Problems with the Institution of Marriage
I believe you will find the advice in this post useful, even if you are happily married. It may help you strengthen your relationship. I want you to avoid the wrong expectations about marriage. Don't assume a wedding changes a relationship for the better. You are making a cost-benefit tradeoff. If you think you are just trading up a relationship status for a better one, you will be unprepared for the costs, and will be unhappy.
But first, you want to know why you should read advice about marriage from a man who refuses to get married. Why? Because I'm good at marriage. I could make a marriage last forever if I wanted to. I was good at it right up to the point, nearly a decade ago, that my wife and I agreed we would rather be single than married, for reasons I am about to outline. It wasn't about any problem with each other. Our relationship, while stable, was in the wrong form. To this day, we still go out to dinner every couple of months.
Yet another pair of my friends is headed for divorce, and I just can't help but wonder how marriage made their relationship worse instead of better. I don't know which fate I dread more for them-- that their marriage will end? Or that it will last forever?
What is different between marriage and committed co-habitation? These differences come in two major types:
1. Benefits, which come from other people.
2. Stresses, which apply to the actual partners involved.
The only thing it does to the bride and groom is add more potential for stress to the actual relationship itself. Do you let yourself go? Take each other for granted? Fight over money now that you're on the hook for each other? I hear you saying that all these obstacles are surmountable, with communication and trust. True. But why add stresses unless you have to?
I can see clear legal, financial and contractual reasons why so many indisputably smart people get married. But all those benefits are about other people:
* throwing a party to celebrate your love in front of others.
* reducing how much others tax you.
* making others allow you to visit your children.
* getting past others to your lover's hospital bed.
* getting the respect and acknowledgement of others.
To you, those benefits may be worth the damage to your relationships. To me, they are not.
Marriage awkwardly combines romantic entanglements with legal and financial entanglements. It feels like "The party of the first part may kiss the party of the second part. I now declare you liable for damages." These two areas of life are already complicated enough, without worrying that breaking up with someone would mean I'd need to find a new place to live, and a new bank account, and split up possessions, and so forth.
Don't say marriage is more commitment. Commitment is a decision, and you can simply make that decision and tell your partner. You either trust your partner when they tell you that, or you don't. If you don't, you have a problem that is not fixed by shackling them. The best married couples understand the wedding improved their standing with their other loved ones, but didn't change anything between them that wasn't already there. Brides and grooms who get married in order to change themselves and each other are at exponentially higher risk of divorce from disappointed expectations. With marriage you'll just have to go to extra trouble to disentangle when it's over. But don't kid yourself; If you want out, you'll get out. It'll just be worse.
I'm not down on marriage for everybody! I love married people. (Frequently!) It may not be something I desire for myself, but I understand marriage makes many people feel good. It's a tradeoff, just like polyamory, or monogamy, or celibacy, or any other relationship form. You have to walk uphill against the challenges that each form brings. You choose them based on whether they put enough wind in your sails to surmount the obstacles.
Finally, we come to the most important reason not to get married: do you have a personality that buckles under to social pressure? I would like to point out that a lot of married people-- perhaps even the vast majority-- have not thought about the tradeoffs at all. Too many couples get married because of its symbolic value; to feel a connection to a long-standing tradition. Well, those people are going to feel a connection to Prozac in about seven years. I would like to encourage you to completely remove this reason from your list of priorities, if you possess the emotional wherewithal.
The problem is the default cultural script, followed unthinkingly. For instance:
* An unspoken assumption that you are each other's property and therefore can run each other's lives.
* Unrealistic expectations that marriage will change your partner.
* Or that they won't change.
* The announcement of monogamy that you wear on your finger.
Do you assume that you both have the same ideas about that? Even if you do, the people sitting in the audience at your wedding probably don't. Are you sleeping with them? No? Best not to get them involved.
So, if I want to celebrate my love, I would throw a party to do so, and not call it a wedding. But I won't. Frankly, as much as I love you all, it doesn't involve you. This may be the point that I lose many of you, because I know a lot of people like to put a couple photo as their profile pic on Facebook, and kiss in public, and really get the community involved in seeing them as an all-or-nothing unit. Too clingy for me, but whatever floats your boat. I'm not condemning, I'm just trying to help you not faceplant.
