Marriage notes

An essay on why marriage has become so stigmatized, maligned, and misinterpreted

Many people in our age interpret marriage, and have been interpreting it, probably since the 1960s, when divorce became prominent, as the literal exact opposite of everything that “liberalism” supposedly stands for. The word marriage is literally grouped in, and associated very heavily, with daunting and plain words like conservatism, tradition, family, and even of course, in many Third World countries, iti s associated with a word like “force” or “subjugation”.

But, what if I was to tell you that so many of the liberal battles that took place, within the 20th century, like the womans right to vote, the right to divorce, and the sexual revolution...weren’t, in my eyes,as “Anti-marriage”, as so many rather dreary conservatives have always made them out to be? In fact, what if I was to tell you, that all of those things, have actually only served to, perhaps, one day, and maybe even already in our own time, strengthen marriage?

What if I was to tell you that so many of the liberal battles were not fought, as I say, to weaken marriage,or ruin it, or dissolve it, but rather to make it better?

“How could this be, how could this be!” of course, is the refrain I can already hear, from both the conservatives and the liberals. “The right to divorce ruined marriage, and made women run from and abandon their men!!” cry the conservatives of another age (and even some still now), and “the sexual revolution created millions of out-of-wedlock children, who have all but eroded our social structureee!!” cry more conservatives. And then of course...we hear the howls of the liberals as well … “marriage was never anything more than a PRISON! a prison designed to lock WOMEN into servitude to a man! a patriarchal prison! It is to be avoided at all costs!”

As for the young, they have their own battle cry that they chant, in regards to marriage: “Marriage is no fun! Only deathly boring , ugly people get married! Why would you do it? It ‘ll ruin your life.”

Both sides , at least on this argument (dear Rebecca), have some merit. On the one hand, the sexual revolution has created plenty of out of wedlock children in pretty dire situations, as the conservatives say, and when it comes to the liberals, anyone with half a brain can’t really blame them for being filled to the brim with very horrific memories - and fear-  of what marriage once was, prior to the middle 20th century, in comparison to what marriage is, or at least can be, depending upon your willingness to change with the times, now.

Here, I think, is the first thing that needs to be said: Anyone who thinks women getting all those rights they got, suddenly also made them , “unmarriageable” , is an absolute ...well, idiot, to be blunt. Why? It is simple: All those wonderful liberal rights didn’t make women unmarriageable. What they did was make women able to, you know, actually choose, for themselves, the marriages they wanted or did not want.

IN other words, in the past, women were, as we all know, literally forced into marriages --aka “partnerships” -- that they did not want to be in, with men they often hardly knew, at a very young age. Once they were forced into the marriage, they were then stirpped immediately of all their rights , assuming they had any to begin with prior to it happening. It’s thus the case that, what happened to women in the pre-1960s world, and especially i nthe 18th and 19th centuries, wasn’t really marriage as we know it now. It certainly wasn’t a partnership. It was instead a totalitarian dictatorship, where one person held literally all the keys, that person being the man.

This was obviously something that needed to end, because it wasn’t very fun, oftentmes not even--despite popular belief in the trenches-- for the men. (After all, have you ever tried to hang out with someone who can’t read, can’t write, and has next to no concept of the World or whats going on in it? Thats what women often were, in the deep past. IMagine what an annoying and really useless partner that would be.)

Now, of course, fast forward into our own time, and take a look at some of the curious statistics that seem to be the reality today: Contrary to popular belief, as I have written in my other pieces now, the most likely people to get and stay married in our own time, are not conservatives, nor people in that god awful red state “Bible Belt” area. Oddly enough, the people most likely to get married are liberals, in coastal blue states.Yes, thats right...liberals! The same liberals who preach sexual liberation, divorce,homosexuality, and secularism, are also the same folks getting married in droves, significantly moreso than any of those bible thumpin’ Republicans. They are also the least likely folks to get divorced -despite thinking it should be legal!

