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Wedding Gift Shakedown
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Someone has to charge you extra for what you already have. Thai Customs thinks it might as well be them.
Eons ago, when the original Mrs. Knell was still alive and the future Mrs. Knell a high school student in a far away continent I’d never been to, my mother was putting on some of her jewelry and remarked to me that one day, my wife would lay claim to some of it. Sounded great, in the way that solving world hunger sounds great. It’ll be fantastic when it finally happens but you’re not obsessing over it now.
I’m not a jewelry wearer myself. I don’t wear any rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets. I tried all that at differing times in my past, and none lasted. Up till about two months ago, I wore a watch on my left wrist, that was it, and my wrist never liked it much. Watch bands broke with regularity. After my most recent watch broke with just two weeks’ usage, I didn’t bother replacing it.
After my recent marriage, my sister contacted me to ask if there was any particular jewelry of my mother’s that my new wife wanted. The wife likes earrings. I haven’t seen her wearing anything else. I agonized over the purchase of an engagement ring for her, worried about spending too much for a ring she’d never wear or like. A package was dispatched in record time. Before I could provide any pointers on the protocols of mailing to Thailand, I received an email from my brother-in-law to expect a package the following week.
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Wedding Gift Shakedown
Posted by: | CommentsDated 12 May 2011. Click here to see a list of complete video content on the Republic.
Middle-Aged Trip Down The Wedding Aisle
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What does it take to get a middle-aged bachelor hitched?
April 29, 2011. All eyes – some say 1 billion – were focused on a wedding. Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, was marrying his fan club lover, Kate Middleton, at Westminster Abbey. Three weeks before the wedding, the trashy Daily Mail ran an article about who made the cut for this exclusive do. Famous comedians, athletes, exes, and cousins were mentioned. 1,900 people attended in all.
Meanwhile, six time zones east, no eyes were focused on another wedding. No famous personalities or even relatives were present. The bride- and groom-to-be visited a local marriage registry office in Hua Hin and signed some papers in the presence of no one. This wedding was my own.
The Duke’s wedding cost $34m, $32m of that on security paid for by the British taxpayers. My wedding, including a week’s pre-honeymoon in Chiang Mai and two nights in a pool villa outside Hua Hin, ran $600-700, with no security. The Duke gave Kate one of his mommy’s $1m showpieces as an engagement ring. I didn’t have any of my late mother’s rings on hand; if I had every single one of them and gave them all to my fiancé as an engagement ring bonanza, the total price wouldn’t be enough to put a down payment on the down payment of the Duke’s engagement ring. The Duke’s wedding ring cost $11,000. Our weddings rings haven’t been purchased yet. We’ll buy them in Korea in a few weeks for $300-400. The Queen forked out $600,000 for the Duke’s reception. We paid $120 for a romantic candle-lit uniquely designed menu for two along the beach. The Duke’s bride wore a gown valued at more than $400,000. My bride’s special but elegant purchase for the event cost $100. The Duke’s daddy bought him and the wife two wedding cakes for $80,000 – or $134 per slice. My bride and I ate two pieces of banoffee pie the following day at a local bakery for $4. The Duke announced his marriage to the public in November 2010, five months ahead of the ceremony. I only told my immediate family two weeks in advance and was originally going to tell them after I did it.
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Do Open Relationships Stand A Chance?
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Just like a thirty-year old Ford station wagon, these things rarely work
The relationship, regular intimate contact with another. It’s always on people’s minds. If they’re not in one, they want one; when they have one, they obsess if it’s the right one. In pondering the merits of the casual serious relationship, I mulled over the many other types of relationships out there for us to explore. With nearly all in casual or serious relationships, the majority of relationship types never get experienced. Some are illegal or reprehensible, such as beastiality (intimate relations with an animal) or paedophilia (intimate relations with a child). Not many would ever choose to give these a spin. But there is one that’ll make even the most happily and lengthily married (males at least) euphorically smile for a moment: the open relationship, the holy grail of the relationship world.
For those of you not in the know, an open relationship is one in which the couple (bi, gay, straight – it doesn’t matter) are in a serious relationship, but where both parties are free to secure other emotional and physical partners, too. The couple may decide to have rules about the number, type, and extent of intimacy in the extracurricular pickup or they may establish an environment in which anything goes.
Non exclusivity isn’t a modern innovation. There was no prohibition against Biblical Jews having multiple marriages. China’s Confucianist philosophies spread throughout Asia and multiple marriages became common in East and Southeast Asian countries. Thailand only abandoned the practice legally in 1935. The two most numerous religions in the world have had segments of their faiths engage freely in multiple partners. The Morman Church practiced polygamy until it was discontinued in 1890. Fundamentalist Islamic republics still allow it.
