Good point, re: not being able to love two women at once

I saw this comment on Copperstud's blog, which I thought made a damn good point:

If it's not possible to love two girls at the same time, how is it possible to kawin four? ...Do we need [to be] in love til eternity or is that just a phase? Will being in love feed the kids and build the family? Or is [all you need] just plain love and commitment, and, most importantly, compromise? [Link]

I did edit it for understandability but, hopefully, it still captures the intended meaning.

I'm one of those crabapples that think love and marriage don't really go together. IMHO in a marriage, love is a bonus but economics is the essential nugget. But that doesn't mean you can't marry for love — you can. Therefore, when you marry, you have to be clear in your head: is this marriage for love, or for economics? If it's for love (as in my case) then you have to be prepared to give up certain economic ambitions that don't fit with your married life. In my case, I can't just leave the USA if I am not, say, satisfied with the job climate in this country. I have to stick it out, set myself up as best I can, and make sure I'm raking in enough dough to make sure our shared economic ambitions are being achieved, and so on. The same applies to the guy I married.

On the other hand, if you're marrying for economics (which is fine! no need to be ashamed), you have to be prepared to be lonely because part of the rules of the marriage contract is that you can't form intimate relations with someone outside of the partnership (if you're a girl, lah -- if you're a guy, you're free to do whatever you want with up to four girls).

p.s. One final gauntlet I'd like to lay down has to do with kahwin misyar (again). I know it's seen as nikah's sleazy cousin, but for couples who want to get together for purely love reasons it might be not be such a bad idea after all because there are no economic considerations whatsoever. In such a case, if the two decide, after a long-term, sexual relationship, that it's worth pursuing an economic partnership with one another, they can upgrade to a full-fledged nikah. (I'm sure it's legally feasible, right?)

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So, the person who made the comment calls herself widadzuro. I clicked on the link but it was a fake profile that led nowhere, making me very frustrated indeed. This goes back to my whole gripe about anonymous bloggers and how frustrated they make me. I am all for building relationships with commenters and so on, but half the time people who leave comments (a) don't show their face; and (b) are not serious at all. You can add to that (c) people who leave nice comments in order to be polite. But since when have blogs become like houses that you have to be polite about entering and exiting? Blogs are not places; blogs are ideas! Or, more accurately, they are ideas that someone has taken the trouble to log for your web-viewing pleasure -- in fact, readers should thank the author, not the other way around! And comments are there so you can contribute your own ideas from where the author left off; to introduce another angle to the subject, perhaps. In other words, comments are there so you can establish an ideas-relationship with the author, or with the blog's other readers, by continuing the conversation that was initiated in the post. Unfortunately my posts don't elicit good comments, making me think that my ideas must be retarded or something... [Sorry, dear commenters! I love you, I really do, but your comments suck. However I've left lots of sucky comments myself on other people's blogs, so we're even.] :)

Finally: all you whiners out there, who complain that you're being ignored by me, never seem to notice that with or without your comments, I am constantly talking to you; responding to my readers. I do this via my posts, which I have updated with regularity and without fail since February 2005. You're just not listening, that's all.