What if your bright and educated daughter showed up one day with a Certified Total Jerk and announced, “We’re in love! We’re getting married and moving to a dump in the middle of nowhere because — y’know! — he’s a mining engineer!”
What on earth WOULD you do?
That’s the story of my (former) mother-in-law. She married one of the Great Turkeys of the Western World — proving that love does go blind at the garden gate, or somewhere along the path.
He couldn’t hold a decent job — not for love nor money — because he was such a jerk that he insulted just about everyone he met. At some point, someone in our tribe remarked that he never stayed on a job more than about six months. If he didn’t piss off the bosses enough to make them fire him, he’d quit on his own before things reached that point.
The particularly Looney-Toons aspect of this saga is that M-i-L was a very bright woman who, in a time when few women even thought about going to college, much less actually did it, had a four-year degree from a major university.
It always posed a kind of mystery to me…because she wasn’t an unattractive woman, and there was no reason she couldn’t have hooked up with a decent human being. Instead, she flang herself down the pit of a marriage to one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met.
They were divorced by the time their son and I married. Dear Dad had remarried by then. Crazy Mom never remarried, and indeed, after some years, came out openly as a lesbian.
At one point along the line, Dear (ex-)Father-in-law was visiting at our house. I asked him — truly mystified, I must say! — why on earth he married the woman.
“Because,” said he, “our parents disapproved.”
Well. That was the kind of fliply stupid thing he typically said.
No doubt the story was more complex than that. But it does beg another question: Why didn’t you wait for a year or so and see how things worked out?
If you were intent on scandalizing your small-town parents, you could have taken off on a prenuptial fake honeymoon: shacked up together for three months or so, just to drive the relatives crazy. This would have allowed you to see how that relationship would work out, and….
…yeah: And maybe have spared you 20 years of married misery.
Jeeemineee! I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d had a daughter who showed up with a jerk like that in tow. Nor what if I’d had a son who jumped into the marriage bed with a wacko like the character Chuck selected.
Nothing, I suppose. They were both of age. Their parents rightfully had no say about who they chose in the mate department.
Huh…. It puzzles me to this day: not only that they got married at all, but that they stayed together for some 20 years. It must have been 20 years in Hell!
Back at the ranch:
Waiting…and waiting…and waiting…and waiting…