Marriage week is the new Shark week.
The very week my website features confessions from married people and Auntie Gibbon’s guest post about keeping sex alive within long-term relationships, the marriage issue explodes all over the internet and TV news programs like my pussy on a date with the njoy Pure Wand. You’re welcome, Zeitgeist. Always a pleasure doing business with you.
The newest news fad of the week is apparently proclaiming the Death of Marriage. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the most blatant admission of a slow news week since CNN did an exposé on the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest. Why the fuck should anyone care about a survey where 40% of people said they think marriage is obsolete? Why is this news when it feels so much like… not news.
Let’s be clear about something. It’s something you probably already know, but it needs to be stated: There is absolutely no purpose a married couple fulfills in society that an unmarried couple can’t. Close your eyes and imagine… wait. You’re probably reading this with your eyes. Don’t close your eyes, just imagine a world where marriage no longer exists: where pair bonds form, break, shift, and last, all without a legal document or religious ritual. Try to visualize that. Does it look very, very close to the world we live in today? It should, because relationships are going to function in more or less the exact same way. Some people will mate for life, others will have a string of committed relationships, and still others will play the field indefinitely. People will be monogamous and polyamorous. Couples will switch partners. People will love and fuck and fight and breed and raise their children. Taking rings and vows out of it won’t change that.
Does that mean I agree that marriage is obsolete? Not at all. I just think the question is uninteresting. It isn’t a breaking story that the concept of matrimony has drastically changed over time. Romance, partnership, and parity within marriage are comparatively new ideas in the Western world. The latest great evolution in marriage, I believe, is the removal of the stigma of divorce. Sure, divorce sucks and most people don’t like doing it, but instead of being anathema to polite society, it’s now more or less a break up smothered in legal hassles. A failed marriage is no longer the mark of Cain (in the mainstream and the vast majority of subcultures, at least). Since there’s less risk of becoming a shunned outcast when you get around to leaving a shitty situation, being married no longer forces a couple to stay together the way it used to. That and the increasing mainstream acceptance of premarital sex and the whole “living in sin” thing make marriage less and less necessary in the grand scheme of things. But they don’t sap its potential to be important to individuals, whether society needs it or not.
If it’s important to you in a religious or cultural way, or will ensure that your family or circle accepts your partnership, marriage is probably a good idea. If you find personal, romantic meaning in the institution, then have that wedding, you crazy kids! If you’ve chosen your life partner and being married makes sense for home ownership, insurance, legal, financial, or child-rearing purposes, much joy to you. If you want a free stand mixer, have at it. If it’s important to you to define your relationship that way for any other reason, I support your decision 100%. I don’t think your relationship is automatically more valid and special than everyone else’s just because you chose (and were able) to opt into matrimony, mind, but I also get that making that gesture of lifelong commitment is a big damn deal.
My point here is that if marriage is important to you, it obviously isn’t obsolete. No, society wouldn’t crumble without it, but it can indeed hold beauty, meaning, and practical advantages. If marriage were viewed in a more realistic, personalized way, maybe we wouldn’t have so many people deciding that others should be excluded from what should really boil down to a personal choice rather than a public virtue.
And yes, I absolutely did just write an entire blog post about how I don’t care about a news story. What of it?
“There is absolutely no purpose a married couple fulfills in society that an unmarried couple can’t.”
I love this. I wish people would understand it better. There’s actually a lot of drama going on around the blogging world (at least my part of it on Xanga) about how people who are in premarital sexual relationships are “selfish” and are the cause of society’s downfall. I can’t believe there are still people out there who think that way!
I’m trying to think what’s selfless about withholding sex from someone I love and desire until he’s essentially blackmailed into committing to me for life. To be honest, I’m coming up a little blank.
@quizzical pussy
Well, I’m intending not to have sex again until I’m married again. And I’m sure as hell not thinking I am going to withhold sex from a woman until she’s blackmailed into committing to me for life. Yeah, right, that would work.
To my personal perspective (this isn’t the society perspective you were discussing), taking vows out of it looks very different. I offer “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health”, and I want the same thing. I haven’t yet found the woman that means it like I do, but it’s still what I want. When it gets to “for worse”, and they always do, I want someone who will keep talking with me, keep trying to fix it with me, not quit. Because I also believe that with good people it can always be fixed, and that I’m good person in that sense.
