The attempt to pigeonhole marriage as one thing or another is a bigger problem than marriage itself.
The most common criticism of marriage I hear from unmarried men, in conversations and in comments following articles, is that marriage will limit their freedom in some way. It might be sexual freedom, the desire to have many partners, or the freedom to arrange their homes, to come and go as they please—in short, to live without having to compromise, at least in their domestic space. In extreme examples, men imagine marriage and see life with a raving tyrant woman, a materialist socialite in need of posh dining and expensive furniture. Consider this (somewhat edited) comment:
I see the benefits of marriage for women: financial support, limited fertility window, legal advantage in case of divorce. Personal security. Someone to move furniture, basic domestic and auto maintenance. Company, etc. But what’s in it for me? I have to make more money to buy a bigger house, buy and insure multiple vehicles and health insurance policies, ask permission to make basic decisions, prostrate myself before…feminist opinions so common in modern women. I can see why a man historically would want to marry (access to sex, nurturing role of women, Patriarchal domestic structure, traditional family unity), but there really isn’t much incentive in today’s context. I look around me and I see a lot of married men trying very hard to convince themselves and me that their choice to marry was a good idea. I just can’t think of any. It seems obvious to me that for a man to marry in 2012 America is a contract for indentured servitude. I like to make decisions on short notice. I like living comfortably on $50,000 a year and not sweating it if I have to switch jobs. I like my old, comfortable furniture. I don’t like expensive restaurants. I don’t like large pretentious social gatherings. I believe that animals should not be treated like people. I disagree strongly with the majority of feminist politics. I am attracted to women, but I would prefer not to live with them.
This view baffles me. Where is the example of this universal wife? Where does a man earning $50,000/year encounter her? None of the married men I know busy themselves fixing cars or moving sofas when they are not making black tie dinner reservations for a group of PETA volunteers. Perhaps there is some guy out there who bought a large house when he himself did not want to live in it; even in that case, chances are the family has two incomes, something made possible by feminist opinions like Mary Wollstonecraft’s. I won’t kid the audience: many women in my family like to get together in their front rooms and compare knick-knacks, sofas, rings and other painful trivia. At the same time, men will be in some other part of the house examining fishing poles, golf clubs and grills. As far as I can tell, the desire for this toy collecting life is shared by the sexes—it’s an essential part of contemporary society.
The delusions behind it are easily our greatest problem. We’ve seen from the last American presidential election how people in power become paranoid when they see those traditionally powerless—or not-as-powerful-as-they—gaining numbers, voices and various forms of capital. The assumption: if someone gains, I lose. This assumption isn’t trivial but quite damaging, especially to relationships, and I mean all of them, not just potential marriages. When we think like the commentator, when there are only two possibilities—either you are my servant or I am yours—when our only incentive is control, imagined or actual, of others, marriage will definitely suck. So will all sorts of other things, including friendships and work relations, not to mention our world-view. Why should we assume that the will to impose patriarchal structure—the commentator at the top of his household and everyone else below—ends at home? He will protest: I do not extend this desire to everything, to every child, neighbor, stranger and animal. It is only onto the wife I don’t have and…er…the dog I’d love to have if society did not interfere with how I wanted to treat it.
A recent New York Times article by Sonja Lyubomirsky, titled New Love: A Short Shelf Life, explains that the first two years of marriage are rather blissful. Following these come less passionate years when many marriages end; those that survive may see a bounce-back in the “empty nest” years when the couple “rediscovers” itself again. I’m in my thirteenth year of marriage, my third year of parenthood, and I understand these cycles; they might be intuitive, even obvious. Yes, when I met my wife and realized she was interested in me, I was elated, even shocked. When she agreed to marry me, I was sky high. Once we married and moved into our own place, we felt magnetic kinship. Then the business of life presented itself, the business of school, the business of learning to live together and respect each other’s desires and needs. We entered what Lyubomirsky and researchers call companionate love.
