I was talking with some friends lately about this Slate article “Burning Love“, subtitled “When I found out my wife was cheating, a certain backyard plant helped me take revenge.” I was mocking how limp-wristed satchel-wearing lefties take revenge; plus it seemed to me like a crime. But I also criticized this couple for being married students. As I wrote my friends, “I mean why are they married while students, pretending to be adults in the first place?”
My friend Rob Wicks said:
Nothing wrong with getting married in college. Mormons do it all the time. These were grad school aged students. She was working on a dissertation. He married someone who did not prioritize honesty and he strikes me as fairly feminized. Femininity is not attractive in a man, and if you combine that with a woman who does not really take vows seriously (which is the norm), you will likely be cheated on. He seems like someone who grew up without a dad.
Me:
Disagree. Don’t play grownup until you have a jay-oh-job.
Wicks:
Getting married is not having kids. A strong bond with a sexual partner is better than casual sex.
Me:
Yees, but you can also have a committed relationship while in college but wait for marriage until you are an adult. I.e., there is something between casual sex and marriage.
This led me to ruminate and and think about my antipathy to married students. It brought up some old memories.
Cindy at Arco Chemical, Houston, in Nomex suit, 1992
I started dating my now-wife, Cindy, in the second or so year of college. We both started in the BSEE program at LSU in 1983. She took another 5 years to finish, graduating in 1989, and by then had a job lined up in Baton Rouge (actually she had one for last 2 or so years of college), which then opened the door for an instrumentation engineering job with Arco Chemical in Houston which she started in 1991.
I would take another 7-8 years to finish. In 1991 I had a job offer at a Houston law firm, but decided to take their deferment offer and get one more degree in London 1991–1992. 1 She refused to marry a student. Why play grownup and pretend. I always thought that was smart.
For some reason that stuck with me. I think I always disliked the “married students” at LSU. Running around playing grownup even though they were still in school. Something about it annoyed me.
One exception was a friend I made when I was in school in London from 1991–1992. One of the students was a slightly older practicing Canadian attorney, Nicholas Stooshinoff. As I recall, he had come to London and taken a year off work to get his LL.M and brought his wife along, who was pregnant with their first kid. They were both sort of Randians so we got along.
In fact I remember an interesting conversation I had with him. At that time I was about 7 years into dating Cindy who was at that time in Houston working as an engineer at Arco Chemical. I was about to start working as a lawyer a year later in Houston, at Jackson Walker.
I had always thought I would have kids; I loved playing with Cindy’s nieces, Laura and Emily. But Cindy had told me she did not want kids. This puzzled me, but I didn’t think much of it. I went with it. Figured it would sort itself out, or that’s the way it was.
Stooshinoff and his wife had had an interest in Objectivism, and he and his wife seemed a bit like me and Cindy—independent, career driven, and so on. Maybe because the kid thing was on my mind, I asked him on the bus one night why he was having kids. I mean lots of Randian’s don’t have kids, and it looked like I was heading in the same direction. He told me he and his wife were the same but then eventually they changed their mind. He said something like, “we just got tired of being selfish.” That struck me because he was a Randian or sorts, and also because that was on my mind.
In fact, perhaps partly because of that conversation, I considered breaking if off with Cindy. It bothered me that we might be childless. In the end, I could not bear leaving her and figured I would rather be with her and no kids, than be without her. Luckily, after a false cervical cancer scarce when she was 36, she had a change of heart and so we had our son the next year and everything worked out. Maybe I assumed she would change her mind; Stooshinoff’s example calmed my fears.
In retrospect I think it was perhaps an unwise choice, because we had not ended up having a child, thinks might have turned out worse. So although I am happy with my choice and how it worked out, I think that if I knew a young man at age 26 or so in a similar situation, and who asked my counsel (which never happens; young people never listen to advice), I might advise him to break it off and marry a different girl, or at least think long and hard about it. Good times.
- Discussed in Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025); The Start of my Legal Career: Past, Present and Future: Survival Stories of Lawyers; KOL456 | Haman Nature Hn 109: Philosophy, Rights, Libertarian and Legal Careers; other biographical material. [↩]
