This is a take off from a thread in IMHO. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=122034
I was surprised at how many people have hostile views of marriage.
Has the tradition of mariage out lived its usefulness?
Should there be changes in the way we define or think about marriage?
If you are married, why?
If you are in a long term stable relationship and have chosen to not get married, why not?
Well, it’s a wonderful thing, this freedom concept; if you want to get married, you can, if you think it’s a waste of time, you don’t have to. Great.
Mangetout is dead on.
Marriage as the exclusive basic unit of society is outmoded. Marriage itself can never be outmoded, if it remains how people want to arrange their lives.
Sua
er, that is
“how some people want to arrange their lives.”
Carry on.
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I am to and even more surpised that none of them have a good arguement against it.
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If it has then people would simply stop getting married.
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Certainly, the way a marriage is defined and how we think about them isn’t set in stone. For example marriages in our society most often have their basis in a romantic relationship of some sort while in the past marriages were arranged for economic or political reasons. I also think marriages should be redifined to allow homosexual couples to partake of the institution.
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Because once I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her it was the logical thing to do. Marriage allows us to consolodate our property, have power of attorny should the other become incapacitated, and makes a public statement that we’re together. I’m sure we could accomplish the same things without getting married but why bother when marriage is so easy?
Marc
Of course it can be a terrible thing when couples bring children into the world and then break up messily, traumatising the kids, but marriage is hardly a magic potion that prevents this happening.
People still ride horses and use typewriters, but those are still outmoded. Furthermore, marriage isn’t a relationship simply between two people; it’s a relationship between two people and the rest of society. If the rest of society doesn’t agree to participate in the marriage, then it’s not fully meaningful.
What meaning is lost though? it seems to me as if no internal detriment occurs if society fails to recognise the marriage as valid.
Well, me and my partner can regulate our relationship however we like, and go through any ceremonies we want. It’s nobody’s business but ours.
However, when we want society at large to recognise and accept our relationship, we have to do so on terms which are acceptable not just to us but to the rest of society. That’s where marriage comes in.
The terms on which our relationship is recognised and accepted will, of course, vary from society to society. Most western societies require that our relationship be exclusive (i.e. that as long as we stay married to one another, we can’t marry anyone else), that it be heterosexual, that it be publicly celebrated or registered so that everyone knows we’re marrried, and so forth. We usually have to accept mutual legal obligations, e.g. to support one another financially, in return for which we get financial or tax recognition, e.g. exemptions on inheritance tax for property passing to a spouse. And so forth.
The terms on which society recognises a marriage can vary not only from place to place, but from time to time. Divorce laws may be introduced or revised. Homosexual couples may be allowed to marry. Polygamous and polyandrous marriages may be recognised, or have recognition withdrawn. And so forth. Generally this is (and, I think, should be) done in response to social changes.
In one sense, marriage frequently becomes outmoded. The particular features and consequence of marriage may need to be overhauled to reflect social changes. But it another sense, I doubt that marriage will ever become outmoded, in that I doubt we will ever reach a stage where we dispense entirely with social, legal and practical recognition of a conjugal relationship by society at large. Conjugal relationships are a signficant feature of most societies and, indeed, among the most important aspects of most people’s lives. Trying to construct a society which, legally and practically, ignores there existence would be even sillier than ignoring the existence of relationships like employment, or landlord and tenant, or buyer and seller.
As a practical matter, society must offer some formal legal recognition to conjugal relationships. That’s marriage.
I started off by thinking that marriage is an outdated institution but as I started collecting my thoughts for this thread I find myself changing position.
First off, in the US at least, marriage is more a legal construct than anything else. By being married you are legally binding yourself to another person in many ways such as fiscal responsibility.
So where’s the social component? Why would government care to tie people so tightly together? Simply because there is a societal benefit to marriage. Studies have shown many times that children raised in a ‘nuclear’ family tend (statistically speaking) to do better than children raised in single parent households. If a couple is merely committed to each other without marriage there is nothing holding them together but their own goodwill. Some might say that should be enough but the reality is that people jump out of relationships all too easily even with marriage. If things start getting rough (or one person finds someone else they like better) an unmarried couple will likely break apart more easily than a married one if for no other reason than going through a divorce is far more difficult than just packing your bags and leaving the house.
