Experience-"Honor? Hah! He doesn't HAVE any 'honor'!"

            Rory has been married for more than twice the required time limit, and had a bit of difficulty remembering a time she had to defend her husbands ‘honor.’  Defend HIM, as a human being, both physically and emotionally, from both the world and himself, sure.  Not so much his honor.  We discussed how she had cut people out of her life in defense of his honor, people who at one point she regarded as family, but proved to be back stabbers, and betrayers.  One, a high school friend of hers, the other a man her husband regarded (and possibly still regards, in some aspects) as a younger brother.  Both, however, had taken information gleaned from their privileged vantage point over the couple’s lives to gossip, and betray.  Her husband took a fairly passive stance, perhaps too shocked from the betrayal to truly accept it, for whatever reason, but Rory made her stance firm.  She cut these people from her life, because she would not have her husband’s name dragged through the mud just because they felt it would help them advance their careers and/or personal lives.

            Perhaps more to the point, she mentioned a time before they were actually married, back when they were in high school together, when another girl came up to her and began to spin a number of tales about him.  She was basically trying to make sure Rory knew his had ‘a past’ and was with many women.  This was not news, they lived in a very small town, and Rory politely put the young woman in her place by stating not only did she know this, but she also knew he was faithful to her.  He may have slept around as an unattached bachelor, but he would not do that to a woman he actually loved.  Though here, I think she was defending herself as much as him, heh.

            The concept of “honor” is a somewhat foreign one in our modern times.  The definition of honor is “the evaluation of a person's social status as judged by that individual's community.”  The lines get blurred because we’re such a multicultural society, and within that we’re further divided by our multiple communities.  There’s the community we live in, the one we work in, our online community, etc., and each has its own set of rules, codes, and ideals one must live up to in order to be “honorable.”  Rory herself had a difficult with the concept, struggling to think of just what constituted “honor” and how one could defend another’s.