“So much emphasis, certainly in movies and pop culture, is placed on falling in love and getting married. But then everyone kind of shuts up and doesn’t really look at what happens during married life, and how married love is very different from the premarital love that got you to the altar.” -Susan Squire, author of “I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage.”
This quote stood out in an interview published with Squire in a recent Salon.com article because it’s something I often find myself lamenting.
When is the last time you saw a movie or television show that portrayed marriage in a positive light?
In pop culture, romance almost always happens in a whirlwind. Two people meet, fall in love and roll into bed together with precious few moments in between. Sometimes they get married, but more often than not one of them gets cold feet and ends up running off with either the wedding planner or someone in the wedding party. When we do see married people, it’s usually only to show us how miserably boring and constricting it is to be committed to one person for the rest of your life. Or as was the case in an episode I watched of The Wire yesterday, we see the ugliness of infidelity.
Last week, a study released by the Parents Television Council found that references to adultery in network television programs outnumbered references to marital sex 2 to 1. Visual references to practices like voyeurism and S&M outnumbered marital sex references by a staggering 3 to 1 ratio, the study also found.
That, of course, only scratches the surface of network television.
While I understand that showing marriage only in a positive light does not typically make for a good story, shows like “Friday Night Lights” do demonstrate that you can be edgy while depicting two happily married people fighting and struggling as they raise a family and juggle their professional lives. One of my favorite films, “All the Real Girls,” effectively depicts a whirlwind romance that doesn’t lead immediately to sex with the kind of raw honesty that is so often lost with the typical rush-to-a-sex-scene approach so many filmmakers take.
That said, I’m thankful for the honest portrayals of marriage in literature, pop culture and real life I was exposed to before taking this bold step in my life. It’s certainly been a big help in getting me to where I am now, learning and growing each day as a happily married man.
Sara and I are now the only members of the Ralph clan living in Kentucky. Mike, Faith and Ella said goodbye to Wilmore officially this morning. They are en route to New Jersey where they will be living temporarily (emphasis on the word temporarily) with my folks in Woodbury. Mike is still looking for teaching jobs in Maryland. If you have any connections, please let me know.
Sara and I made our final trek to visit them in Wilmore yesterday and helped with the tedious task of moving. As exciting as it is to think about moving back to the Philadelphia area, seeing what Mike and Faith were going through getting all of their stuff together doesn’t have us very enthusiastic about following suit any time soon.
Ella was pretty amazing through it all. She is so well behaved and so content as long as she has eaten and her diaper is clean. Aunt Sara and Uncle Matt are really going to miss her.
We’re going to miss Mike and Faith too of course. The four of us spent a lot of time together these last two years. If not for them living in Wilmore, Sara and I likely never would have dated. Our last meal together in the apartment was on the floor of the empty living room, eating pizza and Mike and I clanging our Ale-81 bottles together as a toast to Wilmore.
It’s funny how Mike and I have traded places. Two years ago I was content as can be living the single life in Woodbury. Now, I’m the married brother that lives in Kentucky.
For those of you overly anxious to see photos from the wedding, here’s part one of a two-part slide show video (YouTube made me break it in half) documenting all of the tears, laughter and fun from July 5.
The quality isn’t the greatest, but it should be a good holdover until the day comes when we finally make it through the 4,000 photos our friends Jonathan Miano and Tina Crossley took of the wedding.
So there’s this delicious “all-natural” sherbet my co-workers Donna and Alecia recently introduced to everyone at work.
Donna, who is a stand-up comedian when she isn’t designing publications, sent in an entry for a Fiesta Friday office contest from Hola Fruta. Because we are all about winning contest at the medical society, Donna was one of the first ones to win the free sherbet office party.
The above photo was taken during our Fiesta Friday, along with several goofy ones I took with the maraccas they sent in the party pack. Several of those photos, including the one of me above, are now on the Hola Fruta Web site.
That means I’m now Hola Fruta famous. Check it out here.
For those of you who missed it the first and second time it was showed in public, here is an edited version (the music is a little different) of the slide show that played during our wedding ceremony and at the New Jersey reception.
Mike and Dave Ralph deserve props for their hard work putting it together. I’m pretty sure it made some people cry during the ceremony. It made me cry when I watched it last night on my computer at home.
Ah, growing up, falling in love and getting married.
We’re playing catch-up here on the blog so stay tuned for plenty of pictures and posts about the wedding and our trip to Montreal. In the meantime, I wanted to gloat a little bit about winning the TARC (that’s Transit Authority of River City for all of you non-Louisville folks) “Drive Less, Save More” contest.
For my entry, I figured out that the money I saved was roughly equivalent to what I pay per month for my Ugandan sponsor child - Niwandinde Wilson. For creativity’s sake, I put together a little slideshow to illustrate why I should win the contest. It’s nothing spectacular, but if you want to check it out it’s on YouTube here.
In addition to getting my name on the Web site, I received two $100 Visa gift cards. It couldn’t have come at a better time with all of the expense of the wedding, honeymoon and setting up our home. Adding to my TARC contest win I found out today that I won the first of three wellness challenges for the year at my work. All of those hour-long walks home paid off.
I think I’m going to enter some more contests now. Winning contests, unlike winning games of Scrabulous, is both fun and financially fruitful.
With the wedding now less than a month away, the milestones keep coming for us. We signed our first lease since moving to Kentucky (both of us have been living with families in exchange for child care and helping out with chores) on May 31 and started moving in right away with what little furniture and household items we have.
We discovered that other than books and CDs, we don’t really have a whole lot of practical things you typically need when living on your own.
The house we are renting is a carriage house built in 1907. It’s on the historic register. When Sara officially moves in after we return from our honeymoon we will be sleeping where the hay loft used to be. The horses used to hang out in our kitchen/living room on the first floor. We are sharing the building (it’s split into two units) with a really nice guy named Chris, who is from Manchester, England, has an adorable non-barking dog and roasts his own coffee.
We are right near Bardstown Road, a cool street with all kinds of restaurants and shops. We can throw stones and hit a grocery store, a library branch, an independent movie theater, a comedy club, a Mediterranean restaurant and some places we won’t be frequenting like McDonald’s and Dairy Queen. If I miss the bus in the morning, there are two other bus routes that run within short walking distance.
Compared to the 20-minute drive to anywhere we were dealing with when Sara lived on the farm in the middle of nowhere, living here is going to be a vacation.
The above photos are from a shower the fine folks at the Greater Louisville Medical Society had for Sara and me on Monday. The cake was delicious and the conversation priceless.
Sara and I spent much of the time laughing.
For the record, we didn’t feed the practice wedding cake to each other. We’re saving the fun for the wedding day, which is now exactly a month away. So exciting.
Bert, Cheri, Donna, Alicia, Ludmilla, Dottie, Carol, Lelan, Donna, Rita, Glenda, Stephen, Robert, Tammy, Jessica, Stephanie, Pat, Ray, Bob, Terry, Angelique, Aimee, Rosie, Cindy, Marilyn, John, Bruce, Sonia, Mary, Bob and Bernice — You are all so wonderful. Thanks so much.
