Share Dialog
Share Dialog
I’m at that age where it feels like all my friends are getting married. My Instagram feed is a deluge of engagement posts and the only times I will see my friends who live far away is at weddings. Everyone is asking when me and my boyfriend will get married, since it’s the hot thing to do. The question feels strange and random more than anything else. Falling in love with him so early was one of the major blessings of my life, and it’s bizarre to have the parents who told you to leave the door open when you hung out in high school to now ask when they are getting grandchildren. But c’est la vie I guess.
All of this has me thinking a lot about what it means to get married. Since it’s getting shoved down my throat and is seemingly compulsory, I want to understand what the institution is. That exploration is the topic of this essay.
Marriage historically has been about the survival of our species— in order for us to continue to populate this planet a man needs to knock up a woman to produce the next generation. It’s tidier for society if the two are bound together in some legal contract beforehand. Society wanted people to get married before they had sex, otherwise who would be responsible for a bunch of bastard children running around?
In its oldest form, marriage was a strategic play. Before we had central governments maintaining law and order marriages would cement alliances between families and tribes. These relationships were not about love but about survival. Your army is not going to invade neighboring lands if your daughter is living in the castle with her kids. Women didn’t have to consent to these marriages and they were arranged by the adults in her life, often when she was very young.
Fast forward to a couple centuries ago, society has organized central governments but women don’t have the rights to participate in the economic system so we had to get married to survive.
Men needed women to carry their kids and so they went out into the marriage market, found a bride, negotiated a good dowry price and after a promise before God to take care of her consummated the marriage to start making babies. At this point in history, men are driven into marriage not for security but for reproduction. Women still have to participate because they have no other way to secure food and shelter, if not through a husband.
I’m at that age where it feels like all my friends are getting married. My Instagram feed is a deluge of engagement posts and the only times I will see my friends who live far away is at weddings. Everyone is asking when me and my boyfriend will get married, since it’s the hot thing to do. The question feels strange and random more than anything else. Falling in love with him so early was one of the major blessings of my life, and it’s bizarre to have the parents who told you to leave the door open when you hung out in high school to now ask when they are getting grandchildren. But c’est la vie I guess.
All of this has me thinking a lot about what it means to get married. Since it’s getting shoved down my throat and is seemingly compulsory, I want to understand what the institution is. That exploration is the topic of this essay.
Marriage historically has been about the survival of our species— in order for us to continue to populate this planet a man needs to knock up a woman to produce the next generation. It’s tidier for society if the two are bound together in some legal contract beforehand. Society wanted people to get married before they had sex, otherwise who would be responsible for a bunch of bastard children running around?
In its oldest form, marriage was a strategic play. Before we had central governments maintaining law and order marriages would cement alliances between families and tribes. These relationships were not about love but about survival. Your army is not going to invade neighboring lands if your daughter is living in the castle with her kids. Women didn’t have to consent to these marriages and they were arranged by the adults in her life, often when she was very young.
Fast forward to a couple centuries ago, society has organized central governments but women don’t have the rights to participate in the economic system so we had to get married to survive.
Men needed women to carry their kids and so they went out into the marriage market, found a bride, negotiated a good dowry price and after a promise before God to take care of her consummated the marriage to start making babies. At this point in history, men are driven into marriage not for security but for reproduction. Women still have to participate because they have no other way to secure food and shelter, if not through a husband.
Women play up the fun parts of marriage, we enjoy the courting and the dresses and the party to make the most of the situation. But at the end of the day, we were damsels in distress and needed a man to save us from the life of a spinster.
I have this bit that the modern conception of romance is a fairy tale women told themselves to feel better about our oppressed state. If someone can find a romantic story in our canon (ie Cinderella, pretty woman) where the female love interest already has everything she wants and doesn’t need a man for anything, I’d love to hear it.
Let’s also consider that originally a marriage was a covenant in the eyes of God. What does it mean now to get married if you are not religious? Who are you making a promise in front of? I think ultimately it’s friends and family, but shouldn’t that trust and sense of belonging come from showing up for each other’s families time after time, and not just a one time speech at an altar? What is the point of going through the motions of a ritual that was grounded in religion in the absence of that religion? It just does not add up for me, but that’s a whole other essay.
