Jerry Seinfeld: To me the thing about marriage is I can’t believe how often it happens. I mean I like the idea of it, but I can’t believe that many people are meeting people that they want to see every single day, every day, every day, every day. Every day? That should happen like three or four times you know, in the whole century. 

Perhaps it should be just three or four times a century, but in reality, in 2005, over 2.2 million americans got married; that’s 7.5% of the population. Happily ever after? Well, I recently discovered SecretTweet.com, a site that facilitates anybody and everybody to anonymously post their secrets to Twitter. The accumulated results show up here. Warning: some of these are heartbreaking, so proceed with caution or ignore it altogether. What’s interesting is that of all the topics that people could choose to confess secrets about, the majority by far, from my unscientific account anyhow, are related to relationships and marriages. Here’s a sampling of secrets posted recently:

I’m in love with one of my coworkers, and I wish he didn’t have a thirteen year old daughter so I could break up the marriage

I don’t want children with my husband because I don’t want to trap myself in this marriage.

College degree. Supposed to be a career girl. I really just want to marry rich & devote my life to community service

I love my children but I’m not in love with my husband; I stay with him for the kids.

I want children, but the thought of my husband as their father disgusts me. I hate myself because of that.

You may not have physically cheated on me, but you did cheat on me through those emails…I don’t forgive you. We’re getting married

Today is my anniversary and I wish I could just ask my husband for a divorce instead of going out to dinenr and putting on a fake smile.

I fantasize about being a widow

i’ve been married for 14 years and I’ve been having phone sex with my x-boyfriend for 4 years

Sometimes I think about my husband dying of a strange illness. I feel terrified and sad, but also excited about being on my own again.

I’m no longer attracted to my husband and secretly wish he would cheat on me so I’d have a real reason to divorce him.

What an inspirational batch of quotes, healthy and balanced. Wow, marriage is looking better and better every day. Keep in mind that these are written by people who willingly planned a wedding, stood in front of a gathering of their friends and family and vowed to spend the rest of their lives with that someone standing next to them. Every single day. Every day, every day, every day. ‘Til death do you part’. And then something happens and the marriage somehow turns into a game of “pick a card, any card” from the nutcase bin. And wow! How exciting: any one of these random acts of psychosis could land on your square and hey there you are! Exhilarating. So just to summarize, once upon a time a couple said they wanted to do something as bizarre and unnatural as spend every single day with each other. And hey, they had rings and cake. So it must have been real, non? But then fate rolls the dice, and oh, well it turns out that they can’t actually pull off the “every single day” thing. In fact, well honestly, they actually hate each other. Huh. Who would have thought that the notion of waking up to the same person EVERY DAY would make you hate that person after a while? Completely unforeseeable. Because that just sounds like total bliss to me. All that love just brewing thicker and heavier every night and every day, just bubbling away. Every day. What could go wrong?

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