Can a marriage without loaves survive?

Moo ponders..... http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4231771

Oh good lord.

Quote
Moron Moo
If I didn’t have these two little touchstones who mimic so much of who and what my husband is, would it be easier to walk away from my marriage? I have to say yes. What does that say about me — that I’m only in this marriage for my kids? I have to say no. Regardless of how much I adore being married to my babies’ daddy, if he were just absolutely intolerable, i.e., a drug addicted narcissist, I would have to bail out of my marriage. But the truth is, having kids with someone, gives you a whole new perspective and reason to keep your marriage going and work through issues with more invested... and to those couples who work through their issues despite never creating joint pieces of themselves in their offspring, well, I am in awe of your commitment to the sanctity and preservation of your marriage, I just don’t know if I’d have the same drive to stay.

There's so much wrong here. If Daddy were a drug addict, you'd keep the kids in the house with him? If you've promised to stay with someone through sickness and health until death do you part, you'd "bail" if he developed an addiction and you didn't have kids? Those are both your first reactions?

Quote

Had we not had kids over the course of our 14 year marriage there are many moments when, had it just been the two of us, I think it might have been over. ...while I would never stay in my marriage if I felt it was no longer a loving and supportive relationship

So, you'd leave if it wasn't loving and supportive, but there were times you would have left if you didn't have kids, yet you "adore" your husband...this is wildly contradictory.

Quote

So I’ve always wondered how and what keeps couples who don’t have kids, married.

Hm. How about love, friendship, respect? Loyalty, compassion, devotion? According to this woman's logic, the only reason to be married is to parent children...of course, she's not alone in that. It's crazy.

OMG, this all doesn't make any sense.
No structure, no logic, contradictons.

When you take a look on her articles, the only topic she
has is her stupid family:

5 Signs You are Not A ‘Let’s Have A Sleepover Party At Our House’ Mom
Raising Kids has Challenged Everything I THOUGHT I knew
Things You Learn About Your Marriage When Your Kids leave
Marriage, Skin Cancer and Scars: A Love Story
The George Costanza Guide to Raising a Teen
I’m Losing the Passion For My Husband of 17 Years
I Still Don’t Have All the Answers and Other Parenting Nuggets of Wisdom

There is also this pearl:
"Four Things I Learned About My Marriage When My Husband Left Me" - she learned
those four things while her husband left her for whole two nights and three days (!)

Small minded woman is small minded and unable to comprehend why everyone else isn't also small minded.

Also, one of her websites is MarriedMySugarDaddy.com. So she's pretty much admitting that she didn't marry a man, she married a wallet. No wonder she doesn't understand how a marriage works.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
"Not every ejaculation deserves a name" - George Carlin

No, a bad marriage without kids can't survive, nor should it. She acts like it's sad that child-free people have no incentive to stay with someone they loathe.

I'm no expert but isn't the whole point of getting married that you actually like the person you are marrying and want to spend a lot of time together? You shouldn't have to find some reason to stay with your significant other - either you like them or you don't.

Ps. Your kids aren't "touchstones" for your relationship. Your kids aren't like some video game save slot where you can load your previous feelings for your husband from. They are people with half of each of your DNA. If you need to find some reason to stay with someone maybe you shouldn't.

Lock him up or put him down.
Stolen from Shiny.

It's not necessarily "easier" to leave a spouse when you don't have children, but you have far more freedom to do so. To say it's "easy" runs on the assumption that childfree/childless couples never bother to put in the effort to save the marriage and just file for divorce. "Easy" is a relative term, anyway, when divorce and the resulting division of assets can be financially and emotionally draining. When a childfree/childless couple goes to couples' therapy or whatever other interventions are out there, they're doing it for themselves and each other, not for the sake of children. That, to me, forms a stronger union because both partners understand that they could walk away and don't have external forces compelling them to forgo their happiness and stay together.

Plus, a lot of couples who stay together "for the children" are ones who would be doing their kids a major solid by divorcing.

------------------------------------------------------------
"Why children take so long to grow? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process..."
- Dr. Yi Suchong, Bioshock

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."
- Garrett Hardin

"I feel like there's a message involved here somehow, but then I couldn't stop laughing at all the plotholes, like the part when North Korea has food."
- Youtube commentor referring to a North Korean cartoon.

