had a baby out of wedlock AND she tried to kill herself, twice.

Mary died in childbirth, at the age of 38, while giving birth to her famous daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein”. Mary Shelley was smart enough to never take the name of Godwin as her own.

I guess in a way, it makes sense that the woman who wrote the first feminist manifesto had a love life filled with assholes and trauma. Who better to fight for the rights of all women than someone who kept falling prey to the worst members of the opposite sex? But it’s sad to realize that a big take-away from her life ended up being that apparently it’s easier to write a brilliant manifesto that changes the world for the better than it is to find someone decent to love.

Reason #20: The Parable of The Always Packed Suitcase

If I had been a woman who cared in any way about marital tradition, I would have been divorced three times before I finally got married.

One of my divorces would have been from a lengthy but unstable relationship that in retrospect is best represented by a suitcase that was never unpacked. You might say to yourself “Who in their right mind would remain in a relationship where it was necessary to keep a packed suitcase at the ready month after month?” To which I might answer “Well, think of all the time I saved not having to put all that stuff back on to hangers!”

The suitcase remained packed because the relationship was volatile. So my plan was that when things got bad, I would grab my already packed suitcase and hit the road. I guess it was a little like keeping a loaded gun in the drawer of the nightstand, though physical violence was never really a concern. Only the need to remove myself from an endless torrent of tantrums and yelling that seemed like they would continue for as long as I was near enough to hear them. So as a precaution, the packed suitcase just sat in a closet in my office, ready to accompany me in the event of another explosion.

On the plus side, the general packing techniques I learned from this experience later went on to inform the ones I used in 2018 when rapidly evacuating for a wildfire. My suitcase management involved quite a bit of content rotation. Depending on the season, I might remove the heavy sweaters and add more tank tops and dresses. Slowly but surely the contents of that suitcase became a fifty-fifty mix of clothing and personal mementos because from time to time, I updated the layer of one-of-a-kind photos or souvenirs I felt would be thrown away in the event of a breakup.

And where did I go when I fled? Well, a couple times I spent the night on my brother’s fold out bed.  Once I spent the night on my friend Carol’s sofa.

One especially memorable time I ended up at the Holiday Inn in Santa Monica where I tried to check in at the exact same moment as a bus load of contestants for an International Cheer-leading competition. So there I was, sniffling, miserable, dragging my packed suitcase, waiting at the back of a line full of beautiful, fit young women in the best moods of their lives who were also occasionally practicing their cheers.

After checking in, I vividly recall wheeling my packed suitcase into a crowded elevator as I listened to the sounds of peppy cheerleader-to-cheerleader exchanges about the best lipstick brands and colors for cheering.

 When I got up to my hotel room, I was so rattled that I phoned the home I’d just fled to see if maybe a reconciliation was forthcoming. When no one answered the phone, I realized that my opponent had gone somewhere for the evening. The truth was, I never was sure he knew I’d left the premises.

Ultimately the takeaway from this particular parable was: Anyone dumb enough to put themself in a situation where they can’t unpack isn’t wrong to be afraid of marriage.