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Okay, so, the only person who voted gets what they wanted: the farthest in story development. Marriage it is. By the by, this is not fantasy but it is fiction and it is in first person so this is not me but the character speaking...enjoy.
1.
I always wondered how the human race continued its existence after it became bored with itself. Everyone could see how predictable human behavior was through the news, school, television, music, and movies without actually looking directly at the source of all these situations, real people. You’d think that someone would look ahead like they always said they did and saw this coming like a car about to hit you in the middle of the street, but no one did.
Everyone was talking a hundred years ago on how they were going to obliterate societies that still performed arranged marriages because they thought it was barbaric. Ironically, that is the very thing that is keeping us alive today.
Love is for losers, everyone knows that. No one falls in love any more and for those that do, they find it to be short-lived or child-less. It’s weird, like nature wants us to extinguish ourselves.
So when nature wants to kill us, we develop systems, like we have been since the beginning of time. So our new system is:
If you want to get married to someone, get married to them and don’t complain when you can’t have children because divorce doesn’t exist anymore unless you are on a Timed Marriage.
If you want to have children in the world and contribute to more human beings being on the Earth, you donate your sperm, your egg, or your womb.
You pay taxes to support children like that. They don’t live with you, that’s what orphanages are for.
If you want to be married but don’t care who it is, you go on to what used to be called a dating website or file paperwork at the local service office. Either way you’ll get paired up with someone.
Once you are paired up, you are put on what is called a Timed Marriage which means exactly what it says, they set a number of years for you to be married to someone and after that number of years have passed, you’re not married anymore.
Depending on how old you are, the Timed Marriage will expect things from you. Too young by their standards, you’re just set up for another marriage later and put on a short time period. Too old, they make you tend to the children in the orphanages and you are bound to each other for the rest of your life together, no matter how short it may be. Everyone who falls between those categories are expected to have children and they monitor your progress, ready to cut your marriage off as soon as it seems right.
Any children you have will be split or fought over in court for custody. The parent with no addictions (not including food, reading, music, art, ect.) always wins and sometimes the option of them going to an orphanage is brought up. It is rare for a child to drift between two parents.
Oh, and instead of keeping you where you are known or your spouse is known, they put you in the middle of both those places, even if it is in the middle of nowhere. If a house is near by but not exact, you go there but if there is no house for miles, they build you one in the middle of nowhere so you can stay there.
Everyone else can live his or her life without you. Most people these days don’t sign up for marriage so when there is a shortage of people coming into the world and limited resources to keep it up, they draft people like they do in the military.
Oh, and the “They” that does all this is an organization called The Priest. The individuals who carry out marriages are called priests even though the organization’s name isn’t plural. Weird.
I was told that marriages were once conducted in a church with the bride in a white dress that poofed out from the waist down and the groom wore a hideously-tight-across-the-neck suit and didn’t stand out from the rest of the men in the church unless he was standing where he was supposed to be. They had a song for when the bride walked down the isle with her father or some other sappy guy in another suit who knew the couple and the groom would wait for her at the end with the priest, who would say the magic words and then they would be married, hours later.
That’s where the name came from for the organization but what I don’t understand is why did the groom wait for the bride to come to him? Was it to show that he’d be willing to wait a lifetime for her or was he just too damn busy talking to the priest? Those guys seem really boring today so a priest back in a time where there was love must have been a little more interesting because the groom didn’t go get his bride. Another reason why love is for losers.
Thank goodness they don’t do that anymore. Sure, the priest says the magic words but it only takes about ten seconds to say seven words, “You are now husband and wife. Amen.” I wonder if anyone knows what “Amen” means? I’m not religious so I wouldn’t know.
So the good thing about these marriages is that the population is controlled. Fewer mouths to feed that are in need and all that jazz. When this first started happening, no one had children for ten years. I mean none, zip, zilch. My grandparents were born in the ten years to follow and were the first generation of children to be born by this system. They were married by that system and so were my parents after them. If I ever want to get married, I’ll follow the same pattern. But I don’t think that will happen.
Life doesn’t seem too bad now, at least we won’t kill ourselves off or overproduce to where we suffocate the planet. That’s always good. But if there’s one thing I can say with certainty at this very point in time it’s:
I have no plans on being married.