What is marriage for anyway?
Here is an article on marriage from the Atlantic that I think is rather frank regarding something I have noticed. Many bright, articulate women wanting marriage find themselves waiting year after year for the “right” guy, and not realizing how they might be contributing to their own situation. The ideal of marriage has become so romanticized and worked up by Hollywood that we have forgotten what marriage is for. It seems that every woman wants to marry up (why is that?), and when you are pretty impressive yourself it’s rather disconcerting that maybe the ordinary guy in the next cubicle, or the quite nice guy at church might just be what this author calls “good enough.” I disagree that men who are “good enough” are really just that. Maybe the guy who seems to promise all the thrill of a Hollywood romance is really a candle in the wind put out by the first life storm that comes through. This is the point when women need to ask themselves, what is marriage for anyway? How about life long stable, some would call boring, companionship? Most of life is ordinary and mundane so what a good woman needs is a stable “good enough” man. Maybe she can learn to be a “good enough” woman and not make herself into a pretzel trying to please. That may lead to “good enough” parents who aren’t running around trying to raise the next Bill Gates. So now my next question is, why are these articles always about women?
This is a weird article. You’re right – why are these articles always about women ? What about men who don’t want to settle ? I know men who admit that they could have settled with ‘good enough’ women but who are waiting for their very own Yoko Ono. There is also the problem of men who don’t ask women out even though they like them. I’ve been at the receiving end of this kind of nonsense several times. It’s also important not to forget that there is a lot of disrespect and rudeness around in contemporary society, that is frankly off-putting in a date.
I think my biggest objection to this article is not its basic message of encouraging settling: ultimately this is a good goal. The problem is that the author seems naive. There are people out there of both sexes who would make marriage hell on earth and who could wreck their spouses’ mental health and welfare. I’ve managed to turn men like this down. They could be suitable spouses one day – IF they have the courage to face their problems and get pastoral care. There has been a vast increase in mental health problems and lifestyle-related illnesses in western countries in the last few decades. Simply believing that settling will solve unhappiness betrays magical thinking.
The whole problem of not getting married requires vastly more understanding of the underlying problems than the author has mustered.
I would suggest reading an article from the website religion online by Dr. Stanley Hauerwas titled “Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and Human Sexuality.” Although written in 1978, his essay still carries much relevance. The premise of his essay was that to understand the purpose of sexuality and marriage requires a political and deterministic view of life. For example, how the early church changed the view of marriage as an economic necessity to one of vocation, in which singleness becomes a viable option. This doctrine during the ancient church was radical and almost inconceivable. Hauerwas criticizes correctly how modern understandings of relationships and marriage focuses way to much on interpersonal qualities, which on their own are not able to maintain a health relationship. He refers to this interpersonal criteria through the following expression which I quote him at length:
“Once the political function of marriage is understood to be central for the meaning and institution of marriage, we have a better idea of what kinds of people we ought to be to deal with marriage. Most of the literature that attempts to instruct us about getting along in marriage fails to face up to a fact so clearly true that I have dared to call it Hauerwas’s Law: You always marry the wrong person. It is as important to note, of course, as Herbert Richardson pointed out to me, that the reverse of the law is also true: namely, that you also always marry the right person. The point of the law is to suggest the inadequacy of the current assumption that the success or failure of a marriage can be determined by marrying the “right person.” Even if you have married the “right person,” there is no guarantee that he or she will remain such, for people have a disturbing tendency to change. Indeed, it seems that many so-called “happy marriages” are such because of the partners’ efforts to preserve “love” by preventing either from changing.
This law is meant not only to challenge current romantic assumptions but to point out that marriage is a more basic reality than the interpersonal relations which may or may not characterize a particular marriage. Indeed, the demand that those in a marriage love one another requires that marriage have a basis other than the love itself. For it is only on such a basis that we can have any idea of how we should love.”
Perhaps in answering the question what is marriage for should prompt us to examine marriage/relationships holistically and not just on emotive and interpersonal criteria alone.