"Reality is a bitch when it slowly crawls out of your vagina and shits in your lap."
- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
- Cambion

Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
- Miss Hannigan

In our small-town paper there's a weekly columnist whose only topic so far is parenting. Her latest offering today is about how she and her husband "had to have babies," and now they have four kyds. Big whoop, most people have them. Somehow modern parents think they're doing something special and unique; worse, some of them have to write about it. Maybe it makes them feel better about their real situation, i.e. feeling stuck with their spouse out of obligation to the sprogs.

An interesting fact: the divorced people I know all have kyds with their exes. So much for strengthening a marriage!

I think the better question is whether a marriage can survive with loaves. Even wanted brats brought into a stable relationship (marriage or long-term partnership) can wreck everything beyond repair. Most married parents I know have either been divorced at least once or are miserable and they and their spouses act more like roommates than significant others. Meanwhile, the few married couples or long-term relationships I've seen where the people involved have no kids are happier and last longer.

No one should ever stay in a bad marriage just for their kids. Who exactly is it benefiting for the kids to see/hear Mommy and Daddy constantly fighting, treating one another badly and possibly being physically abusive to one another? Why would they want their kids to grow up scared of them or believing that the way Mommy and Daddy act toward one another is how normal relationships work? I imagine it's not outside the realm of possibility for kids who grew up watching their parents abuse one another to have a higher chance of getting in and staying in abusive relationships when they're adults too because they think that's how things should work.

I'm not saying up and leave the second things get a little rocky and I'd say that regardless of how many brats are in the household, but sometimes a marriage isn't worth salvaging. I think incompatible parents are just too fucking lazy and cheap to divorce or separate and will blame it on the kids when they stay together.

In cases of serious incompatibility, I think marriages are worth saving even less when kids are involved. If you want to stick around in a shitty marriage and get treated like total garbage because you're a dumbass, that's 100 percent your choice. But when you decide to have kids with this person you hate, you now have dependents who have no choice but to live with you and watch your dysfunctional marriage from the sidelines, sometimes possibly getting involved against their will like being abused along with you or being used as pawns by one parent to hurt the other one. Should it not be one of the parents' responsibilities to remove their kids from that kind of environment? Kids shouldn't be forced to deal with their parents' bullshit drama because the parents refuse to separate.

Someone who claims that she would have left her husband already if it weren't for their kids is someone who probably wasn't very compatible with that husband to begin with, and if this idiot married her sugar daddy, then that's probably pretty damn close to the truth. The thing is, when people get married and breed, one half of the couple will change. Almost every single time, the woman will suddenly live entirely for her kids while the husband will still live for his wife. Oh sure, he'll love his kids (sometimes), but he won't shift every ounce of his affection toward them like the wife does. The marriage basically becomes a love triangle where Moo no longer loves Duh because she got what she wanted from him, yet Duh still tries to love Moo and is shoved away every single time because he's not the kids. Then Moos are shocked when their husbands cheat or leave them. Yeah, it's a mystery.

I think my marriage is stronger because we have no loaves. My husband is my best friend, and we love each other. We don't need loaves to keep us together. ITA with Cambion, who states that loaves can destroy an even great marriage. If you have to stay together because of them, it can make for a miserable famblee.

I also agree with cj, that most divorced people I know had sprogs.

The woman who wrote this is a narrow minded individual where it comes to love and marriage.

Quote
mumofsixbirds
I think my marriage is stronger because we have no loaves. My husband is my best friend, and we love each other. We don't need loaves to keep us together. ITA with Cambion, who states that loaves can destroy an even great marriage. If you have to stay together because of them, it can make for a miserable famblee.

My relationship with Mr. Kittehpeoples is partly predicated on us not having children. When we decided to get together, we had a conversation stating exactly what we wanted and expected in a relationship and from each other. One of those things was Absolutely No Kids. We'd both be miserable if we had children.

Quote

The woman who wrote this is a narrow minded individual where it comes to love and marriage.