Sure there were sometimes love matches (queue Bridgerton) but fundamentally marriage was a financial transaction in which the woman was bought from her family and sold to a man to have his kids. We see this in the traditions that still exist today: the groom asks the bride’s father before he proposes and then the father walks her down the aisle to hand her off. She wears a ring before he does to indicate she’s claimed. She takes his last name, and so do her kids.
I went on a history tour recently and learned about a woman in Virginia in the 1800’s who was married at 14, had 10 kids, and then died at 24 because of the strain child rearing had on her body. When I asked why that happened, the tour guide didn’t really bat an eye “that’s just what life was like, they needed to populate the colony”. She never learned to read or write and she was chosen for the marriage by the groom’s mother based on the quality of a ceremonial offering she made for her. I’m 24 now, a college educated engineer, and the idea that I could be on the brink of death because of the strain of bearing 10 kids sounds like hell. My aim is not to critique the past, but to consider if this is an institution that still makes sense for us.
Cut to modern day. Thank god for feminism, I have a job where I can support myself (and one day my children), there is a central government with an army and police force that (for the most part) ensures my physical security. There’s not really anything I need to survive that I can’t provide for myself. Oh and I’ve been on birth control for years, so I control when I have kids and who I have them with without being completely celibate. What would drive a person like me into a marriage, an institution historically designed to benefit men at the expense of the woman’s well-being?
An object in motion stays in motion, and this institution has been part of our culture for so long, it won’t go away now that it’s no longer relevant. Marriage existed in almost every culture, across continents and time periods. Our parents and grandparents want us to get married because it’s proper. I had an older cousin anxiously say to me “maybe you and your partner will have kids out of wedlock, I don’t know about your generation” which even as the seemingly radical feminist that I am, made me seize at how wrong that sounded. Legacy software sticks around even after we have something better, we still have vestigial organs like appendices even though all they do now is get infected. I think this is one of those irrational bugs about life and evolution.
Admittedly this is the one I find most appealing, a wedding is a great excuse to throw a big party. In a moment in history where everything is changing, it’s nice to have traditions we can do that our grandparents and their grandparents did before us. There’s no other excuse to force all the people you love to come together at the same time and celebrate love. The global wedding industry is $1.3T a year. It’s a fixture of a life and one of those life experiences that I don’t want to miss out on. All of the adults I know have had one (or two) and talk about the experience for the rest of their lives.
This is just plain pragmatism. Our society is structured such that life partners are supposed to be married. If you visit someone at a hospital, the policy is only family members are allowed in. When you file taxes, you get a benefit for filing with your spouse (one that is notably diminishing in recent years). It’s easier to buy a house as a married couple rather than two people who have no preexisting legal relationship. We built a society around the hetero couple, and it’s easier for two individuals to navigate life together if they are officially married in the eyes of the government.
In the end I’ll probably end up doing it. I have someone I want to go through life with, and making our partnership official to our families and in the eyes of the law makes life easier. The performance of a wedding will make our families happy and save us from judgemental eyes, as if getting up in front of a crowd and declaring all the things we say in private will change the way we feel about each other. At the end of the day we all are in a negotiation with our society, we can’t make all the changes we want to in a single generation. But in writing this down I want people to think more critically about the institution of marriage and in doing so take love seriously.
When I go on these feminist rants, I get the impression that I come off as cold and bitter and unloving, but it’s quite the opposite. I love love, in the deepest spiritual senseI think it’s the point of why we are all on this earth. Love is the guiding force in my life and whenever I have to make a decision I think to myself which feels the most like choosing love. It is for this reason that I critique marriage, marriage was never about love it was about survival. What would love look like in a world without marriage?