@Mousie762 The way I see it, if two like-minded people decide to wait until marriage, more power to them. To me, they don’t hold any moral high ground, but it’s great that they’re doing what’s right for them.
But a lot of times one person is just jumping through hoops to finally get to have sex with someone s/he loves. “Backed into a corner” doesn’t seem to me like an awesome basis for a marriage, although I know it happens a ton and doesn’t always implode. Jumping through those hoops and respecting your partner’s genuine wish to wait is selfless, but the person calling the shots and rushing the other into marriage is not making a selfless choice vis-a-vis the other person. At all. That doesn’t mean the person who wants to wait is a bad person, but I can’t think of a way to call those actions selfless. And often the person waiting is using it as a manipulation tactic rather than acting on deeply-held belief, and that is downright selfish.
I hope you meet a like-minded woman and have a lot of fun together!
@quizzical pussy
I second that couples who are waiting, or waited, don’t hold any moral high ground. Most people aren’t waiting until marriage simply because they don’t see the point in doing so, which doesn’t make any kind of moral statement. Implying a moral high ground would be like A playing chess with B, winning, and then implying the win shows how much better he is than C who only plays Go.
Have you known any couples where the woman was backed into a corner in desire to have sex with the man? I ask because it seems like a joke to me, like the Penny Arcade cartoon where one of the guys needs money and attempts to charge his girlfriend for sex. But maybe that’s just me being neurotic about men’s desirability again. I certainly don’t want someone to marry me because she was backed into a corner, but it’s hard for me to imagine it as something to worry about.
Thanks for your well-wishes!
@Mousie762 Here’s one example of a guy who wants to wait and a woman who doesn’t. And I can guarantee you it’s not a complete one-off. Realize that women can want sex as much as guys and you’ll come to understand that the power from withholding sex really can go either way. I’ve been controlled with sex before, without a doubt. It may even be especially effective against women because it makes us feel like double failures, since chicks aren’t “supposed” to get rejected.
@quizzical pussy
I think of “withholding” from women as ridiculous, not because they necessarily want sex less, but because the world seems to be awash in guys who are offering more sex. Like, I feel that guys spend enormous energy just hiding our feelings of attraction, because to show it would often be rude or even threatening. But all this male sex on call is really an illusion. I’m a clear (though outlying) example; I’m desperate for sex, but I’m not making any offers.
Mousie – even if it were easy for women to go out and find a guy offering them sex (which it certainly isn’t for a large percentage of women who don’t fit the stereotypical attractiveness ideal), a woman can still be put in that situation in a committed relationship. If you’re a monogamous person or your partner is, and you love your partner and want your relationship to remain monogamous, it doesn’t matter how many other people you could potentially have sex with – what matters is the sex you’re having, or not having, within the relationship. Being the most desirable woman in the world wouldn’t solve the problem of wanting sex within your relationship, with a particular individual, and being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.
Thanks, QP and Graphite! I will be careful about this. Hopefully being as immediately upfront as possible (like discussing it in any online dating profiles etc.) will help anyone who wants sex in the short term realize I’m the wrong guy.
Have you known any couples where the woman was backed into a corner in desire to have sex with the man?
I know you’ve already been told different, but I was a bystander to this exact situation in college. My closest female friend there was in a relationship with a boyfriend who wanted to wait, she didn’t, and I watched the whole thing gradually trainwreck. What actually wound up happening was she pressured him into sex after about a year and he had something of a moral breakdown. It destroyed the relationship.
Posting in a big hurry here, so hopefully not repeating what anyone’s said, but:
I’m reading this after a conversation with a friend in Sarajevo. It’s the 15th anniversary of the war and the EU is in serious trouble and he feels that war is back on the horizon again. And in ways he’s lucky because in some places in the world, it’s always been there. And he’s not got a lot of ways out.
And that’s why I feel that – whilst in 115% agreement with your article, marriage may in fact be moving into a new form of relevancy. Our votes and money often achieve sweet fuck all – but the capacity of marriage to subvert deeply unfair divisions in society is something that bears thinking about. I know many people who’ve cnstructed marriages for precisely this reason, and these smart, negotiated relationships mean a *lot* let me tell you.
Just a thought – marriage is inconsequential to monogamy, relationships and romance – but it’s a political grappling hook which can really make big changes.