Ok…so I know this is a blog about the Dating scene for us equestrian types; but I have to rant a bit about communication. After all, if you are dating, communication is the oxygen that breathes life into your relationship.
As a society continuing to devalue the power of our main forms of communication. What strikes me as odd is that people are surprised that the divorce rate continues to sky-rocket when the average person says their wedding vows with about as much fore-thought as they use to picking a condom color. I mean, the vows say -”Till death do us part…” which seems pretty freaking final to me. It’s obscene with the flippant attitude that people now take to marriage.
Granted, I hear the argument, “I don’t need a piece of paper telling me about commitment.”, but since when was marriage just a piece of paper? It is SUPPOSED to be a commitment between two human being, whom after much deliberation and courting, finally make the biggest decision of their lives and commit to each other forever. And by forever, I don’t mean like the “life-time” warranty you get with you average Wally-world purchase, I’m talking about the kind of commitment that leads to children, arguments, money-problems, errands, etc. - and still ends up with you going to bed happy the other person is there.
It all comes down to people not meaning what they say. Here’s a classic: “You can’t say he like chicken because he’s black, that’s racist!” No it’s not. That’s stereotypical, maybe even prejudiced, but certainly not racist. What’s that? Not a big deal you say? Tell that to Jesse Jackson, who says everything is racist, which is just not true. Oh sure, people will generalize by race, but that is far different than thinking that one race is inferior to another. One breeds Nazis, the other breeds comedy [although Nazi jokes are still often funny].
Let’s do something as a species. Let’s pick up a freaking dictionary and look up a word if we don’t know what it means. When people start using words incorrectly, it dilutes the power of the language and hinders communication. It’s called language ecology, and ignorant use of the language is tantamount to verbal-pollution. If you want to save the world, you need to start with the basics, and communication is just one of those important fundamentals.
1 response so far ↓
1 Angry Penguin // Oct 7, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Inrterestingly enough marriage formal marriage vows a fairly recent invention in Christianity.
As late as the 16th century in England, de praesenti marriage and marriage de futuro we’re still accepted as legally binding and the Church was only just really managing to take legal control of the marriage contract. Basically under these two forms of marriage couples could just declare that they were married or intended to marry in front of a witness and it was legally binding. The whole thing could be done in less time than it takes to put a pound into a condom machine.
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