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First off, let me start by making it clear I am not even remotely against marriage.
I know marriage can be a genuinely beautiful and wonderful thing; I have been to absolutely lovely weddings, and I know more than enough awesome married couples to believe marriage can be great.
There are many who question the validity of marriage as an institution at all, but that is not my axe to grind.
My issue is with the glorification of marriage, or, more specifically, the way girls and women are taught that all we ultimately want and need to succeed in life is to get married.
From fairy tales teaching us that "happily ever after" is synonymous with a wedding, to the Washington Post actually publishing a column suggesting single ladies can help end violence against women by getting married, everyone is telling us that marriage will solve all our problems.
This is, to be frank, absolute bollocks. Not only that, it's a dangerous and potentially oppressive lesson.
I get asked if I would ever get married a lot. In all honesty, I'm not certain if it's because I'm a girl, or if it's just because I have pink hair and therefore look a lot like I object to anything resembling The System.
Regardless, the answer is probably not.
No, it's not because I don't believe in full commitment to one person, that I don't believe in growing old with someone, or because I don't believe in love. It's not even because I don't believe in The System.
It's mostly because I've already been married.
I was 17 when I fell pregnant. A combination of abstinence-only education that constantly reinforced the myth that condoms are basically useless, and just plain old teenage stupidity.
My mother, bless her heart, announced the pregnancy to the family in exactly this way, "Laura is pregnant, and the wedding date is on..."
There's this idea that my parents must have pressured me into getting married, but they really didn't. They didn't have to. Society had done their job for them.
I wanted to get married. I had been taught, my whole life, that nothing more wonderful than love and marriage existed. I wanted this happily ever after so many told me comes with marriage.
And I was 17, exactly the age where love is really intense.
Needless to say, the marriage didn't work out. Of course it didn't. 17-year-old children are not equipped to make decisions that will last them their whole lives, and my ex and I simply were not a good match even to start with.
My ex wasn't and isn't a bad man, but he, like me, had found himself in a situation he just wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with, and because of this, he was a bad husband.
No doubt I was a terrible wife as well.
Through family, my ex got work at a missionary organisation, one that I had been very involved in throughout my teenage years, while I stayed at home to look after our two children, keep the house clean (I was terrible at this), and try to keep myself from descending into complete insanity.
I felt isolated and alone. Mostly my only social contacts were the missionary organization, and they worked harder and harder to mould me into a better housewife.
I was reminded constantly by them that the husband is the head of the home, and that my happiness and fulfilment rested in looking after, supporting, and generally being his PA / praise singer.
If I showed interest in anything else, no-matter what it was, they would gently point me back towards this sole life purpose.
Meanwhile, my husband found enjoyment in reminding me that I was his "ball and chain". I had "trapped" him. Our marriage was, he seemed to make it clear, a favour he was constantly doing for me.
In private, he would mostly ignore me, particularly anything I had to say. In social situations, he would "gently" tease, where I was constantly the butt of jokes, always made out to be naggy, or boring, or one of the many negative stereotypes we're taught wives are.
Looking back, he was not much older and certainly no more emotionally mature than I was, and while the pressure was on me to make him my life, the pressure was on him to flawlessly provide for me and the children, always be the decision maker even when it comes to decisions he was not equipped to make, and generally live up to expectations that were far too high and extremely unfair. It's really no wonder he lashed out at me.
I'm not quite sure when I got to the point where I was so depressed, I would cry myself to sleep every night, quietly, to avoid my husband hearing.
So when I met a man who was charming, and intense, and dramatic, and over 10 years older than me, and who declared his undying love for me almost instantly, I fell for him.
Intellectually I knew he was a useless pile of shit, (he was, after all, going after a married woman) and I knew his assertions about true love and destiny were far too fairy tale-like to be taken seriously.
But the child who hadn't yet gotten a chance to grow up in me still wanted to believe in magic, and the miserable woman I had become wanted desperately to escape from the situation I believed I was trapped in for the rest of my life.
I had an affair. My ex found out, and we separated.
The pressure on me to 'repent' and go back to my ex was phenomenal. I forced myself into trying to work things out with him over and over again. The last time, I started crying hysterically during sex, and that was it, we were done.
As divorces went, it honestly could have been worse. After the initial pain and hurt, we both seemed to settle into the realisation that our marriage was doomed to failure from the start. Neither of us had been happy, and we were better as friends than lovers.
I am not trying to excuse my actions. I don't even for a moment, regret the end of the hell that was my marriage, but having an affair was one of the worst experiences of my life. It is also one of the worst things I've ever done.