She can't think outside the Life Script.

Anyone woman who proudly boasts being involved with a 'Sugar Daddy', obviously doesn't give a rat's arse about having a loving relationship with their partner - they're gold-diggers after a wallet, nothing more. The relationship or rather money flowing contract will end once Sugar-Daddy finds a younger, sportier model. The only way the diggers can assure the contract continuing is by popping crotch dumplings.

I'd highly doubt she is 'losing' her love for him, as she didn't love him in the first place. That's why she popped 4 kids rapidly, and now that they're nearly old enough to leave the nest, she's panicking as Sugar Daddy is getting ready to trade up. That's why she's rambling about kids being 'touchstones' and other such rubbish, as they literally are the only thing holding their vacuous, superficial, selfish parents contract together.

I think my marriage is stronger BECAUSE we don't have kids. If a problem comes up, we can handle it. We can find the time to talk through things like adults, instead of hiding behind "the kids" as an excuse. We can invest time and resources in our relationship. We are more trusting and secure than our married-with-kids friends, because there's no distance or lack of closeness due to the massive amount of time taken up by kids.

My question is how do marriages survive WITH kids? Marriages require intimacy, trust, respect, and affection. Kids dilute and/or interfere with all those.

Quote
randomcfchick
My question is how do marriages survive WITH kids? Marriages require intimacy, trust, respect, and affection. Kids dilute and/or interfere with all those.

I have often wondered how today's bizzy parunts find the time to talk about things which aren't directly related to brat-wrangling. Given that they like to helicopter around their children, I cannot imagine they have time for discussions of current events, literature, hobbies or any similar topics. All the discussion is just coordination. I would not be able to sustain a relationship without some intellectual interaction.

Quote
yurble

Quote
randomcfchick
My question is how do marriages survive WITH kids? Marriages require intimacy, trust, respect, and affection. Kids dilute and/or interfere with all those.

I have often wondered how today's bizzy parunts find the time to talk about things which aren't directly related to brat-wrangling. Given that they like to helicopter around their children, I cannot imagine they have time for discussions of current events, literature, hobbies or any similar topics. All the discussion is just coordination. I would not be able to sustain a relationship without some intellectual interaction.

Or even any time to just appreciate and care for each other as partners and friends. It seems they spend all their time putting out fires...making sure bills are paid, kids are cared for, and schedules coordinated. No time to talk about how they're doing as individuals. No time to take care of each other. All energy is put into tending the kids. I guess they assume that adults are just on their own in terms of well-being.

"Having kids has united us in this shared, joint lifelong venture"

I call Bullshit on that one.

The only unity that exists is a genetic one and nothing else.

"If I didn’t have these two little touchstones who mimic so much of who and what my husband is, would it be easier to walk away from my marriage? I have to say yes."

I call Asshole on this one. Proof positive breeders just want a miniature version of themselves to mold into themselves.

Good luck with that one, Sweetie.

And as for my marriage - ours is stronger and closer than that of breeders precisely because we do NOT have a Cumford/Cumlina coming between us.

Quote
selidororous

I call Asshole on this one. Proof positive breeders just want a miniature version of themselves to mold into themselves.

That whole "genetic immortality" thing is nonsense anyway for 2 reasons. First of all, after a couple of generations your DNA will be diluted by other people's DNA in your great grand brats. It is sometimes possible that traits skip a few generations and an F6 or F7 has traits from generations back, but it is less likely the more they breed, and at some point having DNA doesn't do much. Don't humans have Neanderthal DNA still? And yet, MRAs aside, we don't really look like them. Second of all, at some point human life is going to end. I'm not sure what the first thing is projected to be, if it's a collision with andromeda or the sun dying, but it is going to happen. So having kids for genetic immortality, besides being a selfish thing to do, is a stupid thing to do.

Lock him up or put him down.
Stolen from Shiny.

If two people work at it and there is true love. marriage without kids works. PERIOD.

40 years and counting here...and no little DNA's to show for it.

I'd love to hear what she has to say when her sugar daddy husband trades her in for a newer model, and her precious little touchstones morph into angry preteens who blame her for the divorce and make her life hell.