Marriage is Dumb
I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage recently, after the whole Prop 8 thing in California. On some level, I can’t help but empathize with the struggle of gay people who just want to the right to express their love for each other. But on another level, I can’t help feeling that this is further legitimizing a problematic institution. As one of my friends said, I’m not sure why they even want marriage.
We’ve all heard those numbers – something like 50% of first marriages of people under the age of 45 will end in divorce (see here) and something like 40% to 80% of marriages will at some point have at least one cheating spouse (see here). Simply stated, it looks like the institution of marriage is not working for about half the country.
Some people, particularly people who have a vested interest in marriage for moral or religious reasons, will blame the person who broke up the marriage or had the affair by insinuating that he or she is somehow a bad person (or possibly a good person who made a bad mistake.) However, this seems somewhat unfair given the amount of people who are unhappy enough with their marriage that they end up divorcing – it seems to me what we actually have is an institution that does not suit the nature of the people who uphold it. The problem isn’t that people who divorce or have affairs are “bad”, it’s that marriage isn’t working.
If we were talking about airbags, for instance, instead of marriage and we found that 50% of the time they helped people avoid getting hurt in an accident, we might say “well, that’s pretty good but wouldn’t it be better if we could improve them so they were helping nearly everyone?” We would not say, “well, that other 50% really wasn’t sitting properly in their seats so you can’t expect the airbag to work then” or “many times the people whose airbag doesn’t help them are just bad drivers, so they really get what they deserve.” No, if this was airbags we would keep trying to improve the design of airbags to fit to the types of situations people got into when they drove. Similarly, we should rethink how to implement marriage to fit the way people naturally seem to live instead of trying to force people to change to become the conventional definition of a “good” husband of wife.
Additionally, the problem may be even worse than the statistics indicate because the fact that 50% of people end up getting divorced doesn’t necessarily indicate that the other 50% are happily married. Perhaps people who don’t have affairs would secretly like to have them, but stop themselves from going through with it. The thing is, conventional marriage puts a lot of pressure on one spouse to be everything to the other spouse. But there’s no reason why the person you’re going to want to raise kids with is necessarily going to be the same person you want to have sex with, or even be best friends with. One of my ex boyfriends was really into bondage, and I gave it the old college try, but I could never really get into it myself. We broke up, and we’re still close friends who have very compatible personal ideologies, but very incompatible sexual desires. I think he would be a really great person to raise a kid with (if I ever had one), but I think we would both be extremely unsatisfied if we were only able to have sex with each other for the rest of our lives. The chances of you finding someone who is completely compatible with you in every way is vanishingly small, so at some point you will have to make a trade off (better sex, or better kids? best friend, or household partner?)
Sexual relationships are the only relationships that seem to place these types of restrictions. If my BFF and I regularly go and watch romantic comedies because she can’t stand horror movies, she won’t get jealous if I go and watch Hellraiser with my flamboyant gay roommate. Similarly, my father doesn’t get jealous when my mother and I having girly workout time with Alison Davis because he’d really rather play Squash anyway. But, if your wife doesn’t like taking it in the butt, she’ll throw a fit if you go sodomize your hot neighbor even though you may still think your wife’s a fantastic cook and wonderful mother. As one of my friends once said that you have to accept that you can’t be everything to everyone, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We seem to accept that in our platonic relationships, so why can’t we accept that in our romantic ones?
In what ways could we change marriage to alleviate some of these problems? It’s hard to say without trying them out, but there are certainly other options. One option would be a non-monogamous marriage. For instance, if my ex boyfriend and I had had kids and decided on such a situation, we’d live in the same house, share the bills, and alternate who cooked the meals and picked the kids up from school. But, when he wanted to get his kicks, he’d drive to Madame Midori’s house who would tie him up and step on his nuts or whatever. A potential downside of this situation is that people are likely to get jealous, particularly if the couple is still having sex with each other as well. Logically accepting that different types of sex can be like pizza and ice cream, both good in different and incomparable ways, may help but it’s likely that people may still feel uneasy. The best way of dealing with this is probably to be as open and honest as possible so that your partner knows they can trust you. Many couples say that the lies used to cover up an affair can end up being more damaging than the actual affairs themselves.
Another option would be a series of monogomous relationships, which is what most people have now anyway. The difference would be that instead of expecting that when you find the right person you’ll run away with them forever, you’d just expect that every relationship you’d get in would end (at least sexually.) If permanence wasn’t seen as a cornerstone of an ideal relationship, breakups would not have the same stigma. After all, when two people broke up it wouldn’t indicate that anything went wrong, just that the relationship just ran its course. Additionally, if an eventual breakup was expected, then people would probably work to maintain some of their independence throughout the relationship by keeping a career or not merging all their assets or whatever. Raising kids in this situation would certainly be no more difficult than a divorced couple raising kids, and could possibly be a lot easier if the couple was more likely to stay friendly after the split.
