100 Tweets on Marriage

By Glenn Campbell

Below is a collection of 100 of my past tweets on marriage (tweeting as @BadDalaiLama). This list was assembled for the English language edition of my forthcoming book, The Case Against Marriage. If you would like to locate and retweet one of these tweets, you can find it by searching one of my two archives: the official downloaded Twitter archive or my own homemade tweet archive.

1. Trying to capture love with marriage is like displaying a wild animal on your wall. As soon as you've nailed it down, you've killed it.
2. Beauty cannot be purchased or possessed. If you try, all you'll get is bragging rights to the beauty that was once there.
3. As a rule, Paradise turns into Hell as soon as you move there.
4. If you're not willing to fight, stand up for your interests and defend your borders, then love is not the place for you.
5. Love alone cannot bear the weight of all we ask it to do.
6. Given the credit card of life, most spend it to the max as soon as they can, laboring the rest of their lives to pay the interest.
7. A relationship cannot truly grow unless there is the realistic option to withdraw and renegotiate.
8. A romantic relationship should not be confused with a parental one.
9. A successful relationship isn't merging. It is sharing of independent viewpoints.
10. Don't be a victim of your own cleverness—finding ingenious ways to sustain a relationship that really should end.
11. Even after years of research and testing, there is still no clean-burning form of love.
12. Every relationship is a balance between sharing and the need to preserve ones own identity.
13. You can't prove love by killing freedom.
14. If a little of something makes you happy, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot of the same thing will make you more happy.
15. A bad marriage is the ultimate police state, with Big Brother watching your every move for signs of disloyalty.
16. Love is not a steady state but an ongoing negotiation to get what we want.
17. Adult personality cannot be changed from the outside, especially within the scope of romance. Change may happen, but only after you're gone.
18. Love is a means of travel, not a destination.
19. People in love are not sane. They are the worst people to be making fateful choices about lifetime commitments.
20. It is remarkable how humans can willingly accept imprisonment in exchange for the approval of their family and society.
21. Failed romances are one of life's great classrooms. You learn how people really work and how fantasy differs from fact.
22. Gay couples who cannot marry must take their relationship in small discretionary steps in a process resembling reason.
23. Falling in love with someone is the best guarantee that you won't be able to change them.
24. Love is a condiment of life, not a main course. It can't give you a meaningful mission any more than ketchup is a food group.
25. Given the choice between being lonely and losing yourself in a relationship, lonely gives you far more options.
26. Love is a dance of "Closer, please, but not too close!"
27. It is remarkable how love can turn lead into gold—and back to lead again shortly after marriage.
28. Romantic love is a partnership, not a charity. You're not there to repair the other person or protect them from themselves.
29. Happiness is not a permanent condition. It must be constantly renegotiated and cannot be nailed down in the future by any form of contract.
30. Hubris is thinking your romance will last forever.
31. It is plain enough to us when a friend gets drawn into an unproductive relationship. If only we had that same insight for ourselves
32. Marriage is like giving guns to teenagers. Who among us, in the heat of passion, can comprehend the implications of "Til Death Do You Part"?
33. Romance does not just combine the strengths of two people, also their weaknesses.
34. If a relationship is faltering, don't fool yourself into thinking you need "more commitment" and fewer options for escape.
35. The main effect of marriage is to tie people together by shared financial obligations. This is different than being tied together by love.
36. The neutralizing of future discretion should not be mistaken for a declaration of love.
37. In Medieval times, marriage was a necessity. You couldn't have sex, live together or have children without it. Today it is a vanity.
38. The unmarried look longingly over the fence at those who are married. The married look longingly back.
39. Marriage can give you a front-row seat to insanity no one else can see.
40. In the beginning, love is defined for us by others. We have to fail many times before we learn to define it for ourselves.
41. Romance is a futile attempt to reproduce the apparent security and unconditional love of childhood.
42. It's a bad sign for your relationship if you're watching your words and editing your thoughts to not trigger an explosion.
43. Ice is water that got married. Those free-flowing days are over!
44. Instead of making one grand decision based on faith, you should make many small decisions based on knowledge.
45. In every relationship, you have to fight for what you want, especially from those you love.
46. The greatest wealth is the freedom to change.
47. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you can live with them.
48. It doesn't say much for your relationship if you think you need marriage to lock you in and make it harder to escape.
49. If one fat person marries another, they'll both get REALLY fat. Same with any other mutual defect.
