natural born marriage pessimist

It surprised me to hear our anonymous someone (presumably a person in our QCP demographic) just now beginning to question the wisdom and inevitability of marriage. I also get surprised when people my own age get married. It just seems such a terrible idea. I cannot remember ever really thinking that I would get married. I had never realized that intelligent, thoughtful people could still see marriage in an optimistic light.

Apparently my pessimistic viewpoint is an uncommon one. Of course – like everything else – the root of my view on marriage is my own family experience. Suffice to say that of my entire immediate family only my Grandpa and Grandma have not had their marriage end in divorce. Aunts and Uncles on both sides: divorced. Other Grandparents: divorced. Parents: divorced, remarried, divorced again. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to assume anything about marriage, except that I too would get divorced. So, why even bother?

This opinion remained unchallenged for a very long time. All through college and for some time afterwards, I dated the same young woman. She had very similar ideas, and perhaps an even more negative view of marriage than I. Her family had less divorce but more unhappy marriages, and both of us thought marriage either legal slavery or religious permission. And we wanted nothing to do with either one. Occasionally the question was raised, “Under what circumstances would you marry?“ but never in context of the relationship we had then. Commitment to each other was always phrased in terms of five year projects or some other limited lifespan.

As was pointed out by the previous blogger, “until death” is a very long time. Suppose you marry at 26, and you and your spouse love each other and get along well. As the years pass you assume that you’ll remain married to the same person, but that’s not true. I have this theory that we are constantly changing, and that behind much unhappiness and divorce is our blindness to change. In that first decade after marriage, my spouse will have changed, I will have changed, and what’s less certain is that we will make the time and effort to learn about these new people inhabiting the marriage. So we react and act as if this were still the very young person who we had married, and not this new person, to whom we should pay attention and attempt to learn. And then small bitternesses grow into large ones. Which is part of why “communication problems” fall just behind infidelity as the case of divorce.

So, unless you are that rare couple capable of constantly learning a new person and paying attention to all the small changes, divorce or distance seems likely. What do I mean by distance? Think about your longest relationship, whether one year or five. Note how comfortable you get around that person, how much of your life they eventually come to fill. Now imagine being married for twenty years. Your life is now structured around this other person, your family is built around them. Just their presence makes you relax. You may no longer be in love, but simply friends or companions. This is distance, a growing apart, but remaining within the bounds of the marriage. Would it seem foolish to give up this constant companion (with numerous defects no doubt) for divorce and loneliness? What if you divorce and find nothing on that other side? There is great value in lifelong friendship and closeness.

So that was where I was. However, in my twenties I met someone with a very different opinion of marriage’s possibilities. This person’s parents “love each other and still have a great relationship” after twenty or thirty years of marriage. This person’s family history is the exact opposite of my own, with only one divorce among a cloud of more or less happy marriages. And the kicker: this person was of similar age and educational background to myself, and was actually seriously considering the possibility of marriage in the next couple years. The idea that “dating” might have some marriage-related purpose was weird to me. I had seen dating as a way to pass a couple years with an enjoyable person in some semblance of monogamy. And it would seem to me that the difference in goals creates a real difference in the qualities that you look for in others. So now reading the previous post and the responding comments makes me feel even weirder, as I appear to be the only one to never really consider marriage a given in my own life.

One thing I do know is that people need each other. We are and always have been social animals. And, it seems a constant that we pair off and form these tight bonds around each other until intermingled. Like Genevieve mentioned, one reason to be married is for that extra social pressure to work through problems, so that you can keep that bond. However, I think that you have to first want one long-term relationship before you can value social pressure to stay together. If you want to date a lot of people, that pressure to stay together is just one more obstacle.

So it appears that something so socially-constructed as marriage is actually intensely personal. We each must come to our own understanding of what we want, between pressure from family, friends, and media and the pressure of our own experience telling us that this is not for us.

That’s my stance, but like any good QCP-er, I reserve every right to change my mind in a couple years. Maybe I’m just not then marrying type. Yet.