yeah, martin. i know exactly how you feel. i kept meaning to say something of a similar ilk to you, but i have this thing where i have an idea and i think 'need to do x about this' and then don't do x and then immediately forget that i'm supposed to do x until the next time that the thing comes up and i'm all like 'dammit! i have to do x about that.'

but yeah, mn and i had this thing recently where the marriage thing came up and i knew that you and chow were talking about it and i wanted to know how you felt. cause getting married is something that is extremely important to her (and the rest of her family), but not of high importance to me at all. what i really wanted to know, though, is how you were feeling about marriage as an institution in general, though. i know that we've had talks before about how neither of us had positive role models (or really any at all) who were in 'traditional' heterosexual marriages and hence the idea of marriage was a bit alien and not really on the priority list.

i still feel that way, but people look at me like some sort of freak (much worse than normal) when i say that. to me it has sort of become 'there will be no difference between us or in our relationship once we are married, so what's the big deal.' of coure i'm a path-of-least-resistance sort of guy and the marriage thing seems like a lot of sort of silly work and money for no net change, so why bother. but i was posed with the question: 'if you don't care and/or it doesn't make a difference to you, but it does to me, why don't you just give in and let's get married.'

i must admit that i've been hard pressed over the past few months to find a hole in that logic. exactly like you, i'm sticking to my guns because of this feeling that marriage is not something i want to be involved in right now. don't know why, but it's not. and it's not some male cop-out thing -- on the prowl constantly or anything. it just doesn't interest me.

there's a whole collection of discussions that accompanies this central issue. i just wanted to let you know that you're not alone and that validating your feelings is not really something that you (any human, i think) can do. so you should be required no more than 7%. and if your whole relationship can be made or broken by the answer to that question before you're ready to answer it, than it's not healthy.

this is, of course, assuming a universe in which soulmates do not exist and you are not missing your One Big Chance(tm) here, because that's the universe we live in.

ps - fuck you mr. my-only-responsibility-is-to-jack-off-into-a-petri-dish-during-my-fake-job-during-summer-vacation-and-hence-have-all-the-time-in-the-world-to-write-blog-posts