50. Looking back on our own romantic obsessions, we are bound to exclaim, "I can't believe I fell for that!"
51. Loss of libido is a crisis only if you are already committed to a relationship that depends on it.
52. Gays battling for the right to marry is like men fighting for the right to wear corsets.
53. Love is harmless. The obligations that follow on its heels are not.
54. Loyalty isn't all that admirable if it makes you hold on to a dysfunctional relationship.
55. Making babies is the standard turnkey solution for couples who can't think of anything else to use their relationship for.
56. Many a marriage is kept marginally afloat by the herculean efforts of one party who mistakenly takes the wedding vows literally.
57. Romance is powered by the need to believe, which can sweep all sorts of disturbing evidence under the carpet.
58. In any relationship, how you argue is more important than what you argue about.
59. You can't reason with the gambler, the addict or someone in love. They may agree with your logic, but it won't change their behavior.
60. In romance, you build the theatre, write the script, choose your own role and cast a lead actor. Don't rant at all actors if the play sucks.
61. Marriage is the most effective Redpill you can take. In a few weeks you'll start seeing your partner for who they really are.
62. In any relationship, there are times you draw close and times you pull away. You damage the former if you try to prevent the latter.
63. Marriage, under the law, has nothing to do with love. It is an economic incorporation that most relationships are much healthier without.
64. Much of what we call romance is the attempt to outsource responsibility for our own life. 
65. If you grew up in a paper mill town, the smell of wet paper would remind you of home and you'd probably marry someone who smelled like that.
66. Love without flowers, chocolate, jewelry, children, alcohol, codependency or interior decorating. Can you imagine such a thing?
67. Marriage and home improvement recursively justify each other.
68. In romance, you are not a therapist, protector or parent. You are a consumer, willing to pay a reasonable price for a quality product.
69. Even a "successful" marriage runs the risk of freezing your life in place and bringing an end to creative growth.
70. Only in romance are people expecting someone else to save them from themselves.
71. Passion alone cannot fuel a long-term relationship.
72. People in love build a mythology about their early days that involves some selective memory loss. When love ends, full memory comes back.
73. Marriage is most destructive when you have to mute your own growth to match that of your jealous and less competent partner.
74. The recurring error of investors everywhere is to take the "trend" of today and extrapolate it in a straight line into the future.
75. People tend to confuse having a lot of obligations with having a meaningful life, so they pile on the obligations.
76. Relationships are damaging when they disrupt the individual's direct negotiation with outside reality.
77. Romantic love is a value-added service. If you are not receiving value in excess of the price paid, you shouldn't be using the service.
78. Most forms of mutual protection become unequal over time, with one party giving far more than he is getting.
79. Romantic relationships are successful only when power is relatively equal and each person remains responsible for their own problems.
80. single — adj. the state of being able to do whatever you want with your life without having to negotiate with anyone.
81. Someone in love is the perfect propagandist, trumpeting the positive aspects of their choice while obscuring the negative.
82. Survival in marriage means carefully watching your words and not rocking the boat.
83. Romance involves the acceptance of creeping change, often leading to conditions you never would have agreed to in the beginning.
84. The dueling agendas of gay rights are "Government must stay out of our bedroom," and "Government must sanction our relationship."
85. The greatest danger of marriage is the loss of negotiating power.
86. The main fallacy of romance is thinking someone else can give your life meaning when you can't find it yourself.
87. When your love is completely selfless, prepare to be abused.
88. The only thing sadder than divorce is a failed marriage that does not end.
89. The premise of many a Hitchcockian thriller—and countless real-life ones—is how your partner changes after you are married.
90. You don't fall in love with a person but with an image of them which is partly a fiction in your own mind.
91. The scary thing about intimate relationships is how one party accepts and adopts the dysfunctions of the other.
92. There are no unconditional relationships. You have to fight for what you want, even from those you love.
93. To be against marriage doesn't mean you are against love. It only means you don't want money to come between you.
94. Walking down the aisle, taking the marriage vows, the bride is thinking: "What does everyone think of me? Am I doing this right?"
95. We design our own romantic disasters. The opposite gender just fulfills them for us.
96. When you find something thrilling, the worst thing you can do is commit yourself to repeating it. The thrill goes, but the commitment stays.
97. You never know what a person is really like until after the honeymoon.
98. Young people in love think they have things all worked out, but time will teach them otherwise.
99. Your best asset in romance is to not really need it.
100. Free will dies the moment you say "forever".