Why, at first, the conserative is ready to do ...what, when he hears this? He is ready to call foul, and to tell the liberal that he clearly is a hypocrite, as this ridiculous article in the National Review I was reading here does.

“Ah, you see, you liberal freak, you claim to be mister new age, but in reality, you just want the same old, same old that we done alwys had. You want to be married, boring and married, like a conservative!”

The reality, of course, is, to my mind, not what the conservative thinks it is. The liberal ain’t a hypocrite. You know what he, or she, is? I’ll tell you: They’re folks who are indeed in a marriage, but they are also folks who define the word marriage differently than the conservatives define it.

For the liberal, marriage is not something that needs, for example, to be tied up with God, or with a Church, an enormous $35,000 ceremony,  and it also isn’t something that he needs to, you know, force an illiterate  Filipino bride into, whom he will then subjugate and keep under his demented dominion. For the liberal, marriae is instead an equal opportunity partnership, where both sides have just as powerful of a voice, and an opinion, as the Other side.

The liberal is able to understand that marriage itself -- which, as I stress, could really just be switched with the word “loyal partner”--was never really the problem. The problem was that this particular institution was infested, one could say, by a patriarchal, lunatic, toxically masculine Church, that twisted it into something it was never meant to be, at least for healthy people.

 The real reason why liberals are “ironically” getting married and staying married longer than the bible thumpin’ conservatives, isn’t because they are looking for anything traditional, or old timey. It’s because they’re doing the exact opposite: They’re drawing up sensible modern day  “contracts” of partnership, that offer a fair shake to both parties.

The conservatives down in that hellish Bible Belt , however, are still doing the old time tradition: They are pressuring young women into marriages they don’t want to be in, they are insisting that the good ol’ boys have all the keys, they are insisting that the marriage be linked to a Church of their choosing, and they are also -- this isa very big detail -- insisting that the marriage be just as boring as it often was, in the deep, dark and miserable past. I.e. Both the man and the woman, within the confines of a Bible Belt marriage, are to have no outside existences. A Bible Belt marriag, a traditional marriage, call it what you want...it’s all claustrophobic, suffocating, and demeaning , to both parties involved, as far as I am concerned. Because it is not an equal partnership.

Now, the way this all extends to the basic, non-Church going, non voting poor, is as I already have written in my other pieces: The poor put on a great big spectacle, pretending to be “free thinkers”, listening to their little rap songs, wearing their light up sneakers, getting drunk and sleeping with people, and turning their baseball hats around, but the reality about the poor is that they really have next to no idea whats going on...and the way this connects with marriage is because, essentially, just like the conservative Church leaders and Republican traditionalists, the poor folk look at marriage, and unlike the educated, college liberals, they are unable to formulate a new definition of the word.

They aren’t Church goers, but they can’t shake the definition of marriage being something that happens within a Church blah blah. They can’t really fathom that, at its core, marriage was never really anything more than just a very intimate partnership, of two people vowing to protect one another, be there for one another, etcetera…

They are still looking at it all with an old time view, more or less. The poor...it’s  like they are computers that have yet to receive the latest Windows update on how marriage is changed. They’re not intentionally viewing it in an old fashioned manner, like the Muslims are overseas, or even the Evangelicals here, but they are still not getting the full update on it, either.

 For the poor, especially I suppose the now plentiful ocean of illiterate poor men, it basically has to be “this one way”, and once it is not “that one way” , they opt out of it, refuse a partnership, the women opt out of it as well of course, and then they burn whatever semblance of a partnership they might have down, only to later crash and burst into flames all to their lonesome somewhere, as a single.

So the real main theme of this all here is that marriage is a word that has been used by people to mean many different things. What marriage always shoudl have been, was just an equal opportunity partnership, and the more people come to realize this, the more they will also realize it is not the most mortifying thing in the world, but is actually quite beneficial, especially in the long run, as most partnerships usually are…

-- Further notes on S0ciety.