Finally, even if breaking-up is in the cards and the correct thing to do marriage protects both parties upon severing the relationship. The government (essentially acting as an arbitrator) will see the couple’s assets divided up in an equitable manner (or to whoever has the best attorney). The court will also see that children are appropriatley taken care of from at least a fiscal standpoint by obligating both parents to provide for their care even after a split*. Unfortunately, if you aren’t married, it is much more difficult to see the assets you acquired together equitably divided and theoretically you can chase down a deadbeat parent to help pay for the children but it is more difficult.
So, is marriage good? On the whole I would say yes. We live in a disposable society where it is all too easy to go for the next good thing and dump the previous one. While some relationships should break apart I think there is something to be said for an artificial construct to keep you sticking with something. Relationships are not all fun and games but sticking through the bad times are partly what can make the good times so good.
Of course, it is this very legalistic issue with marriage that homosexuals wish to take part of. They can commit to each other all they want but till they get the same legal options available to heterosexual couples they this will count as a large piece of the discriminatory pie against homosexuals.
[sub]*I always thought it was odd that my college education was guaranteed only after my parents divorced. If they had stayed together it would have been entirely up to them whether or not they would pay for my college education. Thanks to their split my education costs were mandated by the court to be paid for by them. That somehow seems backwards to me.[/sub]
Whack-a-Mole wrote:
However, keep in mind that the “nuclear” family is a modern invention. Before the 19th century, most families were “extended” families that lived together under one roof. It wasn’t just mom & dad & their kids, it was mom & dad & dad’s siblings & dad’s siblings’ spouses and all their kids, and maybe mom’s siblings & mom’s siblings’ spouses and their kids too, with the occasional gramma and grampa sitting around in the rocking chair complaining about the government. That’s why Victorian houses were traditionally so huge – not because of a love of excess, but because of a basic need for that much space.
It was only during Westward Expansion in the U.S., with pioneers setting off with only their wives and children to settle the untamed frontier, that nuclear families started catching on.
Sure, tracer, but who has the possiblity of that much extended family close by these days? Some lucky few, I suppose–actually, my parents live a mile away and it’s great–but for many single-parent homes, the single parent is it as far as reliable, permanent caregivers go. In the context of the modern world and whether marriage is a good idea, it’s a valid point.
So where are all the folks who were trashing marriage in teh IMHO thread?
You won’t find me trashing marriage; it’s been a wholly wonderful and positive experience for me, sorry 'bout that.
I didn’t see much trashing of marriage in the other thread. I mainly saw a lot of people feeling free to express their feelings that marriage is not for them. I didn’t see anybody saying that all marriage is bad.
This isn’t because of a lack of opportunity. This is because of the social stigma against moving back in with your parents, or not moving out in the first place, after you have kids.
Remove the social stigma, and the extended families of old can come screaming back like there’s no tomorrow. In which case the kids of the single parent will have plenty of live-in adult role models to choose from.
Marriage will never be an outmoded institution. It’s the best way societies have been able to devise to rear children and preserve the wealth of families.
“and preserve the wealth of families”?
Heck, every culture on Earth seems to have different rules as to what wealth goes to which spouse. Some cultures have a dowry, where the bride’s family pays the groom. Other cultures have a bride price, where the groom (or the groom’s family) pays the bride’s parents. Britain once had a law of “dower” wherein a female widow automatically got 1/3 of her dead husband’s estate for the rest of her life, but that was by no means a general rule. How does every society’s institution of marriage preserve the wealth of families?
Here’s a spitback of Bill Maher’s opinion of mariage (Politically Incorrect):
Marriage is a very outdated institution. It was created so that there could be alliances and for division of land. All marriages used to be arranged based on how much money you could get from the other side…you traded your kids for wealth. It was not supposed to be this big romantic thing until just recently, when it was made out to be this great, romantic thing.
People change. Why hitch youyrself to one and only one person for the rest of your life (when the institution of marriage was created, it wasn’t 70-85 years you had to spend with the other person, it was just 40 or so)? This is why we see so many divorces…it’s almost impossible to stay together and find your perfect mate early in life.
Tracer, that would be great (for people who like their families, anyway…). But currently, federal welfare laws in the US encourage young single moms to be living on their own–you can’t get as much support if you live with your family. I would very much like to see that change, since it results in so many young women living on their own trying to handle huge changes.
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