At the same time, I can't hold onto guilt and regret forever. What's done is done. All I can do is learn from my mistakes and move on, which is what I've tried to do in every area of my life, especially love and sex, since.
Thankfully, the one thing my ex and I managed to get right was the way we treated and cared about our children. You wouldn't believe my kids are the product of a horrendously unhappy marriage that ended in pretty ugly reasons for divorce.
They have two parents who absolutely adore them, and that seems to be all they really need.
Fast forward many years. I am barely recognizable. I have had a chance to date, to have flings, to get serious, and to be single. I have had a chance to find my own interests, my own path, and most of all, as cheesy as fuck as this sounds, myself.
And yet I still have people in my life who honestly wish I'd stayed with my husband. Often, we're still invited together to things as if we're still a couple. My parents still invite my ex-husband to family events, events my long-term boyfriend aren't invited to, because "what if it upsets" my ex.
And this is partly why, despite the fact that I am now in the happiest relationship I've been in my life, the one thing I don't want to do, is marry him.
Marriage is not just about two people in love making a commitment to each other. It's about making that commitment in front of the community those two people live in. It's about their friends and their family. It's public.
And, making that commitment can make people think that you owe the commitment to them, not just your spouse. Even if you made that commitment when you were too young to know better. Even if you made that commitment to the wrong person.
Any commitment between my boyfriend and me is just that: between us. Our business. no one else's.
It's also why I'm tired of being told, and seeing other women and girls (or anyone, really) being told that marriage is happiness. No it isn't. No. It isn't.
I'm tired of marriage being glorified. I'm tired of dealing with people who still think that, if I just go back to my ex husband, I'll be happy, when the opposite is true.
Marriage can be happy, but it can be miserable. For me, marriage was miserable, but I am happy now.
I understand that my ex and I were just children playing at marriage, but if someone is getting married as a result of any outside pressure at all, even if that pressure is just fairy tales repeating the mantra that marriage is synonymous with happily ever after, isn't that someone just a child playing at marriage as well?
For marriage to succeed, it really needs to happen for the right reasons. Over-glorifying marriage will only lead to more marriages like mine.
So please, if you're one to preach that if young ladies want to achieve happiness in life, what they need to do is settle down and become someone's wife, please just stop. You're not helping, you're just spreading a damaging and harmful myth that has a tendency to hurt everyone involved.
Follow Laura on Twitter or visit her blog.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
I know marriage can be a genuinely beautiful and wonderful thing; I have been to absolutely lovely weddings, and I know more than enough awesome married couples to believe marriage can be great.
There are many who question the validity of marriage as an institution at all, but that is not my axe to grind.
My issue is with the glorification of marriage, or, more specifically, the way girls and women are taught that all we ultimately want and need to succeed in life is to get married.
From fairy tales teaching us that "happily ever after" is synonymous with a wedding, to the Washington Post actually publishing a column suggesting single ladies can help end violence against women by getting married, everyone is telling us that marriage will solve all our problems.
This is, to be frank, absolute bollocks. Not only that, it's a dangerous and potentially oppressive lesson.
I get asked if I would ever get married a lot. In all honesty, I'm not certain if it's because I'm a girl, or if it's just because I have pink hair and therefore look a lot like I object to anything resembling The System.
Regardless, the answer is probably not.
No, it's not because I don't believe in full commitment to one person, that I don't believe in growing old with someone, or because I don't believe in love. It's not even because I don't believe in The System.
It's mostly because I've already been married.
I was 17 when I fell pregnant. A combination of abstinence-only education that constantly reinforced the myth that condoms are basically useless, and just plain old teenage stupidity.
My mother, bless her heart, announced the pregnancy to the family in exactly this way, "Laura is pregnant, and the wedding date is on..."
There's this idea that my parents must have pressured me into getting married, but they really didn't. They didn't have to. Society had done their job for them.
I wanted to get married. I had been taught, my whole life, that nothing more wonderful than love and marriage existed. I wanted this happily ever after so many told me comes with marriage.
And I was 17, exactly the age where love is really intense.
Needless to say, the marriage didn't work out. Of course it didn't. 17-year-old children are not equipped to make decisions that will last them their whole lives, and my ex and I simply were not a good match even to start with.
My ex wasn't and isn't a bad man, but he, like me, had found himself in a situation he just wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with, and because of this, he was a bad husband.
No doubt I was a terrible wife as well.
Through family, my ex got work at a missionary organisation, one that I had been very involved in throughout my teenage years, while I stayed at home to look after our two children, keep the house clean (I was terrible at this), and try to keep myself from descending into complete insanity.
I felt isolated and alone. Mostly my only social contacts were the missionary organization, and they worked harder and harder to mould me into a better housewife.
