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:::by amanda:::

When you think about it, loyalty is a pretty old-fashioned concept. People are loyal to sports teams, to flavors of soda, to favorite restaurants. Anything else is fair game.

I�m getting married in eight months, so the first thing that came to my mind was, of course, marriage. Okay, now everybody whose biological mother and father are still married to each other, raise your hands now. Not too many of you, eh? I know I�m not raising my hand. I�d have to say marriage is an embodiment of the concept of loyalty. I�ll stay with you even if you get sick and we use up all our money making you well. I�ll love you if you lose your job. I�ll tolerate your moodiness if you get pregnant. I�ll stay with you when you�re old and forgetful and the skin on your neck looks like crepe paper. This is what those vows mean. And so many people say them with sincerity, yet their marriages end a year, five years, even twenty or thirty years later.

I�ll stay with you as long as you stay young and attractive.
I�ll love you until I get a better-paying job and want to have an affair with someone at the office.
I�ll cherish you until we have two children and I can�t sleep through the night for the baby�s crying and we have to use the vacation money because junior broke his arm and the dog ruins the couch and you don�t lose the weight you gained during pregnancy.
I�ll honor you until we have a disagreement about money.

I think we�re all doomed to be cynical about marriage in general because so many of us have seen it played out before our eyes. Divorce is a truly terrifying thing for a child�yet so many children go through it nowadays. Is it my fault? Who will I stay with? Will I like mom�s new husband? What will happen if Dad has a new baby with somebody else? Many of us have fallen by the wayside as our parents go off to pursue new relationships and discard us in favor of a new family. Many of us have gone through the difficult readjustment of a stepparent trying to assert his authority over us, or try to be our best friend, or try to make us call her "Mom."

But I think this cynicism is good in a way. I don�t know too many people who get married very young or quickly any more. I�m 23 and when we marry, my fianc� and I will have been together for five years. Few of my friends are married and several have given up long-term relationships because they know they won�t work out in the long run. Fifty years ago they might have gotten engaged at age nineteen after knowing each other for six months and married six months after that. Nowadays we�ve learned our lesson; we�re a lot more careful. (For the most part.)

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