I love weddings.
An expensive party with food, entertainment, and socializing? For free? I’m in! But marriage?
It’s cool that there are rings. And you get to call each other husband and wife. And there are some tax implications. And some built-in legal conveniences. Symbols, labels, a contract, and a big party.
Real cool.
But, I mean, everybody should know by now that modern marriage is bullshit, right? Til death do us part? Come on. There are no real repercussions for turning your back on the whole thing whenever you want. You can even take advantage and trick someone into it since it operates without restrictions and is therefore mostly meaningless. It is only meaningful in backwards cultures around the world where there is only one controlling party in the relationship.
Remember, for most of human history, marriage was a way for men to essentially own a woman. There were many variations in the tradition but this was the common thread across cultures. The contract, labels, symbols, and party were all about this. In other words, marriage was binding in this way since it was an institution that was difficult to break out of because one person was given much or all of the control.
Ah, the good old days.
Modern marriage is something else. Since it’s not enforced by anything and not even culturally unacceptable to break the marriage, it’s more a game people play to capture another person in their trap of “holy matrimony”. Holy fucking hell, modern marriage is a way for relationship hunters to capture their prey!
No matter what games people play with each other, the fact is that no two people are equal. Therefore, one side of a marriage always benefit more than the other. One side always wants it more than the other. One side will always be more likely to cheat than the other. Marriage is a fake balancing act. There is never any balance to begin with. People are different and this ancient institution is make-believe.
What’s not make-believe?
Good question! Let’s start with the fact that an incomprehensible number of our great grandparents made horny decisions that led to our existence. We are the evolutionary result (millions of years) of what Darwin called “sexual selection” – and we put these primitive monkey lust sexual desires into a pre-packaged box of “marriage”? Is it to restrict and depress our natural desire for people outside our partnership? Indeed, in just about every marriage a few years in, sexual desire in at least one half of the relationship plummets. Comedians joke about this. Because what’s funnier than choosing to be in a profoundly sad relationship. Am I right?
Our chimpanzee cousins have an “alpha male” who dominates the tribe and physically dominates the relationships. The human “alpha” in relationships is the smart person, regardless of sex. The alpha male/female is the dominant controlling partner, whose intelligence is often driven by deep rooted sexual desires. In a marriage, this person is the one who is most responsible for the marriage happening in the first place and tends to also be the one most likely to cheat and be unsatisfied after some time (the hunter). If they are not cheating to keep their desires – their juices – flowing, their desire plummets and they are just depressed (depressed hunter). The primitive nature of the more controlling party in the marriage must be fulfilled and can never be satisfied in a restrictive situation – just like alpha male monkeys.
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The marriage balancing act tumbles with one particular problem being the difference in timing between an average man and an average woman when it comes to desirability and capturing prey. Timing is everything, right?
The average woman receives frenzied desire in their late teens and early 20’s. An average woman’s power to break up other relationships and have things go her way and in her direction are incredible and unlike anything that an average man will ever experience – it brings men to their knees. Things calm down with each passing year and then fall back down to earth in the mid 30’s and continue a descent.
Men, on the other hand, mature at a frustratingly slow rate and become a bit more desirable in their mid 30’s, finally catching up to women’s falling desirability in their 30’s. Men never really fly with an extreme high level of desirability like women do, but being a desired life partner doesn’t necessarily plummet even into older age (especially with improved financial security and emotional stability) while women have little such advantages (don’t blame me, I don’t make these rules). The graphs only barely align around the mid 30’s and nowhere else – women conquer men in their 20’s while men have consistent advantages in their 40’s and above. Men and women who don’t consider these age inequities (everybody) discover that time changes their motivations for relationships and marriage traps. Lies, breakups, and sadness follow.
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Today, while the history of divorce is relatively short, it has swept the Western world as a new reality in about half of all marriages. I believe the other half are mostly just sick and broken partnerships after some years. You don’t always hear about the sad details in marriages because people are generally liars or just quietly depressed. In too many cases it is a lifetime of deceit or abuse by one partner, and in many other cases it is just keeping up appearances for the children.
Divorce with children is much worse and incredibly sad and ugly. Families are not made to be broken up. And yet this is now an accepted devastating reality in our stupid culture due to the lies we tell ourselves about our pretend exclusive unions. I suspect that many times, broken families lead to many of our broken toxic masculine narcissistic males in our culture who have given up on idealistic principals altogether and embrace dangerous “might is right” type philosophies. And then there are the many men who take advantage of the ease and cultural acceptability of divorce to drop (or engineer a way for her to drop) the relationship as age does its inevitable thing – leading to toxic angry forever victim females.
The ideal of marriage colliding headfirst with the reality of marriages breaking up is like bringing yourself and your loved ones into a cult only to find out that your cult leader is a fraud (duh) and that they actually intend to separate you from your family (also duh).
You see, marriage is as fake as its origin, dating. You ever sit next to people on a date? It’s just miserable. You feel sorry for them as they go through a primitive mating ritual born from a time when men and women were given very specific roles with no alternatives. Today, there are alternatives and freedom – which screws up old formulas.
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So, what’s the modern formula?
Relationships – plural. Meaningful relationships that extend out and beyond partners. A healthy culture ought to keep relationships growing and inclusive and – most importantly – keep families together. The mirage of marriage is no substitute for strengthening relationship understanding and keeping things realistic for ourselves and our children. Our instincts of jealousy and possessiveness may fight with open ended relationship ideas, but these are ultimately insecurities that must be overcome for true healthy and meaningful relationships.
The idea that we are first uncomfortably dating and then later comfortably married is a fiction that we need to confront and destroy in the modern world. We should always be uncomfortable in relationships because time changes things and everyone has the freedom to change their mind and suddenly decide that they want to leave our partnership cult and leave us broken and voting Republican (or wanting to kill Republicans). People are not equal, and fluid relationships are volatile, delicate, and deserve better than outdated concepts that do not fit modern life.
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I find it exciting how “they/them” are opening up new ideas that terrify people who are brainwashed by old fictions of how everything is supposed to be. I was always annoyed at how blue was for boys and pink was for girls (notice that girls don’t get red and instead get a pale red color while boys get a bold primary color). But I could never have imagined the brazen challenging of sexual and gender identities happening today. It feels crazy, but it is exactly what our culture needs for us to realize that we too – with our basic little closed off paired unit “going steady” fantasies – have been playing make-believe, and our ancient games need an update in times of human freedom.
Look, I’m not sure what the future will be like, but I think the standards of relationships are evolving and marriages will either evolve or be replaced. In my own life, I have no interest in this archaic institution but a high interest in my child having parents who take care and love themselves and love and protect one another. Taking care and loving oneself, for me, doesn’t include involving myself in volunteering to walk on a landmine. It involves building a deep relationship without the mindset that involving others is an automatic threat to our own. At the same time, it doesn’t allow me to fall into a state of false comfort about the delicacy of our relationship. Today, I live at the edge of culture with my views, but in the future the way I think will be mainstream.
From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health — you have been warned! Go ahead with your contracts, labels, symbols, and big parties (and invite me please) but consider being creative and challenging obsolete concepts, for a modern lasting family of honest and growing relationships.