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If we treat marriage like crystal meth, we’ll be disappointed at best, depressed at worst.
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Our marriage would be doomed today if both (or just one) of us suddenly looked at it and asked, “Where has that feeling of soaring elation gone?” Where is the euphoria? The high? Where’s the surge of dopamine? We once had public sex (and photographed each other) in the dungeon of the ruins of a castle in Torun, Poland. Why are we not fucking this way every weekend? We also used to get drunk on beaches, in dormitories and with members of rock bands, budding international jazz stars. God dammit! Why did we have these kids? We could totally get rocked every day if it weren’t for them. What’s the point of life now? Just cartoons and snowmen?
If we treat marriage like crystal meth—if we treat life itself like a search for the ultimate, endless high, rush after rush of passionate ecstasy, every moment indulgent and orgasmic, every experience a bragging right, a collection of new and improved, immediately outdated toys—we’ll be disappointed at best, depressed at worst. We’ll look around and wonder what the hell has happened to us. How did we get “so low” and how can we get high again? If our goal is to control something, anything, we will find ourselves frustrated when we learn it is impossible—whatever pleasure you get from demonstrating the absolute command you have over your dog will end when that dog dies. If we go into any relationship or experience hoping to benefit from someone serving us fantasies and desires, we’ll be shocked to find that others have points of view, desires of their own, that neither the world nor our lover is the customer service desk. Step one in the shift society desperately needs is for us to face our delusions, all of them, and see what we’re looking at. We delude ourselves if we think living without compromise is possible, most easily by avoiding marriage. If nothing else, we’re trading the companionship of a spouse for whatever freedom we believe we have without one.
That, of course, is our right. Marriage is an agreement between two people to share whatever space they see fit. The couple makes the agreement, and there is something to be said for those who seek not euphoria, constant passion or the biggest house in town but peace and stability, support and companionship, gentle hours watching cartoons, coals to press into the heads of snowmen. Especially Americans have bought into so many dangerous and idiotic myths. We are exceptional and our lives are extraordinary. Without anyone around to envy our experiences, we feel like we’re not experiencing anything at all. Weddings recreate princess myths; children become vicarious little pawns, precious commodities on which we project our own self-consciousness. These are symptoms of cultural immaturity. So is the dismissal of marriage as something flawed all on its own, an absolute pathway to something, either servitude or the bliss of fairy tales.
Photo by amslerpix.
About Gint Aras
Whoever made that initial comment re: indentured servitude needs to get bent. His attitude is one of not really knowing, respecting or liking women. And of believing himself unworthy of being actualy loved by an actual woman. Good thing he’s never getting married.
Marrying my wife was the best thing I ever did. I could ennumerate the many reasons why (but that’d be tacky).
Your article is great and reminds me of an experience I had during my friend’s bachelor party in Atlantic City. It was me, two other married guys, the groom, and three unmarried guys. One of the unmarried guys started saying stuff just like the commenter from your article. One married guy agreed with him (and is now miserably divorced), one unmarried guy agreed with him and is miserably single. Everyone else looked at him as if he was an idiot (which he kinda was being)- me and the other married guy are still happily married, one single guy is now happily married, and the other single guy is still happily single.
I think one’s attitude towards life and love says more about that person himself and their capaciy to be happy than anything else.
I think I’ll let the ignorance of the man quoted in the article speak for itself. It speaks volumes. Then again, maybe he just doesn’t want to be in a relationship at all, and that’s his choice. If he’s satisfied with whatever ramifications are in store for that choice, who am I to judge?
Bottom line is just like the author says: If you want to make a relationship work, any kind of relationship, and your partner does too, it can work, and it can be the must honest, loving, wonderful thing you’ve ever done. It’s not going to be cloud nine all the time, but as long as everyone is honest about what works for them and what doesn’t, trust can be built, along with intimacy, which is very real, very powerful, and very awesome, if you’ve ever experienced it. But just remember that even though you chose to be promised to him/her in the relationship forever, marriage, and even dating, to a lesser extent, is a choice you make everyday, as long as everyone is an adult and can make that choice. You Or you can choose to believe, like that guy, that it’s not worth it anymore in 2012.
