When Scott and I got married, I wrote our vows. I told Pastor Tim that I would not be saying "obey" because I've never "obeyed" anyone in my life and I saw no reason to start our marriage off with a lie. He seemed okay with it. Right up until he decided to start quoting St. Paul about how wives should be submissive to their husbands. That's when Mom and I started heckling him. If you've seen my standard picture on Facebook where we're all laughing, that's after Mom and I interrupted the ceremony.
I'm still really bad at obeying, and submissiveness is not my style. I'm passive-aggressive as hell which can sometimes be mistaken for submissiveness, but trust me, there's a difference.
Scott and I are a mixed marriage. Not racially or religiously, but politically. It wasn't a big deal at the beginning, but I was drinking a lot and probably was not expressing myself coherently. I mean, I can't really expect him to know that "yaaaaavo tad bama" meant "I voted for Obama", right?
But I've quit drinking and I'm not slurring my words anymore and shit, suddenly he can understand what I'm saying. Worse, instead of hiding out on Usenet with my Imaginary Friends, we've all migrated to Facebook. Plus my local friends, old friends from high school, family...typical Facebook circle of friends. The problem is that he's on Facebook too. And of course we're friends, we're married. Worse, I'm friends with some of his friends.
My imaginary friends (and a lot of my local friends) and I share a lot of current news through Facebook. A lot of us lean left, but certainly not all of us, and this is what we did on Usenet - we'd post something currently in the news and provoke a discussion. Not a flamewar, not something meant to attract the grepping loons, but a real discussion. Sometimes the posts would get heated, but usually we kept it relatively civil. If we couldn't keep it civil, we tried to keep it creatively mean. Eventually the threads would die out with everyone losing interest and conceding that The World is a Very Big Place (TWIAVBP) or Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) or just a cheerful "PLONK!" as someone was added to a killfile because their imagination had failed them and they'd resorted to typing the same cuss words over and over and over and over. Not that we were adverse to cussing - one of our group has reached levels of cussing that I am just in awe of - but creativity counted.
So I have my imaginary friends that I'm used to engaging in lively debate. As I go through recovery, I'm making IRL (in real life) friends with whom I can engage in lively debate. Yes, most of the time we tend to agree on things...but not all the time. I'm still a Liberal living in South Carolina.
What I can't do is engage in lively debate with my husband. There is no debate. What ensues is a verbal beat down of me, my opinions, liberals, Obama, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton and the mainstream media.
It makes things difficult. He finally unfollowed me on Facebook. I think that's for the best.
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