Worst Passengers
 

Not to mention the higher transaction costs of acquiring all manners of insurance (especially health), structuring assets to pass as we would want, etc.

I'd take the higher effective tax rate and save the rest of the costs of cohabitation.

Even(not married)Odds

Worst Passengers
 

Tell your husband to quit his job. all of a sudden teh marriage penalty disappears, and your taxes will go down from what they would be if you weren't married.

Then you could afford to upgrade from Bud Ice.

RW Paris
 

I saw Christina at a local tres-trendy hotel bar here last week - sort of. Her entourage was there in a roped off area, but she was nowhere to be found. The DJ said she had been taken upstairs to her room because she was too loaded. After awhile, though, she showed up - clearly blotto and not looking very good - for a few minutes before wandering off again.

Worst Passengers
 

Flight attendant spike's baby's drink

This is going a little too far even for me.

Worst Passengers
 

Why is this so important to you? We all judge people all the time. Big whoop.

Edited to say I should have read ahead to see PLF judging someone for judging someone else yada yada.

Reasons for marriage
 

Are you really this dense? Do you read everything 100% literally? What happens when you see a comedian's show? Do you sit there asking the person next to you if the horse the gentleman on stage just said went into a bar can really talk? Jesus. You're sucking the fucking fun out of every damn post you respond to.

TM

The Perfect Threesome
 

and some twice.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whatever the fuck you want
 

Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence.

A goodly number of our married friends are DINKs. I have the utmost respect for them, but that has nothing to do with whether they have kids. They don't ask me to chalk up extra responsibility points for them because the world is overpopulated, or they'd make terrible parents and raise maladjusted children, or their marriage is stronger for it because nothing ties them together except love, or any of that kind of shit.

Saying that kids are likely in str8's future is a fair statistical observation, not a form of oppression, any more than the wedding ceremony's sly references to the wedding night are a tacit acceptance of rape. The people who jump all over a reference to "kids" in the same sentence as "married" as somehow a form of DINK oppression are being unnecessarily defensive because they're replaying far less subtle interactions with people who actually are trying to goad them into changing their minds, and they're braver attacking strangers on the Internet than their own mothers.

The point of my response to str8 was that married life brings with it surrender of a huge quantity of control, kids or no. I'm not offended by people who issue "no kids" wedding invitations, but I'm tickled by what it represents to me --- a vestige of the fun aspects of single life in its funeral ceremony. This is a battle for another thread, but a wedding is not supposed to be a party thrown for the amusement of the hosts.

That, and I have yet to hear a truly useful parenting tip from an unmarried male on an airplane.

to correct the record
 

I didn't think anyone was being judgmental* - I was just on a soapbox.


*Except PLF - bastard.

And in Hockey news...
 

Grant Fuhr, Pat LaFontaine and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch were elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame today...

http://espn.go.com/nhl/news/2003/0611/1566498.html

to correct the record
 

And I was just posting for my own devious and naughty reasons. Really, the PMs I've gotten in response to my post have been truly enlightening --- thoughtful essays on the tensions between monogamy and eroticism, the tradeoff between the deep intimacy that comes with years of committed partnership versus the excitement of getting some fresh, the differences between French and American views of marriage, why-oh-why does the open marriage never seem to work, etc. etc. Although the PMs were written quickly, it was clear that their authors had given the subject a lot of thought.



This is a joke about married posters who pretend to be ready to drop their pants for a FB Betty at the first opportunity. No married posters have actually sent me PMs of the sort I described.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whatever the fuck you want
 

Just to point it out, there are people out there that are married and don't have kids that (a) are not being pressured to have kids and have never been so pressured by their mother or anyone else, (b) don't feel oppressed in the slightest and are actually very happy with their circumstances and like seeing other people's kids very much, and (c) still bristle a little when they hear "marriage = kids", because it assumes other reasons for marriage are illegitimate.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whatever the fuck you want
 

Amen, sista.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whatever the fuck you want
 

Here’s another chapter in the Lawyer Princess Guide to Life:

Doing nothing to stop your kids from kicking the airplane seat in front of them—bad
Cussing loudly around children—not okay
Smoking pot around children—wrong
Smoking pot around cops—left tail
Bringing coloring books, CD players, snacks on airplanes to keep kids occupied—required
Clipping nails, picking teeth, etc. in public—don’t
Taking a smelly dump in a public restroom—permissible
Fantasizing about underage twins—harmless
Criticizing people’s parental status—judgmental

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whatever the fuck you want
 

Ah. As ever, we have no quarrel. There is no such thing as an illegitimate reason for marriage, with the possible exception of circumventing our great nation's immigration laws, and even then taking only a very old-fashioned view of the term "illegitimate."