Actually, I can think of many women who believe the same thing as this guy does about marriage, just for different reasons. Didn’t Hannah Rosin say that more women are choosing not to get married, because there was less incentive to do so?
For men, being married is also a professional expectation, but professional women are not so encouraged, I think to get married. It tends to have the stigma of stifling careers, where for men it gets them excepted into more high society circles. Men seem to have more incentive than women, in that respect.
Ironically, this guy will only meet the miserable man-eating, greedy, lazy wench he says all women are, since the majority of women, respectable, ambitious, loving, and financially stable on their own, will steer clear of that guy. Or at least they should, if they had any sense.
Marriage?
Why would anyone want marriage when the risk of divorce is still near 50 percent and the Family Courts and things such as alimony and child support can screw over your life?
Even though I , myself, running the numbers only came up with approximately a 15 to 20 percent chance of getting married and having a “bad ” divorce (and I defined bad as wanting to put a bullet in your brain or ending up in prison), the fact that possibly one in five men end up in this kind of a situation makes the desire to NOT get married perfectly defensible.
http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/conventional-wisdom-on-the-trend-in-us-divorce-rates-may-be-about-to-change/
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2012/01/10/hookinguprealities/the-eat-pray-love-divorce-trend/
Seriously, trying to shame men into marriage is going to fail. I only recommend marriage to men who are one or more of the following:
A. Rich, as you’ll still be rich (just not as rich) after the divorce
B. The wife will work and make as much as you do. Upper middle income families have the only financial incentives NOT to divorce as both spouses would take a lifestyle hit
C. You want kids
And regardless if it’s A, B, OR C, I do not recommend ANY man marry unless he is ready for divorce and by that I mean is ready for a sudden “out of the blue” worst case scenerio divorce.
Men against marriage are not seeking control over their woman. We are not cavemen or little boys who are having their toys taken away from them.
What I, and most anti-marriage men are seeking, is to retain our autonomy and to avoid the risk of financial ruin through a no-fault divorce. No man wants to one day be in a position where his kids are alienated from him. Men do not want to get married when the modern woman feels that drunken sex with her husband is rape since she was too inebriated to say she was tired and didn’t want to have sex (articles on this site are evidence of this rape culture thinking).
Modern marriage, due to feminism’s destructive effects on the roles we used to occupy, is now more about competition than companionship. The family is dead. There is no reason to marry anymore.
I submit the following; a very educational article on the death of the family and the state of relationship today:
The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Politics by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D. (http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm)
Also, some voices from the anti-marriage crowd:
From another male shaming article:
“When relationships have chewed you up, spat you out, and you find yourself thinking that being alone the rest of your life, while painful, seems to be safer for your sense of well being than tying your happiness to another individual, you may wish to avoid marriage. When you find that your desire to have an intimate relationship is laughed at as being too needy, or is generally maligned in some other way by the group that you’d like to court, you may wish to avoid marriage. When you see people do everything they can to make it work and it still falls apart and makes them miserable, you may wish to avoid marriage. When you listen to psychologists and marriage counselors make broad statements about you, about your inability to have healthy relationships, about your need to grow up even while you are succeeding in areas other than marriage, then you may wish to avoid marriage. If you listen to women complain about men who have worked themselves down to a nub talk about their daydreams of divorce, you may wish to avoid marriage. When women criticize you for being interested in attractive women, for being male, for suppressing women, then turn right around and marry someone because they are attractive and will take care of them, you may wish to avoid marriage. In short, if you are a man and pay attention to what the world says, and finally allow yourself to reject the shame it tries to foist on you, you may wish to avoid marriage.”
