You hear a lot of talk about the sanctitiy of marriage by politicians and religious leaders. This topic comes up when a law concerning who can and who can’t get officially married is being debated. We have a seventy one percent divorce rate in Oklahoma. Yes you heard right. Seventy one percent of all marriages in Oklahoma end in divorce. We’ve actually changed the phrase “’til death do us part”, to “’til the first time this dummy pisses me off do us part.” I have to say it’s good for certain parts of our economy. The cheap suit and flower industries are booming as well as the rice industry. So much rice has been thrown in Oklahoma church yards that vast rice paddies are taking over the lawns. It’s common these days to witness a bird explosion in Oklahoma. After a nice ceremony you’ll see a rather obese bird struggling to fly after it has gotten a drink and it’s oh the humanity time. Oh, and the lawyers, how could I forget the lawyers. If you are ever in Oklahoma and you see a person with a permenant smile and spring in their step, that my friend is a divorce lawyer. They know that as soon as they get to the office, Jim Bob and Betty Lou are going to want to fight over who gets custody of the deer heads. I think I know why there are so many divorces in Oklahoma. It’s all about the house.
Let me first disclose that I have never been divorced. I am going on seventeen years of marriage and so far so good. I think I’ve bypassed the most common cause for a divorce in Oklahoma which is building your wife a new house. I have seen this play out many times. Old Jim Bob and Betty Lou get married and they don’t have much. They buy themselves an old trailer house. They buy garage sale furniture to decorate it and they make themselves a home. The ceilings are water stained and the floors are soft and bouncy. The carpet isn’t any color per se, it’s stained color. It has different flavors of Kool Aid stains. It has blood stains where junoir fell off the couch and left a couple of his teeth in the coffee table on the way to the floor. There’s oil and gas stains were Jim Bob rebuilt the carbuerator for his truck and no trailer house carpet would be complete without numerous pet accident stains mixed in with small accidental fire stains where kids decided to light fireworks in the house. It is a home though. It doesn’t matter that the wind from the neighbors leaf blower causes it rock and shake violently and a tornado two states over could potentially launch it like the space shuttle. It’s a home. Betty Lou fills it with love smoke from the oven where her attempt at making anything French sounding has gone terribly array. It’s a home. Notice I keep coming back to this “home” thing. At some point in an Oklahoma marriage Betty Lou is going to start asking for a new house. This is the moment in an Oklahoma marriage that determines the outcome.
Once this occurs to Betty Lou she will never let it go. She will have her house. The trailer has become a symbol of the marriage to her. It is no longer good enough. Therefore, you are no longer good enough if you chose to do nothing about her request. A word of advice here. There are three choices you can make. I am convinced two of them will lead to divorce. If you choose to remain in the trailer she will divorce you and find someone with a house. If you choose to build a new house she will divorce you immediately upon completion. She is not living in the trailer any longer. This is not a viable option. Her favorite magazines and television shows are filled to the brim with smiling women in luxurious surroundings. She looks at her old trailer and then she looks at you in your over sized reclining chair with your beer in hand watching lap after lap of the nascar race. She doesn’t see luxury. She sees you being way too happy, way too content. This will not work. The first momma’s boy that comes along that never got married but has a nice house and she is gone. Building a new house is just as bad. A new house has one big problem with it, YOU! Think about it. You’ve just built this luxurious new house. Everything is sparkling and new. She looks like the women in those damn magazines. I promise you none of those women in those magazines have some dude in an over-sized recliner sipping a beer with a goofy looking grin on his face as he watches someone in a race car do firey flips down the back straight in the picture. If there is a dude in the picture he’ll have on some douchy looking turtle neck sweater and a look on his face that says “I’ll do whatever you say, just don’t divorce me.” You are not good enough for her new house and you are not going to change. The only viable option is to buy a fixer upper. Buy something that old Jim Bob can fix up himself. Take your time Jim Bob. Do just enough to keep her thinking it’s actually going to get completed some day. You need to time it so that when you are completely done with the project, the rooms you fixed up first need fixing up again or you’re too old to give a damn if you get divorced or not. Either way that over-sized recliner is going to feel real good for a long time.