There are many different ways people can sexually relate to other people, and if you’re one of the people who is happy in a more traditional relationship, then by all means go get married. But if you’re not one of those people, if you have difficulty staying faithful or find the idea of being with one person for the rest of your depressing, then you’re not alone and you’re not a bad person. You just need to explore what type of relationships will work for you.
Filed under: Relationships | 2 Comments
Tags: affair, affairs, cheating, divorce, marriage, monogamy
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Another great post. It seems your blog is becoming more insightful and less one-sided… or maybe we’re just biased in the same ways… probably the latter as who the hell am I to judge insight?
Marriage is like college… it’s DEFINITELY NOT for everyone but it’s FORCED on anyone. At least from a social standpoint. People who don’t strive for either marriage or college are seen as somehow lacking or deficient or like they’re missing some key self-evident fact that should suggest they do said things.
Even though I’m married, I don’t agree that other’s should be. But I also think the problem has to do with deeply implanted and completely unrealistic expectations. The fairy tale of marriage and of relationships in general is just now BARELY beginning to be unraveled, and even then you have to actively SEARCH for the threads to unravel it… pop culture has not begun to follow suit.
For example, I don’t know the statistics in Japan but I do know that 1. sex in general isnt considered nearly as big a deal as it is here, 2. certain “perversions” have socially acceptable outlets, 3. “cheating” can be done in a socially acceptable way so that the wive’s don’t really care so much… and even if that only applies to more old-school couples these days, go back to point 1 wherein maintaining a monogamous relationship is likely to be less difficult.
I think many Americans are sensation seekers. We want to experience as much of whatever we want as often as we can and with little to no consequence. I think a lot of times we can achieve this without hurting anyone, but when it comes to relationships its get complicated. As you said, we want our partners to be our everything… we want our sensations but once someone says we can no longer get them from multiple sources, we rely on our partner to suddenly provide them all, and that’s a recipe for disaster.
Conflictingly, we are at the same time based on mislead, ill conceived, judeo-christian and Victorian ethics, that no one ever really successfully followed anyway. Having those values set next to our desires to feel and try everything doesn’t mix.
We are all hypocrites struggling against our self-imposed hypocrisies… some do better than others. Most understandably fail. I blame everyone who came before who ever declared themselves as righteous.
“so at some point you will have to make a trade off (better sex, or better kids? best friend, or household partner?)”
This typifies the rarely spoken modern take on relationships IMO…we have come to desire, even expect complete personal satisfaction. Yet, the “family unit” that we have come to accept as a fundamental building block of society was not designed to accomodate that. It might be more correct to say that the family unit is structured around the interests of one’s children, or even society as a whole. This necessitates the tradeoffs you’ve mentioned, because personal satisfaction and a child’s well-being (which is often partially a function of the well-being of one’s spouse) do not always fit into such a nice package. Only relatively recently has there been a strong movement to suggest that personal satisfaction–sexual and otherwise–should be equal to (or perhaps even above) our desire to support and partake in a happy, functional family.
Furthermore, society has tied legal (and thus financial) ramifications to marriage (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that an instution that at one time “celebrated” a woman becoming, essentially, or in reality, her husband’s property, has been adapted by the laws of our society into a means of preserving this so-called family unit). As such, there are responsibilities, obligations to provide for the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of one’s family.
Certainly there are men who get off on their spouse bearing another man’s child, but generally speaking we are told that people are supposed to take responsibility for their own actions (unless of course it can somehow be blamed on someone else). As such, being forced or coerced (as opposed to willingly, such as in adoption) to take responsibility for the well-being of a child that is not one’s own is not an enticing proposition to many people. Likewise, being forced to take responibility for the well-being of a spouse (of either sex) who then crams one’s emotional and financial support down one’s throat by engaging in risky behavior or shirks their own familial and relationship responsibilities in favor of personal satisfaction is a recipe for resentment in many circumstances.
Anyway, I had been in a relationship with a woman I thought would be a great, perhaps ideal mother, both in the biological sense and in terms of raising them in a way that jived with how I want to raise my children. Yet, our interests and relationship needs were generally wildly different. So I can sympathize with the difficulties of dealing with the tradeoffs, and I can’t make a claim to be different than many others who decide they are not yet willing to reconcile with them.
I don’t agree with Mike’s implication that Japanese women are more “liberated’ and therefore more accepting of their husband’s need for sexual satisfaction–in that case I suspect a male-dominated culture that propogates the idea that good wives and mothers are to be submissive and accomodating to their husband’s needs–but I do think it is suggestive that by changing our societal priorities we can alter the relationship and family framework. Perhaps as notions of personal sexual liberation become more prevalent in society, some headway can be made against an institution that is centuries old and pervades nearly every aspect of modern life. Whether that is a desirable outcome for society as a whole would make for an interesting discussion as well.