The general consensus:
“Men have suffered, but in the end, it is women who lose the most. Sex without marriage? Check. Ability to have a child through surrogation? Check. Ability to be your own person and defined through who you are, not what you provide? Check. I believe Feminism has made life better for Men. Disagree if you like. The damnedest thing about this: Men want to marry. Most Men are just waiting for the right time or place or political climate. It’s in Mens blood to marry and reproduce. It’s just that women have fucked the pooch so bad that Men won’t go anywhere near marriage. Do you know how hard it is to stop someone from doing something they want to do? You’d have to make their desire veeeery unappealing. And that is exactly what women have done to marriage.”
How about an article talking about what women are doing to drive men away from marriage? How about some balance?
I think that every relationship requires compromise, it’s just that compromise is required from all involved parts. It’s not “compromise” if one person constantly pushes their agenda in front, at the expence of the other person.
But I also believe that it’s not just so binary that the author of the article puts it up to be. I don’t think it’s so much “either I rule them or they rule me.” as “I just want to rule myself”.
My first instinct was to write the quoted commenter off as bitter and possibly ignorant. I often roll my eyes at comments like his when I see them.
But then I think about my (our) decision not to have kids. If you caught me in a really grumpy mood, I could paint a terrible picture of parenting that would sound every bit as bitter as the quoted commenter. I never want to be a slave to my kids, their needs and their schedule. I want to travel; I never want to travel with children, or sacrifice traveling money in the name of building a college fund. I don’t want the sleepless nights, the stress, the disgusting things kids do with their bodily fluids and functions (seriously…toddlers are gross). I don’t want to face the hard parenting questions like teaching them about sex, drugs, and dangerous choices. I want to be free to spend my life with my husband as I please. And if I’m REALLY grumpy, I could throw in some pretty nasty comments about parents, too, to solidify my point that parenting is a miserable experience that only masochists enjoy.
In other words, I could be every bit as bitter as this commenter is. Some parents may roll their eyes at my bitterness and ignorance. Some may jump to defend parenting or try to educate me on how rewarding and fulfilling it is, how the poopy diapers and lost sleep all fade away when you watch your kid graduate, blah blah blah. None of that will change the fact that I strongly believe I’m not meant to be a parent and that I find parenting completely unappealing to me.
Some people aren’t meant for college. Some people aren’t meant for parenting. Some people aren’t meant for marriage. Diff’rent strokes and all that.
The key is, though, that I usually DON’T show up on parenting articles and blogs to bitch about parenting. When I decided not to have kids, I also resolved that I would avoid talking to parents about parenting, or making it seem like I know squat about what it is to raise a child, because I don’t. When I decided not to be a parent, I decided to remove myself from that world entirely. I am an Aunt, and may occasionally be a babysitter for nieces and nephews and my friends’ kids, but that’s it. I don’t feel I’m qualified to judge parents, and I certainly don’t see the point in badmouthing parenting at every opportunity the internet presents me just because I’ve decided I don’t like it for myself.
I’m OK with my non-parenting status. If a commenter is OK with his/her unmarried status, quityerbitchin, so to speak. Pushing an anti-marriage agenda wherever you go just makes you look sad and lonely.
Great comment, KKZ! Thank you.
“Some people aren’t meant for college. Some people aren’t meant for parenting. Some people aren’t meant for marriage. Diff’rent strokes and all that.”
I have the same experience with being childfree, and I agree with you, with one slight wrinkle.
I think in some ways that marriage is a much more variable situation than going to college or being a parent. A marriage is a negotiation that two people make, and they can make it into virtually anything they want it to be. (Not absolutely anything, but pretty darn close.) Getting a college degree and being a parent involves jumping through a lot of hoops that you have no control over or that you have no power to negotiate, while your marriage is potentially more your own creation.
