for better or for worse

how many of you pause to reflect on where lives intersect?

i observe that we go through periods when our lives depend predominantly on the various peoples or groups of peoples in our lives. for most of us, we start out dependent upon our families for survival and growth, then comes the so-called rebellious years when we strive for anything but our parents, grandparents, and siblings to define or influence us. we turn wide-eyed and eager instead to the culture that we are inundated with and our friends, with whom we share and experience the pangs and joys of wobbling around on our two feet before somehow managing to stand up tall and proud. the family is eventually let back in once we come to our senses. thank goodness, too. so here we are now flanked on the right by the wisdom of family and on the left by the safety net of friendships, ready to move onto the new and next phase. most of us anyways.

i think it is a time when friendships are about to take a back seat and in some ways, family will as well. the onset of weddings and thus, marriages create a new dynamic, a friendship and family all in one that eventually takes precedence above all else. but is it unfair to view it as such?

friendships and relationships, i believe, have always been tricky to maneuver. one does not and should not replace the other, but it is difficult for the two to co-exist sometimes. feel free to say otherwise. you try to find the right balance, you hope and pray that your friends come to love your significant other as you do and vice versa. as i watch my friends enter into relationships, sifting through one after the other in search of the right one, the perfect one, i have had many mixed feelings that include an irrational fear of being replaced one day by their chosen one. friendships seem to be the first to go whenever a relationship develops and deepens. as my friends begin families of their own and/or live thousands of miles away, i cannot help but feel it all the more keenly. i realize there is room in life for all the people we love, but you have to admit that there does seem to be some sort of an oddly arranged hierarchy present.

i suppose we’re just at that point. when marriage amongst our peers is simply there and everything is shifting so you just learn to adapt and move on. how different is friendship from marriage anyways? there is just no formal declaration of vows.

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.

The Marriage Pressure, a guest post

cindy’s preface: we have a new guest blogger who wishes to remain anonymous for the sake of… well, anonymity, thereby allowing privacy. comments are welcome, in fact they are encouraged. i very much look forward to the response this post generates. the topic definitely highlights my own recent reflections as a person in a long term relationship whose significant other is moving far away for school while i am remaining here for the time being. the pressures mounting from outside sources is not fun at all. so please allow me to present to you, The Marriage Pressure, by the QCP’s second guest contributor.

I’m 26 years old and I have been dating for almost 13 years. Twenty-one years, if you count my boyfriend from first grade. Carl used to ride his bike to my house after school with offerings of plastic jewelry that he purchased from grocery store vending machines. It was my first taste of romance, and it was sweet at the age of six.

For the better part of my dating “career”, my romances have been of the short-term variety. Most lasted for no more than three months; it seemed to be the magic number. This changed the summer after college, when I turned 22. I entered two long-term, serious live-in relationships back to back. Both relationships reached DEFCON 1: ring shopping and conversations about marriage, children, retirement plans. Together, these two relationships spanned five years – five years that passed in a blink of an eye, and now I am closing in on my 27 birthday, and I am single again.

So what am I going to do now? These are my options, as I see it. Option A: Stay single and off the market. Option B: Date but remain single. Option C: Date to find someone that I can eventually marry.

Right now, I think everyone I know is okay with me choosing options A and B – this is the first time I’ve been single as an adult, post-college. I’ve “proven” that I can be a cog in the commitment wheel, so there aren’t really any concerns there. But how long will this last? Can I still choose options A and B as I get older with the same support that I have now? I have a feeling that, as I age, more and more people will start to wonder (and judge), “When is she going to settle down?”

Currently, my choice to date and remain single is suiting me quite well. But I do wonder to myself: what is the point of dating and having those choices? (I’m constantly asking myself why.) And I counter, does there have to be a point? Does dating have to be goal-oriented? If so, is marriage the finish line?

Dating unto itself is an important part of growing. Not only has it taught me how to relate to others in a civilized way, it’s also taught me a lot about myself. I wouldn’t change any of my choices. I’ve learned so much from my relationships and I’m thankful to those who have shared their lives with me. I feel enriched and fortunate from my experiences – I’ve had a great, real-life education thus far in so many ways, and my love life is included in that.

