Given the recent rash of engagements among my friends recently, I feel that the time has come for me to write yet another post on the topic of marriage. Rather than make this a diatribe against what is unquestionably a timeless practice that is credited with maintaining stability and continuity in cultures the world over and throughout time, instead, I want to talk cracks in the shiny facade that is the Utah Valley Marriage Propaganda Machine™.

First, don’t pretend that such a machine doesn’t exist. It is very real. It is orchestrated from the highest levels: talks in conference and church about the importance of marriage. Then there are subtle reminders from parents and their married friends. And then it gets much more insidious. Your friends start to get married. And then all they do is rave about how great it is, while trying to set you up with their friends on the hope that you too can be as blissfully happy as they are. Now, at first, resistance is easy. But it’s like Chinese water torture. All the little drips keep hitting you and hitting you until, at last, you can’t take it anymore, you find yourself a ditzy blonde from Orem who’s just out of high school, and you join the ranks of the indoctrinated, basking in connubial bliss. In summation, I’m convinced that this is a massive conspiracy perpetrated on young LDS single adults in Utah Valley.

And here we come to the aforementioned cracks in an otherwise perfect mechanism. At my place of employ, I am one of only a handful of single young adults. They’ve purposely kept us all separated so that we can’t communicate with each other to find solidarity in our singleness. Fortunately, I managed to rope an intern out of our tech support department who happens to be single, so I have some comradeship. Anyway, I think because all the married people are surrounded by othe married people, they let their guard down and forget that they’re supposed to be convincing us to join their ranks. For example, a coworker walks into our office, plops down and prefaces her story by telling me and the intern, “guys, don’t ever get married.”

The CEO walks in and tells us to “enjoy being single because once you get married and have kids, your fun will dry up.”

My boss walks into the bathroom and sees me cleaning something off of my shirt and tells me “just wait until you have kids and all your shirts get throwup stains on them.”

Occasionally, there is useful advice sprinkled into the cynicism: “buy all your toys now because when you get married, you can’t buy anything fun.”

You get the idea.

My favorite part about all these comments is that, once we remind people about their duty to convince us to get married, they quickly backtrack:

Them: “Being married sucks.”
Us: “Phew, well, I guess I won’t do that then.”
Them: *clicking sound as conditioning kicks in* “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, marriage is great. You should do it!”
Us: “Right.”

So that’s my theory. If you love it, spread it. If you hate it, it’s probably because it’s true.