What scares me the most about wedding culture today is the way young women talk about marriage, like it’s a box to check. It’s a race to get a ring on your finger, if you get too old before someone wants to marry you you are a less valuable human being. People talk about it like it’s a competition in the same way getting a job is a competition. You go to a party because “hus is there” and the goal is “husband hunting”. People are on dating apps to find a wife to settle down with, it’s a prerequisite to the life they want and they just need to find a warm body to fill the other role.
The really scary reality is you don’t control when love walks into your life. I love my boyfriend so much and for a lot of our relationship it was wildly inconvenient. A friend of mine was into him and called dibs before me. He and I were best friends, and I didn’t want to risk ruining the friendship (queue Taylor Swift, always ruin the friendship) when I finally worked up the courage to make a move, it created drama in my friend group for months. Then we went to college on separate coasts and it physically hurt to be so far apart for so many years, but I pushed myself to be present where I was and make the most out of my college experience. Love is something that happens to you and then you build your life around it. You don’t get to decide when you are ready and walk into a store and buy the best one you can afford off the shelf. It’s a blessing and you have no control over when you get it or what it looks like.
I won’t claim to know what love is for other people, but in my world view the two fundamental human emotions are love and fear. Love is present and fills up your soul; fear is living in the future or past, try to heal your past self or protect your future self. Love and fear are always in opposition, and the internal struggle I face is to keep out fear to protect love. When I’m feeling the most loving in my relationship, I am so in the moment. I am gushing with gratitude that I get to live alongside this person, I am not scrambling to lock it down with a ring. If anything, I am thinking about how I want to live in this moment forever, not how I want to brag about it in front of my friends and family. The times that I want to get married are when people make judgmental comments about us living together and not being married, or I realize that he could walk away at any time. The urge to get married is usually motivated by fear, and isn’t present in my most loving moments.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. — Martin Luther King Jr
For most of history, marriage came first and love came second. We married because it was strategic or convenient or necessary, and then hopefully grew a love within that new life. Since the enlightenment we have allowed love to be a guiding force, and having love come before marriage, but we haven’t stopped to consider how that fundamentally changes our social structures.
I think we would all be better off if we took love seriously. If we didn’t say things like “he’s not my type” or “I got the ick” or make lists to describe our dream partners, like people are Frankenstein we can design. What if the cadence of a relationship wasn’t finding someone you find attractive, mutually evaluating if you can stand each other as if dating was some sort of an audition, and then entering into a contract to say you won’t ever leave, wiping your hands like you are done with the matter? What if we really internalized that love is a feeling we are blessed with, one that needs to be protected with intention, and is something that might go away as quickly as it appears?
A snippet from the movie The Materialist —
Patricia: I mean look at me. I’m a catch.Match maker: Patricia, I know that every year you go without having a husband… raises your expectations for him exponentially.But that doesn’t mean that you’re due to get one. And it doesn’t mean that you can customize… because this is not a simulation. If the service I was providing you was building you a man then, of course, I could build you a man with everything on this list…But I can’t. Because this is not a car or a house. We’re talking about people.People are people are people are people. They come as they are. And all I can hope to find for you is a man that you can tolerate for the next 50 years who likes you at all. And you are not a catch… because you are not a fish.
The idea that love is fleeting is the scariest reality of all. Love is famously hard to describe and I know it when I see it, but I don’t know if you are entitled to it forever just because you feel it at one point in time. People are allowed to grow and change, sometimes in different directions. We all have different life experiences that shape who we are. What if we had the freedom to really become ourselves, in whichever direction life takes us, and not feel like we have to mold ourselves to someone else no matter what? When would it be ok to mutually and peacefully exit a long term relationship because the love has been lost, and not to place blame on any individual but to accept that experience as one of the hard realities of life? Should we be bound to endlessly try and make it work with the same person, just because it worked at one point in time, or should we free each other to find love again elsewhere? I don’t even have the answers to these questions for myself, let alone everyone else, but I think we should seriously consider them.
In the same way people who are faced with their own mortality report more life satisfaction, I think being honest about the realities of love would allow us to savor it more. I want to live in a world where people view each day in love as a gift instead of a means to an end, where people trace the edges of their relationships and soak it up the way we stand in front of a great work of art, letting all the details wash over us. I hope someday my kids live in a world that takes love seriously, not just marriage.
