No Marriage, No Commitment?
How apt is this? Just as we are strolling into the month of St. Valentine a plethora of marriage topics are just popping up. As you can see we’ve dressed quite nicely for February, I tried to go for something romantic… Come on it has pink!
I was sneaking around Technorati when I came across this article from Newsweek. A woman was defending her position as to why she does not what to be married. This of course makes her the devil. At least according to the comments.
If she is really in love with Jeff and she plans to stay with him forever, than she should marry him because he asked her to. Obviously it means something to him. In addition, if she doesn’t marry, she’ll miss out on the deep, loving place her relationship has the potential to go. I had no idea that I could love my husband anymore than I already did
She should marry because he asked. Well why did he ask? Did he ask because he really wanted to get married? Maybe he proposed just because he thought she would want to married. Maybe he proposed, heard her explanation and said “Thank god, because I was just trying to make you happy.” They are having a commitment ceremony. Maybe they had opposing viewpoints and this was their way of coming to a compromise. I hardly see how someone can judge this situation unless they were privy to the conversations that took place.
Why does marriage make any relationship more “deep” or “loving?” If you have a strong attachment to the spiritual side of marriage you will benefit from marriage. However if you think marriage is archaic and pointless, attaching that to your marriage is not going to help you.
My personal opinion is that it is not love, because love is selfless and giving to the other. The problem is more than just “I love Jeff and that is enough,” but it is rooted is a selfish and sensual lust masked as love. Marriage is the ultimate committment which shows true fidelity and selfless love!
I always thought that sensual lust should be a part of love in a relationship. Love without lust is…boring. Love is nice, it’s warm and fuzzy, but lust (with love) provides you with that wonderful “I can’t get enough of this person and I never want to let them go!” I like how marriage is still the ultimate commitment, reminds me of the post about kids being a far bigger commitment than marriage. Let’s face it people who are married cheat and fall out of love just as easily as the non-married variety. Approximately fifty percent of marriages fail, and even if you are still married it doesn’t mean that you are getting along or not cheating on each other. Hell you can be married and still participate in your sadistic/masochistic orgy every Saturday night.
Do not assume your relationship is any better, stronger, or more loving then that of a husband or a wife.
Found this response particularly funny 1) because at no time did the author of the original article say any of the above and 2) what if it’s just better than some married couples? See this comment is quite hypocritical, telling someone not to assume but then assuming that married couples are going to be better right off. Personally I think my non-married relationship with my loyal partner is quite a bit better than the two wives I know who have had their husbands cheat on them. And though I hate to get snooty about it I think most people would agree.
First, it’s contradictory for you to claim that your relationship with Jeff symbolizes your commitment to each other when, without that “piece of paper,” you can still walk away whenever you want. That’s not commitment. Plus, theoretically speaking, it shows that he doesn’t have to be fully committed to you, either (and vice versa), because he is not bound to the morals and values that marriage publicly emphasizes.
If marriage doesn’t mean commitment to you, how will being married make you committed? And if marriage means something special to you, why do you want a bunch of people who don’t care about it joining your club? We already established that being married doesn’t keep you from cheating so how does it keep you from being able to “walk away.” Are marriage licenses combination documents/shackles these days? Want to get out of a marriage? Walk out the door and keep on walking, maybe take a flight to Aruba but that isn’t required. See, legally, a marriage license doesn’t really do anything. You are supposed to file your taxes together but they don’t “make” you and you can’t get married again (though somehow plenty of polygamists get around this one.) If your husband or wife walks out the door and doesn’t want to come back there is no legal repercussion. What does have legal ties are children, and you get screwed over by that whether you are married or not.
“The terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ wouldn’t even begin to describe our relationship,” is a slap in the face to every one of us who has the guts to measure up to the word every day. During my husband’s long coma, I was called, “his wife” dozens of times a day by hospital personnel, and it was my honor. And he was damn lucky to have me, because he needed a Wife, not a cockamamie, “partner, friend and lover.”
I like how this one was completely misinterpreted. This is not a slight against being a husband or a wife, it’s saying that adding those legal definitions don’t describe a relationship and I agree. I would go so far to say that no words can ever truly describe the relationship between two loving people, try as the poets might. Husband and Wife are titles, they designate who you are in society and look good on a tombstone combined with “loving,” but is that who you are as people? They aren’t really romantic words, both wife and husband mean “spouse,” spouse is “either member of a married pair.” To have a marriage is to have “the legal or religious ceremony that formalizes the decision of a man and woman to live as husband and wife, including the accompanying social festivities.” Notice what’s missing here? There is no mention of commitment, or dedication, or love, or enjoyment. Meanwhile a partner is “a person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor”. A friend? “A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard” Does a lover really need to be explained as “a person who is in love with another?”
To be a husband and a wife is a a nice title but it means nothing if you aren’t also a “partner, friend and lover,” which, in turn, means a lot without being a husband and a wife.
Without this article I would not have found the wonderful Pandagon with Amanda Marcotte however. She definitely had a bit of a different take than me with her article and her writing is delightful.
*All definitions were provided by Dictionary.com
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