What was practiced in days of yore wasn’t really polygamy. It was polygyny – one man could have multiple wives. The woman was not free to seek other partners. For the man, depending on the society, polygyny was not a truly open relationship either. A Morman man could be intimate with any of his wives, but he wasn’t free to seek relationships outside that circle whereas a genuine open relationship is one where both the man and the woman are free to search for extra intimacy anywhere, known as polyamory.
Polyamorous relationships are not in fashion today – if they ever were. When doing some research for this article, I came across allusions that some famous celebrity couples were polyamorous. Will Smith said that his and his wife’s perspective is “that you don’t avoid what’s natural and you’re going to be attracted to other people,” hinting of a life for both of multiple partners. His wife Jada later denied this to be true, as well she might. The corporate backers behind Will’s success might not be pleased with a power couple being openly polyamorous. The late actor Ossie Davis and his wife were polyamorous but they didn’t shout their open relationship status from the hills. “We had to be discreet,” said Davis. “And, if the word, can be apt, honorable in our behavior, both to ourselves, to whomever else might be involved, and most of all, to the family.”
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The Casual Serious Relationship
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Are you serious . . . about screwing around?
Relationships have a lot of room for interpretation. In Like Father, Like Son, I discussed that not all of us had pops who took us to sports games and scout meetings. Some dads enjoy frequenting brothels and doing blow with their progeny.
* Each person in the relationship is a heterosexual. Gay and bisexual relationships, I believe, have a lot more room for maneuver with vaguer definitions of commitment, but I am in no position, either personally or tangentially, to dissect the flexibilities. That said, gays and bisexuals have been practicing the casual serious relationship for years without calling it that. Were they ahead of their time?
* Each person in the relationship views the other as his or her partner, and any outside observers, like mutual friends of the two in the relationship, consider the two together.
I do not assume that the couple are in love or that the couple even like each other all that much. That helps, but isn’t required. Two people can be together out of boredom or lack of better options.
In the typical (or call it the accepted) boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, the male and the female are good friends with one another, perhaps best friends. Each can confide in the other the most intimate details. This intense like usually turns into love. A sexual component is involved. It may be as innocent as hand-holding or kissing for very young couples, but the mutual sexual interest is necessary, even if activity goes unexercised. Without that interest on both sides, what remains is just a friendship at best; and with interest on just one side, an unrealized obsession that can turn into a stalking nightmare at worst.
Living in Thailand for awhile, you see other sorts of boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that, next to the typical relationship, seem like they couldn’t possibly work, yet do. As with anything, repeated exposure to something makes it seem normal after awhile.
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Does The Institution Of Marriage Belong In An Institution?
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How sound is the idea of shacking up with someone until death do you part?
A psychotic but intelligent girlfriend I was regrettably with once asked me who invented the institution of marriage: men or women?
She thought that men did. Marriage was a way for men to entrap a woman legally so that she would have to cook and clean for him and do his bidding. I agree with her on one tiny point. I think that since early societies were run by men, it was men who passed the law establishing marriage as fact. I mostly disagree with her, because I think it was women who planted the seed of the idea in the men who then made marriage a legal state of being.
Women, more than men, have benefited from marriage, so it’s more sensible women would’ve pushed for it. Every organism’s biological mission is to propagate its DNA into succeeding generations. A man’s best chances for promoting his DNA into the aeons is to impregnate as many women as possible. Celebrities like Clint Eastwood prove this point exactly. A potent man could populate a small village in a year if he had control over a large enough segment of fertile women and continued doing this for his entire lifetime. He truly maximizes the chances of an ideal DNA combo, as he mixes his DNA in countless combinations with a variety of females. Women, on the other hand, can only mix their DNA with one male at a time and have only until menopause to do it.
Women make a larger biological investment in the DNA mixture. With their limited supply of eggs, they must wait 9 interminable months to bear the child before a new DNA mix can be undertaken. While she is nursing the newborn, she needs someone to gather food for her and her offspring. Think in caveman terms here, people. If the man is free to serially impregnate again and again, he doesn’t have to stick around and support the female and the child. Women required some sort of legal framework to force the man to stick around and honor his responsibilities, particularly after they were no longer able to bear children. Hence, the institution of marriage and the still accepted notion of propagating only within that institution. Though in North America, Oceania, and Western Europe, it’s now permissible for unmarried couples or single women to have children, most of the rest of the planet considers it a stigma for a woman to get pregnant outside of marriage.
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