On marriage: a case study

So at least two of my friends have said to me in the last month "I can't look at my Facebook anymore because I can no longer bear to look at everyone getting married."
I am not sure if I'm surrounded by emotionally stunted adult-children or whether I'm selectively ignoring the wedding stuff but none of my close friends (all ten or so or them) are even close to getting married. Not even teetering on the precipice and we're all about to tip on over to the grand 3-0.

The not-so-close friends I have that are married, I'll be honest, are Chinese nationals. They have kids, they have station wagons and they have baggage coming out of the damn wazoo. I say this because I feel that most of them marry less for love but more because they feel that they *are* supposed to and this leads to more problems than it's worth.

I don't know how many times I've sat with one of them or the other and they've asked me if its time yet. Why the heck am i not married? I don't know how to explain to them that tripping to the altar is liable to lead to a broken neck. I just say impatiently "I don't know. I don't want to be" and then they look at me like I just poked myself in the eye on purpose. Borne of love and pity and complete cultural misunderstanding.

So in guessing that none of these friends read my blog. Here are two really fun examples of why you shouldn't get married too damn early (and how I couldn't stop the train from driving off the cliff)

Sailor: got married when she was 25 to her first boyfriend and has been bored out of her mind ever since. Except that she won't admit that she's bored, and because she's been bored, she's been having emotional affairs with other men. One, while she was pregnant with her kid and the other one just last year. She knows this is wrong but she has decided she won't leave her husband because he's a good man and he provides her with a sense of security.

So in this just past affair, she very blatantly hid the fact that she was married with a kid to this oblivious guy. I exasperatedly said "wth lady. What is the point of this? what do you think is going to happen once he discovers that you are married! And you have a little boy! Are you going to leave your husband?" and of course, the answer was no.

I get why she's bored. She's isolated out in the country and her husband is so staid that he won't try pasta (for dinner!) to try something new. But how many affairs can you have before hubby figures it out and then the train falls off the cliff creating a catastrophe? (Personally, I think she's being subconsciously self destructive but who the heck knows what's really going on in the human brain.)

Mooncake: is not the prettiest girl you've ever seen, so when she got pregnant, at a "marriageable"age to a guy she had been dating for six months. She took the offer, it was a readymade family and he decided to spirit her away to China after the baby was born.

Before she got pregnant, she had said to me that she wasn't even sure that he really loved her. Sound the alarm bells. Before she left, she mentioned she wasn't even sure she wanted to go.

Two years later, she's completely stuck and she doesn't want to be there anymore. She can't get divorced because the family will take the kid away from her (they have money and influence in their home town and custody battles are a cinch) and she's pregnant with another one- which she can't terminate because it's too late.

What can you do? What would you do? He doesn't beat her and he's perfectly nice to her most of the time, but she has really well and truly dug herself into a big hole.
So what is the moral of the story here folks besides a) just because people say you should get married doesn't mean you should and b) it's not just about pretty white dresses- it's a lifetime commitment that you have to seriously think about. It's sounds so stupid and basic and it never occurs to people until they wander into a shitty marriage without properly thinking about it and the ramifications.

(out of pure curiosity, I wonder how the kids of both marriages are going to turn out)