Some people are content with one, lasting life-love experience and I respect and support that. I do wonder though, if you love someone and want to be with that person for the rest of your life, why is there a push to legally sanction that union? Isn’t love, so precious and wonderful in and of itself (I’m not being facetious), enough? Does a piece of paper make it better, make you happier or more secure? I don’t think that making the government legally recognize my attachment to another human being makes that attachment any more meaningful. What is the government? A group of people, just like us, appointed to positions of power. So you and I decide to put certain people in power, and then we want those appointed peers to sanction our choices? Does that make any sense? I feel like everyone is hurtling themselves down the marriage rabbit hole. Dating IS goal-oriented! Maybe you personally don’t think so, but there are multiple people in your life who do, and we are certainly socialized to find one person and marry.

Despite the textbook perks of getting married (tax breaks, visitation rights, power of attorney in some cases), I don’t quite understand the point of it. Why do we have to choose one person to be with for the rest of our lives? What is right for me now, as a 26 year old, may not be right for me as a 36-year old. Who knows what I’ll be like when I’m 46. Why can’t two people find each other, love each other, and be together without having to promise “forever”? When two people find each other, there is automatic question as to their commitment to each other and whether the relationship will last. This practice imposes pressure by implying that the point – or goal – of coupling is to find someone to marry and be with, forever. Why is there such extreme pressure to say “forever”? Forever was more acceptable when the average life expectancy was 40; it’s quite different now when the average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 years (according to www.infoplease.com). I realize that even I exert a passive aggressive pressure on others whenever I ask a friend, “So, do you think you’ll marry him?” I vow right now to stop asking that. It’s stupid and I’m being nosy. We humans are so goal-oriented… for all of our generation’s forays into the freedom of introspection (e.g. not finding a job right out of college, traveling instead and soul searching), we’re still hung up on a lot of conventions inherited from those before us. Marriage, in my mind, is one of those conventions.

Adam and Eve weren’t married and they were made in God’s likeness. Thus, God didn’t create or encourage marriage; humans did and do. Why? Based on a book I read, religious conservatives who were anti-sex, anti-pleasure, pro-control, and pro-patriarchy wanted a way to further control the masses, thus creating a binding union to restrict an individual’s choices. If this is true, and seeing that I’m an atheist, my feelings about marriage are less than profound.

My feelings about marriage aren’t improved when I look at the divorce rate in America. The average divorce rate in the U.S. (it changes every year) hovers somewhere around 41% according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s approximately two out of five. It’s really hard for me to feel excited about something that has such a high failure rate (and it’s a failure only because we impose the value of “forever” on marriage). A 59% success rate, if I remember correctly from grade school, lands us solidly in the “FAIL” grade range. Ouch. Granted, every couple’s individual chance for success varies… but that thought is still not that comforting.

I realize that I may come off as cynical or anti-marriage, and that is not entirely the case. I am actually quite the romantic, and I am happy and excited for my friends who are choosing to marry. I cried when I saw my best friend in her wedding gown. I cried at the wedding of two of my close friends. My parents are happily married still, as are my grandparents. And, I think finding true love and being with the one you love is amazing! I’m not against people being happily in love and in committed relationships…. I just question how the institution of marriage came about and what purpose it serves.

According to Merriam-Webster, marriage is “the state of being united to a person… in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law”. Wait a minute… it doesn’t have a time enforcement? Then why the hell are we saying “until death do us part” if we don’t have to? Oh yeah… those religious conservatives pushed that onto us.

Perhaps marriage could be amended to better fit our changing society. We could look to the dictionary for the definition of marriage instead of blindly accepting the values that have been fed to us. Perhaps we could choose to legally link ourselves with someone else for awhile instead of for the rest of our natural lives. I don’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, that is totally cool with me. Saying, “I love you; I want you to be able to visit me in the hospital if something happens (in the next ten years)” is well within my comfort level.

My questions are these: One – what is the purpose of marriage? Why do we feel the need to transfer our romantic feelings to the legal and political arena? I almost feel like the two should be separate, just like the separation of church and state. I also can’t think of a good reason to get married, besides the textbook perks I outlined earlier. And are those really “good” reasons? Two – why do we put pressure on ourselves and others to marry? Three – if you marry, why does it have to be for forever? Four – if you’re not married and past a certain age, you’re looked upon with pity; why?? Do you have to be with someone to be happy? What’s wrong with loving yourself and that being enough?

We should be able to love freely without the confining restrictions imposed upon us socially, legally, politically and economically. Marriage is a social construction and it should be reexamined.