So, when I hear someone complain about how horrible the slavery of marriage is, I tend to think that person is complaining about a particular kind of marriage, not all possible marriages. Many people who think they are not meant to be married are simply not meant for certain kinds of marriages. (And there are some forms of marriage that I don’t think anyone should be in.) Sometimes when I see bitterness about marriage what I see is a failure of imagination. If I’m bitter about my experience with marriage and therefore denounce all forms of marriage, then I’m just using poor inductive reasoning.
Fair point, wellokaythen. I was thinking the same thing when I read the article but my comment was long enough as it is.
I guess an analogy could still be made with parenting if a childfree person had a real distaste for, say, attachment parenting and thought that all parenting was like that, and so reacted strongly against parenthood in general because of it. Parenting is what you make of it too, after all.
But yeah, I’m with you. Marriage is definitely what you make of it. If you don’t want a resentful, imbalanced, unsatisfying marriage, then don’t have that marriage. That means either not getting married, or marrying a person who wants the same kind of marriage you do.
None of the married men I know busy themselves fixing cars or moving sofas when they are not making black tie dinner reservations for a group of PETA volunteers.
I interpret this sentence as you are living in a rented apartment, in a city large enough to have a somewhat functioning public transportation system, and/or taxis available at a couple of minutes’ notice when you need one?
I fail to undestand that how the social institution i.e. marriage, which has a failure rate of about 50 per cent is not a problem. Besides, marriage is also a legal insititution that gives certain rights and duties to both partners which sometimes continue long after the marriage ends, like financial support to ex-spouse. Some people are happily married but the overall condition of the institution of marriage is not good. Personal experience is no evidence on the health of marriage. I have seen quite few couples who were deeply in love, got married and separate ater few years.
Personal experience is no evidence on the health of marriage.
That goes for good experiences as well as bad. A failure rate of 50% is also a success rate of 50%.
The institútion of marriage is as reliable as toss of coin and we should beleive that it is good.
This is going to sound weird, but I’d also question the assumption that divorce is by definition a marital failure. If two people are married for finite period of time and part on good terms (hey, it happens sometimes), then is that merely an example of a failure? Is every end of marriage a failure of marriage? Putting it another way, it seems extreme to me that the only way that a marriage can be a success is if one person dies before it ends some other way. So, create more widows and widowers and you’ll increase the marriage success rate….
People can live for decades in a poisonous marriage, and that counts as a success, while two people who love each other can part on good terms after a few years, and that counts as a failure. That sounds weird to me.
I think the best thing for marriage is to get the state completely and totally out of the family/marriage business and let people enter into contracts of their own design.
Same sex couple want to get married, cool write it up, get it notarized and signed, you’re married.
Traditional couple want to start a family, there’s probably a template for that with a couple of optional clauses that need to be checked or not ,but hey, its their choice what they sign up for.
7 consenting humans of varying genders, orientations, and backgrounds want to enter into a legally binding long term relationship agreement, it may get a little complicated but get it all laid out and have a commitment ceremony for their collective families, fantastic.
If they want to put a “you have to keep me euphoric” condition into the contract let them do it.
We’d need to change some family tax law and terms of benefit plans to prevent people from marrying for just the financial reasons but all that’s doable. With a 50/50 long term success rate, it’s not like that plan could do much worse.
I think this is very true. Marriage is not this one thing that is universal for everyone, and if your marriage isn’t working for you it must be society’s fault. Some people may just not be meant for marriage of any kind, but a lot of people unhappy with their marriages are unhappy with their *specific* relationship with that specific person.
Complaining that marriage just doesn’t work is like complaining that your apartment is too messy. If your apartment is messy, does that mean people are just not meant to live indoors? Does that messiness mean that private property is theft and all landlords are evil? That’s a bit of a leap. Perhaps there are too many people leaping from particulars to general conclusions (my marriage sucks, so marriage is a scam), once again a problem of inductive reasoning.
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/your-marriage-isnt-typical/comment-page-1/#comment-411133