I'll just say this. Marriage is a stamp of approval by the community, that separates approved relationships from unapproved relationships. I take issue with that entire concept. How is it anyone's business to approve your most intimate, private, personal relationships? We let lawyers, legislators, clergy, and nosy family members in our bedrooms, in exchange for access to the approved group. There should be no formal, official approval. The government should not be in the business of sanctioning our private lives. You can join a church if you want that.
So all the drawbacks go to you and your partner, and all the advantages go to other people by giving them control over the shape of your private life. What are the benefits? Access to your kids, a tax break, getting on your partner's health insurance, getting to visit them in the hospital. Do you think society is doing you a favor with this trade? I leave you with this thought: How whipped are you, that you think you shouldn't have that already?
Comments
blue-duck on Jan. 29, 2012 12:15 AM
As always, thought provoking. Thanks for the post
matt-arnold on Jan. 29, 2012 12:20 AM
Thanks! I worked to make it more constructive (although perhaps less entertaining) than the impromptu rant I delivered into the Polyamory Weekly listener comment line (around minute 24, second 25).
druidsfire on Jan. 29, 2012 9:57 PM
Not that I'll ever be in the position to actually have to think about this sort of thing properly, but you bring up some very interesting points here. Ironically, a few of the things you've mentioned are things that will now affect a piece of fiction I'm writing, because the couple involved didn't consider them... and I think they should. Might change how things turn out. We'll see where they go with it. :D Thanks!
netmouse on Jan. 30, 2012 4:45 AM
Interesting things to think about.
On the one hand, decisions like whether or not to live together, whether or not to merge finances and belongings, and whether or not to be monogamous are independent of whether or not you get married. If you live together long enough, splitting up your things is likely going to be complicated, married or no. Bill and I were living together and sharing bank accounts long before we were married. When we got married, of course we acquired more possessions, but generally speaking those weren't the ones it was hard to split up when we divorced.
The big exception was the house, which points to something you haven't mentioned at all: marriage gives you a legal footing with regard to shared property you wouldn't otherwise have - in some ways that makes things more difficult, but in others that protects you from being taken advantage of in a split-up process. The state of Michigan said I owned half the house, and the basis of that is a recognition, I think, that the spouse who is not the primary money earner may contribute things to the marriage it is difficult to quantify. For instance, I and my family did almost all the maintenance of the house and the grounds, I did all dishes and most of our laundry, and I managed all our bills and finances. Is that worth something? Yes. Did we dicker over it? No, it was included in the notion that we jointly owned our joint belongings. We did bicker over the house, but not to that level of detail, at least once we decided I would buy his share from him (when we were discussing jointly owning it until it sold, that was horrible). It also makes that part of the process simpler: spouses can sign quit-claim deeds to one another and pay no taxes for the "sale".
On the other hand, I think you're right that getting married applies pressure. I mean, the things that ultimately led us to divorce were mostly present before we got married, but he pushed me for a decision on getting married because his dad was dying and he wanted to be able to plan on the rest of life or else get on with finding the person he would spend the rest of his life with, and that question was posed to me when I was in the middle of a master's degree, living in a foreign country, and financially dependent on him. (I had a student visa and couldn't work in canada, apart from RA and TA-type positions. He had a work visa.) Once we had gone through with it we had not only our own expectations and the expectations of the family, we also had hanging over us the thousands we'd spent on the wedding itself. Our honeymoon was not all blissful and relaxed. There were tensions already.
If we hadn't gotten married we might have come to a mutual understanding that we were not suited to stay together much earlier, with much less drama.
On the other other hand, when I look at my current marriage, it feels totally different. Of course, Brian and I didn't spend thousands getting married, and we didn't care much if our family approved though it was important to us that our core heartfamily did, and we were both independently functioning adults when we got together, which I don't think was true of my ex, really, nor me back then. Nor, I would guess, you and Rachel, when you got married.
Thanks for the thought-provocation.
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