A good marriage is not great – Photo credit: womenonthefence.com

Happy Thursday!

Marriage is not easy. Actually, if anything requires work, it would be putting two people together with different sets of toothbrushes and brains together, and then proceed to ask them to spend the rest of their lives sharing bedsheets and possibly one toilet seat…Marriage is messy, complicated, obnoxiously loud (yes, even silence turns deafening when you put a ring on it). And apparently, the entire institution seems to be bent on legalizing raised toilet seats and dirty socks.

Yet marriage is beautiful, in a way a weird, color-laden, contradiction-filled painting from some famous artist would be considered beautiful because beauty is easier (and safer) to explain than ugliness. Marriage is your career’s beautiful, free spirited, love-filled big sister. It’s also a license to work hard at something you’re committed to mastering and perfecting over time, yet with no guarantee that you’ll make it past your first raised toilet seat offense. And like marriage, a good, roll-with-the-punches, no-wave career is a good life partner, except you secretly want to pour laxative in his morning coffee just to convince yourself you actually have a pulse (and they actually have responsive bowels, but I digress…).

Gone are the days when an average, good career, or marriage for that matter, was good enough. In the days of the I-phone brain, we need to be fulfilled like we need our next tweet. We need meaning, context, and instant bliss in a bottle. We don’t want jobs, we want careers that help us save the world. Because even if we’re late on our student loan payments and just overdrew our checking account yet again, we are committed not to leave this world in the desolate state we found it in.

So for the rest of us millenials, semi-millenials and somewhat post-millenials, our parents’ picket-fence and safe retirement plan options are worse than dial up internet connection. For us, a good marriage is just not great, and we’ve categorically refused to sign up for good enough. We want passion and self-fulfillment. We have dreams, goals, objectives, and we’d rather bike to work and rent the latest Luis Vuitton purse than one day having to tell our kids to learn a marketable trade, get a safe job or a clean shave…

And maybe that’s why 30% of us will be unmarried by age 40, while 71% among us actually dream of our first startup without being all that ready for the grueling, hard work of entrepreneurship…Because after all, it’s so much easier to fantasize on the perfect wedding dress and ideal family than to actually have to remind yourself why the jerk you married is unable to put the doggone toilet seat down, ever….

The Corporate Sis.