You can find many more related tweets be searching the archives (above) for "love", "marriage", "relationship" and similar terms.

Glenn Campbell on Marriage: The Turkish Interview

Here is a new interview with my Turkish publisher regarding marriage, coinciding with my new book being published in Istanbul this week.

The full transcript of the interview is available in this 5-page PDF File.

See info on the forthcoming English language edition: The Case Against Marriage.

Excerpt of interview:

The world even fifty years ago was a much different one. The main change is birth control. Throughout most human history, having sex meant having babies, and a society had to have a mechanism to assure that young people didn't have sex or babies randomly. You needed this institution of marriage to assure, for example, that a man didn't abandon the woman he impregnated and that stable conditions were in place to raise the child. Marriage was a perfectly logical process in, say, medieval Europe. If you wanted to have sex you had to be prepared for the babies that followed and this meant a stable, socially sanctioned relationship with the blessings of the community.

Today, marriage and childrearing are almost completely separate issues. . At least in America, if a mans father a child, his legal responsibilities for it are exactly the same regardless of whether the couple is married or not. Either you’re in the household helping to support the child or you are paying child support. Your marriage status has nothing to do with it. So the original purpose of marriage is now gone, yet people still get married. Why do they still do it? I think it’s delusion. People think that by joining this thousand-year-old tradition they are somehow improving their lives and improving the relationship, which simply isn't true.

Dissing Marriage at Dayton State College

By Glenn Campbell

Today, I gave a talk of over two hours at Daytona State College in Daytona Beach, Florida. The topic was "The Case Against Marriage," based on my unfinished book of the same name.
Here is the entire presentation in YouTube video (audio only).

The event was open to the entire campus, but about 1/3rd of the audience came from an honors class on intimate relationships that had previously been assigned my book to read. The presentation was very informal and consisted mainly of lively debate between me and members of the audience. Most of the audience disagreed with my positions on marriage, which only made things more interesting. Although the event was optional and everyone was free to leave, about half stayed for the full duration.

As part of the relationships course, the students in the class had been assigned my book to read at the beginning of the semester. In fact, it was their only textbook in the course. They later had to write a report on it, which was turned in two weeks ago.

The lecture came about because one of the students emailed me to interview the author directly. Since I can fly for free, I offered to come to Daytona to talk the the class myself.

I thought it was very amusing to turn up in a place where my work was being discussed. The students were well-prepared to challenge me, and I think we all had a good time.





Also available as an WAV audio file (2+ hours, 31 mb) Recorded with the voice recorder you see on the desk in front of me. A second recording of the same lecture is also available - Daytona.WMA - recorded in the audience. The first recording (.wav) is the best for my own speech, but I don't know which one is better for questions from the audience. In the second recording (.WMA), the professor's introduction begins at 4:15, and my talk begins at about 5:00.)

Screen Story #10: "It's Now or Never"

IT'S NOW OR NEVER

SET-UP: We are inside a tacky Las Vegas wedding chapel. The ORGANIST is drunk and is hunched over on his keyboard, asleep. The MANAGER pokes him and he jumps into action, abruptly playing "Here Comes the Bride." A couple comes down the aisle. They are both dressed in casual tourist clothing. They approach the alter, toward the preacher who is turned away from them. The preacher turns around dramatically and we discover he is… ELVIS (or a reasonable facsimile). He launches into a well-practiced performance in which he sings a sappy love song, says something about the "joining of two hearts," then begins the legal wedding oath. He asks the GROOM if he takes this woman as his wife, and he says "I do." Then he asks the BRIDE.

IGNITION: The woman is tongue-tied. She looks around in a daze, recognizing what she is about to do. She shakes her head and starts pulling away. "No… no," she says, "This isn't right. I can't do it."

ACTION: The ceremony comes to a screeching halt. The GROOM draws the BRIDE aside, while ELVIS, the ORGANIST and the MANAGER awkwardly wait. He wants an explanation. The BRIDE gives a long list of reasons why the wedding shouldn't happen: They have only known each other two weeks; he's unemployed; he blew all his money on blackjack last night and she had to pay all their hotel bills this morning; a dozen past girlfriends have called him while they were together and he took all their calls; he is seriously behind on his child support payments from a previous marriage; he has been drunk half the time he has known her, and she would be embarrassed to take him home to her parents. He isn't even much good in bed because he is so insensitive and self-centered.

The GROOM is stunned. The case against him is overwhelming, and there is no way he can respond. He seems ready to accept defeat and leave the chapel.

SHIFT: Then ELVIS intervenes. Speaking in the inspirational voice of The King, he gives a corny little speech about love. (The ORGANIST even takes the hint and plays the appropriate background music.) Elvis says the course of true love never goes smoothly. Love is always a risk, he says, but to make it work, you have to be willing to take chances. Marriage is just like the lottery, he says: You never know if you've won if you don't buy a ticket.

He then begins singing, "It's Now or Never."

The BRIDE shakes her head, as if saying, "I can't believe this is happening." On one side is logic and common sense, and on the other is this cloying and manipulative sales pitch.

ELVIS urges the BRIDE to look deep within her heart before she walks away from this man. He asks her to come back to the alter.

TWIST: And she does! She picks herself up and goes back to her position. Elvis asks the question again, and she finally says, "I do."

RESOLUTION: The couple kisses, and ELVIS starts singing another love ballad. The couple walks hand-in-hand out of the chapel, but ELVIS keeps singing. When the song is over, it is just him and the ORGANIST in the chapel.

"Thank you," says ELVIS to an imaginary audience. "Thank you very much."

---

© 2008, Glenn Campbell, PO Box 30303, Las Vegas, NV 89173. Also see my other screenplays

BTW: Here are the lyrics for "It's Now or Never."

BAN GAY MARRIAGE (Heterosexual marriage, too!)

MOVED! This entry was reformatted as a new blog entry on March 3, 2010