It's not been a bad 48-hours. Managed to get Richard Sng, Singapore's Sun Tan entrepreneur interviewed in the Straits Times Money section. Yes, Singapore has several solariums and Richard has actually expanded across the causeway. You have to hand it to the guy. I remember thinking that the idea of a sun tan studio in Singapore was nuts. Used to write press materials thinking...."Jee,,,,this is nuts." But hey, the guy has proven his sceptics wrong and found a niche market in this part of the world.
I am also enjoying being sacked by the former PGFNB. I remember the world was laughing at the Malaysians a few years back when they implemented "SMS Divorce," (All you need to do is to SMS your wife 'Talak, Talak,Talak' - which is Sharia compliaent.) but I agree with it. I mean, having been through one divorce, I think it's a good idea to have sms divorce.
Seriously, when things are over, you should allow for a quick and easy end and let people move on. All Gina and I did to get married was to book a date on a website, show up at a place and say a few soppy words to each other. This cost us some S$200, including the price of a ring. With this we were legally bound to each other - call it a lifelong contract. However, when it was clear to the world that we were not meant to be, we had to look for a lawyer, show up in court and this cost us a grand total of $3,000 plus - the process took over a year, which means we both a had a year less of not being allowed to see other people.
It's quiet wierd in the world of corporations too. If you want to set up a business in Singapore it's easy. Just drop by the Acounting and Regulatory Authority (ACRA), fil out a form and pay a fee (not more than $350). By contrast, if you want to disolve a company, you need to do things like call in the service of a liquidator and a lawyer and professional fees can run into the thousands. Once again, this could take forever.
So, I'm often wondering why let people rush into marriage but make it so difficult to get out of. Marriage is supposed to be a lifelong comittment and making it easy makes it cheap. In the crudest terms, I got married because I was getting a regular lay and so when she put the conditions in front of me (I abort, you sign ROM doccuments), my brain was in between my legs and so I said yes and stuck to it. Neither of us had time to work through the initial hormonal surcharge of new relations. My mother always puts it simply - "There's more to a relationship than fucking and when the desire for constant fucking ends, there's got to be something to keep you together."
Much as I hate to admit it, Mother did know best on this occasion. Gina and I had great bonks for the first year. For men we love getting laid regularly. For women, love and lust become confused. If the bonking was going to be a constant, we might have lasted longer but beyond the bonks we actually had shockingly little in comon. As my favourite rogue says,"She had fireplace writen all over her place and you want to get out and do things."
Will both of us make the same mistake? I can't speak for her but I know I could. Zen always reminds me that my best fortune in the past few months was the fact that the former PGF was not offering sex. She's right.
If the former PGFNB had been offering me mind-blowing sex on a regular enough basis, I would have convinced myself that there was something real and before you know it I would have signed away my life. Men are particularly vulnerable when it comes to a regular source of sex and I would have convinced myself that her self-description as a vulnerable person putting on a tough exterior was the right one and then walked into Registry of Marriages to tie myself to a self-aborbed, lazy nut case with a violent temper and no sense of morals.
If that had happened, I'd be swimming in shit. It would take several years to extracate myself and unlike the ending with Gina, there would be children involved - in short I would be guilty of hurting Marcus and Nicollette.
OK, I got lucky this time but who's I won't lose myself if I get picked up by another nut job. Who's to say that I'm the only person who has a shit track record when it comes to crazy women. In Singapore, you don't need to have a trouser snake bigger than your brain to get married. Allot of people get married because they want to move out of parental home. Housing laws are such that affordable housing is easily available to married couple. Singapore men don't say, "let's get married," they say, "Let's get a flat together."
This is wrong. You should make marriage a little bit more challenging. If it's more challenging, people will treasure it more. Under Singapore divorce law, you need to be married for three-years before you get a divorce. Why? Who are you protecting? Trying to keep people together when they've decided that they no longer want to be together only leads to keeping them miserable.
But imagine if you ensure that entry point to marriage is more stringent. Instead of saying, you have to be married for three-years before you get divorced, why not say, you should date for three-years before you get married. This will allow couples to really get to know each other.
My favourite littigator told me that fakes are usually the ones who want to rush things through. Genuine cases will wait for you to do your due dilligence. If what he says of business is true, surely it should be even more true of personal affairs like marriage. I chose to ignore the fact that Gina was pushing to get married fast but imagine if I had to wait for three years before taking the plunge into marriage.
For a lifelong comittment, marriage is surprisingly easy to enter into. OK, you can't equate it with business thanks to the heavy emotional baggage involved but surely some common sense laws should apply. I mean if people married each other for more than a flat or more than a regular supply of sex, you'd find that less people would want to get divorced.
We live in a topsy-turvey world where it becomes easy to say "I do" but surprisingly difficult to deal with the consquences. Surely making a lifelong comittment should be something that people value or are made to value. Surely when people find they've made a mistake, they should be allowed to end things quickly.
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