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"  If you&amp;#039;ve been on Facebook or Twitter today, you&amp;#039;ve seen the quasi-viral story of the moment: the deceptively-titled blog post &amp;quot;Marriage Isn&amp;#039;t For You.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s classic click bait: You&amp;#039;re prepared to hate its author, Seth Adam Smith, assuming he&amp;#039;s written a takedown of the most sacred of institutions. Few topics fire people up like marriage, with the exception of Obamacare and Miley Cyrus&amp;#039;s tongue. But then you read it in all of its gooey glory and realize that Smith is a huge fan of marriage (he married his best friend, Kim, a year and a half ago) to the point where he quite irrationally, IMHO, believes that saying &amp;quot;I do&amp;quot; is a purely 100-percent selfless act.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Marriage isn&amp;#039;t for you,&amp;quot; Seth&amp;#039;s dad told him when he was having pre-wedding freakout. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy\u2026 You&amp;#039;re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children\u2026 Marriage isn&amp;#039;t for you. It&amp;#039;s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.&amp;quot; Cue: everyone getting misty-eyed and doing the Oprah ugly-cry-stifle and pressing &amp;quot;share&amp;quot; because they love their husband/wife SO MUCH. Except, sorry Seth and your dad, this is total bullshit!\u00A0 It&amp;#039;s worth noting that neither Seth nor I have celebrated a golden anniversary or anything \u2014 I married my husband a mere two years ago. But when I did, it was absolutely, in part, to make myself happy. I knew full well I would get a lot of great things out of it, and I have. He&amp;#039;s a kinder person than I am \u2014 always giving people the benefit of the doubt instead of talking shit about them \u2014 so I considered that marrying him might make me a better person, too. (Keep you posted.) He possesses certain traits that I don&amp;#039;t, but that I nevertheless really value \u2014 like, for example, patience. I&amp;#039;d be a dirty liar if I said I didn&amp;#039;t think about how living with an even-tempered person 4life would benefit me over the course of my days. He&amp;#039;s not perfect, but he also cooks and happens to be really handsome. Sue me, Seth! I am evil and totally thought about how he will some day look great with salt-and-pepper hair.\u00A0 This flies in the face of the Seth School of Marriage, as he writes: &amp;quot;True marriage (and true love) is never about you. It&amp;#039;s about the person you love \u2014 their wants, their needs, their hopes, and their dreams. Selfishness demands, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s in it for me?&amp;quot; while Love asks, &amp;quot;What can I give?&amp;quot; Seth and his dad are clearly coming from a place of old-school Romance (capitalized), but &amp;quot;Man Realizes Marriage Isn&amp;#039;t All About Him&amp;quot; isn&amp;#039;t exactly a revelation. Of course I didn&amp;#039;t only marry my husband for personal gain. I absolutely want to make his life better \u2014 support him, love him, make him laugh, all that jazz. As his wife, I do things just for him that have nothing to do with my personal pleasure, like prepare him platters of Italian salumi, watch Atlanta Braves games, and most of all, go to Phish concerts on New Year&amp;#039;s Eve.\u00A0 But I am human \u2014 not a Nicholas Sparks heroine \u2014 and I think about my wants, needs, hopes and dreams as well as my husband&amp;#039;s. Pursuing my goals (to be a good mom when we have a baby next year, to write crazy and amazing things at work) and indulging my needs (Soul Cycle as therapy, if you must know) make me a more complete person, and hopefully, in turn, a better wife. If each of us forgot about ourselves as individuals, and focused only on the other, we&amp;#039;d probably be really frustrated, not to mention super-boring. Bringing our unique selves (highly emotional and \u00A0jam-band-loving as we may be) to the table is what makes our marriage interesting.\u00A0If this is what Seth considers selfish love, I&amp;#039;m the worst. Good thing I was self-serving enough to marry someone who strives to make me better.\u00A0 Follow Michelle on Twitter @michelleruiz.  Photo: GalleryStock  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a16300/marriage-is-for-you/>