On Marriage and Chick flicks

            As a guy does it ever frustrate you watching a chick flick.  You know the kind of movie I am talking about.  The one that is entirely centered around a girl and usually there are two main guys in the movie.  The first guy is usually the jerk, the one that breaks her heart.  He is usually trashy, foul, disgusting, abusive, cheating, and absolutely just horrible and ends up making all guys look good.  He is the complete description of a loser.  He is the kind of guy that pisses us normal guys off when we see how bad he treats the women in the movie.  Normally you think it is not possible to get worse then this. Then there is the prince charming character.  This guy seems flawless, he is usually good looking, rich, polite, charming, and can dance better then any straight guy should be able to.  He is so perfect that he makes you sick.  And the worse part about it all is that you know that every girl who watches this movie instantly is thinking wow I wish that my guy could be exactly like that.  And as a guy you feel that it is a standard you could never measure up to.  So here are the two guys in every chick flick movie: one so horrible the other so perfect.  It would seem that Hollywood doesn’t believe in the normal average joe guy.    See I believe in the normal guy, for I am that guy.   I am never going to abuse my wife, or cheat on her, or any of the other horribly offensive traits of the loser guy in the movies.  On the other hand though I am never going to be able to dance a waltz, be extremely rich, with devilishly good looks and an incredible charm.   And no matter how hard I try to treat my wife right and do things as a loving husband, I could never measure up to this seemingly god-like man either.  So here is to you the average man, I salute you.  Even though Hollywood will never make a movie about us, the average guy, we can still take comfort in knowing that we are doing the best we can for long and happy marriages. 

            However, speaking of marriage brings me to my second point.  I hate how every movie about marriage seems to be so perfect.  Yah they have their fights and their problems, but eventually everything works out and the movie ends with them making out under the sunset.  They never portray the reality of marriage.  If I where a Hollywood director and I was trying to make a movie about marriage it would look more like a war movie set in World War I or WWII.  See for me marriage is a great battlefield, and true marriages work and fail because of the battle going on in the trenches.  It is a daily fight and struggle and yes eventually you still get to that happily ever after (hopefully)  but it looks a lot more like a trench warfare then the glamour that is portrayed in Hollywood.  Most of it is down right dirty work requiring a lot of time and effort.  One of the areas that Hollywood fails at is the always just make it an man vs woman fight.  Which to some extent is true, there is going to be the parts where the man and the woman are on opposite sides of the war staring at each other and shooting at each other with all they got.  However there is also the side of the war where husband and wife are on the same side, fighting together against the things and forces in this world.  For the truth is that this world in which we live is no longer a marriage friendly world.  With divorce being above fifty percent now days, it seems that whenever anything goes wrong no matter how big or little the problem one of the possible solutions is always divorce.  It also seems like the world is saying well if your spouse isn’t perfect just go out and find the person who is.  But in truth none of us are perfect, we all have our shortcomings.   The greatest part of love is knowing your spouses short comings and loving them anyways, which usually also includes forgiving them of their short comings.  I will agree there are certain things like abuse or unfaithfulness that you don’t necessarily have to forgive.  But for everything else, forgiveness is a part of the daily trench warfare of marriage.