Yet with five millennia of historic precedent to support the idea of life long marriage between two people why is the noise about its necessity and future louder now than ever before? Is there any remaining rationale for marriage or are we just kidding ourselves? Has marriage finally met its end?
In my last post on sexless marriages a commenter responded:
“This article reaffirms my opinions on marriage. WHY do people get married? If you’re not religious, what the %^$* is the point?”
Unfortunately many share this same pessimistic view of wedlock. It’s as if getting married is like someone trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, like we are being asked to become something we’re not. We’ve gotten to the point where we are now asking, biologically speaking, if humans are even capable to being monogamous to one person for life. The naysayers cite the high divorce rate, unhappy marriages, and cohabitation in lieu of matrimony as evidence enough that marriage is circling the drain. Though we rarely pay attention to the fact (depending on your age) that our parent’s, grandparents’, and great grandparent’s generations were incredibly successful at it.
So, what is the immediate response, to question the entire concept of marriage? “Does marriage work?” “Is it necessary?” , “Why bother?”, “What’s the point?” We act as if what has worked for fifty centuries has, in the last week, suddenly ran its course and it’s now time for something different! There’s even a new term added into national lexicon which attempts to answer, if not reinvent, this notion of humans and monogamy. Now, instead of simply being monogamous we are quickly becoming ‘serial monogamists’ or when an individual is loyal to one mate for a given amount of time. While that keeps humans atop the evolutionary tree above an amoeba or spider monkey we now have a scientific answer for when we want to sleep around.
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This woman’s response to my post was like one of those ah-ha moments as I reread her challenge to the concept of ‘’till death do us part’. Is marriage now a waste of time? Are we indeed trying to get blood from the proverbial turnip? Are we putting more importance into it than it deserves? Is the current divorce rate and seemingly endless tales of adultery, unhappiness, and lack of fulfillment in its confines an indication that lifelong monogamy itself a practice in futility?
The more I thought about her response the more I became convinced that the institution of marriage itself has been and remains completely flawless. Believing anything otherwise would be like saying the wheel is suddenly a bad idea. The hope that one man and one woman can create, nurture, and sustain a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bond for life is a desire etched into our very DNA. Even in the most adamant opponent of marriage there resides a longing for a lifelong commitment with one person, whether they choose to admit it or not. Regardless of how independent they may be, no one wishes to die alone. Even if they’re convinced the basis for marriage is flawed they still yearn for the opportunity to connect intimately with one person, to allow guards to fall completely and just ‘be’ with someone who knows their inner workings better than anyone else.
One needs to look no further for proof of this than the number of divorcee’s who remarry. If there were anyone with the justification to question the fruitlessness marriage it would be the person who already tried and failed. Yet if marriage itself were the problem why would anyone every try it again? Even looking through the lens of their own marriage nightmares they still want to be a part of it. It remains a risk well worth the reward.
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Within the precepts of marriage lies the very foundation of our humanity – the family. If you permanently take away that stitch from the fabric of civilization the entire thing unravels. Any divorcee, especially those with children, will admit that regardless of how miserable and malcontent they were in the marriage, even in the worse of cases of physical, mental, or verbal abuse, there remains deep inside that desire to have back marriage represents. I’m fully convinced that humans are not only capable of - we are designed for - life long commitment to one person.
Marriage isn’t the problem; the people in the marriage are the problem.
America has the highest divorce rate of any country on the planet at almost at four times the world average. Our Canadian neighbors are only two times more apt to divorce compared to the average while our Latino friends to the south are four times less likely. So let me ask, if the institution of marriage itself is the over-arching problem wouldn’t it stand to reason that we would all share similar divorce rates? I mean no matter if you are from the US, Russia, Japan, or the Island country of Nauru aren’t we all the same with similar dreams, ambitions, and desires – isn’t that what the song says?
No marriage isn’t the problem we are the problem because of the expectations we have placed upon it. We’ve fabricated marriage into something it isn’t. To it we’ve attached our identity, self-worth, feelings of success, and most importantly our basis for complete happiness. We’ve come to believe that marriage will take away all of our problems, will keep him from sleeping around, will cause her to stop abusing drugs. Marriage will complete us and make everything right, or so we believe. But what or who could ever live up to those expectations? We have placed on marriage, and by association the other person in it, responsibilities that we could never meet ourselves.
And therein lies the issue - those beautifully flawed people who enter into marriage. All of us, with our issues, baggage, narcissist tendencies, and insecurities become burdened with our partner’s expectations and vice-a-versa. We expect that because we are now married it will fix those things we can only fix ourselves. Humans have this nasty habit I like to call ‘avoidance’. We like to avoid real problems by laying blame at the feet of something or someone else. It’s so much easier to talk about our friends’ screwed up life than to look in the mirror at our own. It’s more fun for me to point out that speck of dust in your eye than work on the branch in mine. Instead looking at the people as why the marriage didn’t work we would rather criticize marriage itself. Does my ex-wife deciding to cheat on me make marriage, by itself, a bad idea? Would I not have every right to paint marriage as the culprit, the reason she cheated and thereby seeing it as pointless? Of course not, that’d be like saying because my truck broke down automobiles are useless and I should start walking to vacation.
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My children are in the unenviable position of being the first in my family to be raised in a broken home. Their life is drastically different from that of their cousins. Their experience of family will remain far different from mine. But I’m certain that when my daughter dreams about her future it will not include serial monogamy, child support, visitation, or separation agreements. No, she will be dreaming of a white knight riding in on his magnificent stallion, sweeping her off her feet, and riding her into the sunset where they will live happily ever after. Because something inside tells her that’s the way it’s supposed to be.