How many marriages can you really have?
May. 16th, 2015 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just read an actual paid professional writer ask 'how many marriages can you really have'.
Context doesn't help.
They just... how many?
As many as there are combinations of people times situations you put them in.
It's not like marriage is a single thing that you hand to characters at the end of a story.
It's a complex ongoing negotiation that commits to turning two lives into one shared life, and somehow promises to balance every priority so they can continue to pull together.
How many marriages?
No marriage is the same marriage as last year, unless I suppose their life is epically repetetive. I mean I just had two years of sitting in my flat reading homes magazines, I suppose a life like that remains shareable without much reconfiguration.
But homes magazines are like mini epics in how to do marriage, home, family. Because every single time somebody ends up in there showing off their bathroom they went through a whole decision process where they balanced the needs and desires of two or more people. If two people wouldn't end up with the same bathroom (and I've been looking at housing websites for a few years now, there are no two same bathrooms) then they wouldn't end up with the same whole shared existence.
And okay, I read/watch F&SF genre stuff, the bathroom redecoration rarely comes up. ... Dining room, recently, kitchen, full copper repipe, basements, flat hunting, and pretty sure there was something about plumbing on a spaceship, but rarely. But if you've got two people who have resolved enough of their differences they've decided to share a life together, and then demons, then you just take every worry and argument that can possibly happen and turn it into metaphor demons. Rich vein right there.
Marriage doesn't limit a character's possibilities, it multiplies them.
That seems like it should be pretty obvious.
but then I read mostly fanfic, and we spend many many iterations looking at the same relationships from a great many angles, plus occasional plot. Figuring out how lives fit together in the midst of all that F&SF stuff is pretty much what we're here for.
Some people read too narrow.
Context doesn't help.
They just... how many?
As many as there are combinations of people times situations you put them in.
It's not like marriage is a single thing that you hand to characters at the end of a story.
It's a complex ongoing negotiation that commits to turning two lives into one shared life, and somehow promises to balance every priority so they can continue to pull together.
How many marriages?
No marriage is the same marriage as last year, unless I suppose their life is epically repetetive. I mean I just had two years of sitting in my flat reading homes magazines, I suppose a life like that remains shareable without much reconfiguration.
But homes magazines are like mini epics in how to do marriage, home, family. Because every single time somebody ends up in there showing off their bathroom they went through a whole decision process where they balanced the needs and desires of two or more people. If two people wouldn't end up with the same bathroom (and I've been looking at housing websites for a few years now, there are no two same bathrooms) then they wouldn't end up with the same whole shared existence.
And okay, I read/watch F&SF genre stuff, the bathroom redecoration rarely comes up. ... Dining room, recently, kitchen, full copper repipe, basements, flat hunting, and pretty sure there was something about plumbing on a spaceship, but rarely. But if you've got two people who have resolved enough of their differences they've decided to share a life together, and then demons, then you just take every worry and argument that can possibly happen and turn it into metaphor demons. Rich vein right there.
Marriage doesn't limit a character's possibilities, it multiplies them.
That seems like it should be pretty obvious.
but then I read mostly fanfic, and we spend many many iterations looking at the same relationships from a great many angles, plus occasional plot. Figuring out how lives fit together in the midst of all that F&SF stuff is pretty much what we're here for.
Some people read too narrow.