Never had a thing for Sam, I was always more of a Jeannie kinda boy. Besides, Sam is married to that horrid Derwood, and I wouldn’t want to be him. Totally unsympathetic character.
So, let’s say I’m Major Stone of the the USAF and Jeannie is implausibly deeply in love with me, and I’m deeply in lust with her. I don’t see what the problem is, other than Major Healy and Col. Bellows, and I deal with that by just letting them have their own problems and dealing with their own problems. If they don’t like that my wife thinks she is a magical genie, too bad. My super hot and very nice wife is a magical genie, and I have very few problems, except her evil sister.
When fiction has magic existing in the normal world, it always has to be kept secret, because otherwise it wouldn’t be the normal world. The in-story reasons for the secrecy are usually glossed over though. (Voldemort is a nearly omnipotent megalomaniac, but keeps his existence hidden from the majority of mankind?)
However, Bewitched is a particularly weird example. Samantha has the power of a goddess, but chooses to live the life of a suburban housewife? At some point, Tabitha’s going to be whining, dishes piled up in the sink, and the vacuum cleaner belching out smoke, and Sam is just going to say, “Fuck it!”
Having already been through a bitter divorce from an abusive woman, I would be living in abject terror at the idea that she might someday decide that she doesn’t love me anymore, and/or needs to hurt me.
If she waited until AFTER we were married and then told me, per the OP, I think I’d probably find myself stunned and sitting on the floor unable to speak for a while.
Considering that Samantha had a much longer lifespan than “mortals,” (the Bewitched term for muggles), her marriage to Darrin Stephens only occupied a small portion of her life. I don’t know exactly how much, but back then (when the show was on, and the divorce rate was lower), marriage to one person might account for 2/3 to 3/4 of a person’s life. We don’t know how long Sam had been around, although there was some in-show reference to the idea that if Sam went back in time to a time before she was born, she wouldn’t remember who she was. She once went back to King Henry VIII’s (reign, April 1509 – January 1547) court, and that was before she was born. However, another time, she went back to the Salem witch trials (February 1692 - May 1693), and she was self-aware then, so she was born some time between 1509 and 1693. There was another episode where it was explicit she would outlive Darrin, and planned to use magic to make herself look older in order to look like she was aging at the same rate he was.
So she is at the very youngest, 261 years old when the series premieres, and may be more than a century older than that, and is going to live quite a bit longer.
A human marriage, even a very long one, say, one that lasts 50 years, may be only 1/8 of Samantha’s life.
That’s still a long time, for someone like me, who likes things as cushy as possible, but some people like “roughing it.” For some people, a camping trip is a vacation. Some people even like to go camping in the freaking winter.
For Sam, this is may be just some kind of adventure in “roughing it.” A challenge, to see if she can do it. Why wouldn’t there be some witches like that?
If two people are happy, who is to say? Nobody gets out of this life alive anyway. Besides, Chaucer in The Wife of Bath’s Tale answered this hundreds of years ago (and very well):
A wise husband would admit that its just too hard to choose for another person and would ask his wife how she would be happiest.
I voted that I would be okay and live off her powers, but I notice that no one is bringing up the biggest downside: her family who disapproves. Sure, Darrin brings a lot of crap on himself, but a large portion of his problems have to do with her family.
The only reason I’d be okay with it is that I would have Sam do some very small bits of magic on me that basically would just make me exactly how I am (with maybe some improvements.) The point being, no one would be able to turn me into anything since other witches and warlocks cannot undo someone else’s spell.
At least, I hope that would be enough and wouldn’t goad them into trying to come up with worse ways to ruin my day. But they did seem to have ethical restrictions on their behavior. They could have just cast a spell to make Darrin want to leave Sam, but they never did.
I voted for both the top two choices. I wasn’t sure if “live as norms” included her not using her powers. I wouldn’t want to repress her. But if “living off Sam’s power” meant quitting my job and loafing all day or something, that doesn’t sound appealing either.
Well, I voted “happy to live off Sam’s powers”. Been going through some rough times, and I’ve had my fill of trying to make it on my own only to get kicked in the gut over and over again. Pride only goes so far.
Now, Darrin’s attitude to me has always seemed to spring from his ingrained sexist views. He wants a wife who will stay home, clean his house, and bear his children. The view that he wants to be successful by his own efforts is what is generally accepted about the show but falls apart on closer scrutiny.
Darrin doesn’t want success from the powers of his wife, but from his own efforts at his job. But since his job appears to consist entirely of kissing Larry Tate’s ass, I fail to see that his efforts at self sufficiency are all that successful. But since Larry Tate is his male boss, Darrin is perfectly happy at accepting such rewards. But not from his powerful wife. Sexist Pig.
I’ve known people who went on year-long road trips, or backpacking-through-Europe staying-in-hostels trips. I’ve also known people who joined the military and volunteered for long hitches in what are very substandard conditions for someone who grew up in the US, not to mention people who signed up for two-year stretches in the Peace Corps. I also know people who really love camping, and don’t steadily spend an eighth of their lives doing it, but certainly spend that much time total, if not more. Some people love that stuff. I hate it myself, but whatever. The only thing that stops some people is the need to earn a living to pay for all the camping gear and food, etc.
Not to mention, Sam is probably considered pretty odd by the witching community in general.
Came on to say exactly that. Do you REALLY want Esmeralda as your MIL? I’d have to think very long and hard about that, even if I was madly in love with my little witch.
I’m not sure of that. In Bewitched, witches didn’t seem to live forever; they used “mortal” to mean “not-magic user,” not “person who, unlike us, is gonna do one day.” And though Sam was always cagey when Darrin asked how old she was, it was clear that neither she nor Endora was as old as he sometimes thought.
Sam was born between 1509 and 1693. See my post #45.
Trivia: Endora’s name comes from “The witch of Endor” in the bible: 1 Samuel 28:7. The usual translation is “medium” (KJV says “familiar spirit”) though, and “witch” is just common parlance, not an official translation.