I was reminded constantly by them that the husband is the head of the home, and that my happiness and fulfilment rested in looking after, supporting, and generally being his PA / praise singer.
If I showed interest in anything else, no-matter what it was, they would gently point me back towards this sole life purpose.
Meanwhile, my husband found enjoyment in reminding me that I was his "ball and chain". I had "trapped" him. Our marriage was, he seemed to make it clear, a favour he was constantly doing for me.
In private, he would mostly ignore me, particularly anything I had to say. In social situations, he would "gently" tease, where I was constantly the butt of jokes, always made out to be naggy, or boring, or one of the many negative stereotypes we're taught wives are.
Looking back, he was not much older and certainly no more emotionally mature than I was, and while the pressure was on me to make him my life, the pressure was on him to flawlessly provide for me and the children, always be the decision maker even when it comes to decisions he was not equipped to make, and generally live up to expectations that were far too high and extremely unfair. It's really no wonder he lashed out at me.
I'm not quite sure when I got to the point where I was so depressed, I would cry myself to sleep every night, quietly, to avoid my husband hearing.
So when I met a man who was charming, and intense, and dramatic, and over 10 years older than me, and who declared his undying love for me almost instantly, I fell for him.
Intellectually I knew he was a useless pile of shit, (he was, after all, going after a married woman) and I knew his assertions about true love and destiny were far too fairy tale-like to be taken seriously.
But the child who hadn't yet gotten a chance to grow up in me still wanted to believe in magic, and the miserable woman I had become wanted desperately to escape from the situation I believed I was trapped in for the rest of my life.
I had an affair. My ex found out, and we separated.
The pressure on me to 'repent' and go back to my ex was phenomenal. I forced myself into trying to work things out with him over and over again. The last time, I started crying hysterically during sex, and that was it, we were done.
As divorces went, it honestly could have been worse. After the initial pain and hurt, we both seemed to settle into the realisation that our marriage was doomed to failure from the start. Neither of us had been happy, and we were better as friends than lovers.
I am not trying to excuse my actions. I don't even for a moment, regret the end of the hell that was my marriage, but having an affair was one of the worst experiences of my life. It is also one of the worst things I've ever done.
At the same time, I can't hold onto guilt and regret forever. What's done is done. All I can do is learn from my mistakes and move on, which is what I've tried to do in every area of my life, especially love and sex, since.
Thankfully, the one thing my ex and I managed to get right was the way we treated and cared about our children. You wouldn't believe my kids are the product of a horrendously unhappy marriage that ended in pretty ugly reasons for divorce.
They have two parents who absolutely adore them, and that seems to be all they really need.
Fast forward many years. I am barely recognizable. I have had a chance to date, to have flings, to get serious, and to be single. I have had a chance to find my own interests, my own path, and most of all, as cheesy as fuck as this sounds, myself.
And yet I still have people in my life who honestly wish I'd stayed with my husband. Often, we're still invited together to things as if we're still a couple. My parents still invite my ex-husband to family events, events my long-term boyfriend aren't invited to, because "what if it upsets" my ex.
And this is partly why, despite the fact that I am now in the happiest relationship I've been in my life, the one thing I don't want to do, is marry him.
Marriage is not just about two people in love making a commitment to each other. It's about making that commitment in front of the community those two people live in. It's about their friends and their family. It's public.
And, making that commitment can make people think that you owe the commitment to them, not just your spouse. Even if you made that commitment when you were too young to know better. Even if you made that commitment to the wrong person.
Any commitment between my boyfriend and me is just that: between us. Our business. no one else's.
It's also why I'm tired of being told, and seeing other women and girls (or anyone, really) being told that marriage is happiness. No it isn't. No. It isn't.
I'm tired of marriage being glorified. I'm tired of dealing with people who still think that, if I just go back to my ex husband, I'll be happy, when the opposite is true.
Marriage can be happy, but it can be miserable. For me, marriage was miserable, but I am happy now.
I understand that my ex and I were just children playing at marriage, but if someone is getting married as a result of any outside pressure at all, even if that pressure is just fairy tales repeating the mantra that marriage is synonymous with happily ever after, isn't that someone just a child playing at marriage as well?
For marriage to succeed, it really needs to happen for the right reasons. Over-glorifying marriage will only lead to more marriages like mine.
So please, if you're one to preach that if young ladies want to achieve happiness in life, what they need to do is settle down and become someone's wife, please just stop. You're not helping, you're just spreading a damaging and harmful myth that has a tendency to hurt everyone involved.
Follow Laura on Twitter or visit her blog.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