Women play up the fun parts of marriage, we enjoy the courting and the dresses and the party to make the most of the situation. But at the end of the day, we were damsels in distress and needed a man to save us from the life of a spinster.
I have this bit that the modern conception of romance is a fairy tale women told themselves to feel better about our oppressed state. If someone can find a romantic story in our canon (ie Cinderella, pretty woman) where the female love interest already has everything she wants and doesn’t need a man for anything, I’d love to hear it.
Let’s also consider that originally a marriage was a covenant in the eyes of God. What does it mean now to get married if you are not religious? Who are you making a promise in front of? I think ultimately it’s friends and family, but shouldn’t that trust and sense of belonging come from showing up for each other’s families time after time, and not just a one time speech at an altar? What is the point of going through the motions of a ritual that was grounded in religion in the absence of that religion? It just does not add up for me, but that’s a whole other essay.
Sure there were sometimes love matches (queue Bridgerton) but fundamentally marriage was a financial transaction in which the woman was bought from her family and sold to a man to have his kids. We see this in the traditions that still exist today: the groom asks the bride’s father before he proposes and then the father walks her down the aisle to hand her off. She wears a ring before he does to indicate she’s claimed. She takes his last name, and so do her kids.
I went on a history tour recently and learned about a woman in Virginia in the 1800’s who was married at 14, had 10 kids, and then died at 24 because of the strain child rearing had on her body. When I asked why that happened, the tour guide didn’t really bat an eye “that’s just what life was like, they needed to populate the colony”. She never learned to read or write and she was chosen for the marriage by the groom’s mother based on the quality of a ceremonial offering she made for her. I’m 24 now, a college educated engineer, and the idea that I could be on the brink of death because of the strain of bearing 10 kids sounds like hell. My aim is not to critique the past, but to consider if this is an institution that still makes sense for us.
Cut to modern day. Thank god for feminism, I have a job where I can support myself (and one day my children), there is a central government with an army and police force that (for the most part) ensures my physical security. There’s not really anything I need to survive that I can’t provide for myself. Oh and I’ve been on birth control for years, so I control when I have kids and who I have them with without being completely celibate. What would drive a person like me into a marriage, an institution historically designed to benefit men at the expense of the woman’s well-being?
An object in motion stays in motion, and this institution has been part of our culture for so long, it won’t go away now that it’s no longer relevant. Marriage existed in almost every culture, across continents and time periods. Our parents and grandparents want us to get married because it’s proper. I had an older cousin anxiously say to me “maybe you and your partner will have kids out of wedlock, I don’t know about your generation” which even as the seemingly radical feminist that I am, made me seize at how wrong that sounded. Legacy software sticks around even after we have something better, we still have vestigial organs like appendices even though all they do now is get infected. I think this is one of those irrational bugs about life and evolution.
Admittedly this is the one I find most appealing, a wedding is a great excuse to throw a big party. In a moment in history where everything is changing, it’s nice to have traditions we can do that our grandparents and their grandparents did before us. There’s no other excuse to force all the people you love to come together at the same time and celebrate love. The global wedding industry is $1.3T a year. It’s a fixture of a life and one of those life experiences that I don’t want to miss out on. All of the adults I know have had one (or two) and talk about the experience for the rest of their lives.
This is just plain pragmatism. Our society is structured such that life partners are supposed to be married. If you visit someone at a hospital, the policy is only family members are allowed in. When you file taxes, you get a benefit for filing with your spouse (one that is notably diminishing in recent years). It’s easier to buy a house as a married couple rather than two people who have no preexisting legal relationship. We built a society around the hetero couple, and it’s easier for two individuals to navigate life together if they are officially married in the eyes of the government.
In the end I’ll probably end up doing it. I have someone I want to go through life with, and making our partnership official to our families and in the eyes of the law makes life easier. The performance of a wedding will make our families happy and save us from judgemental eyes, as if getting up in front of a crowd and declaring all the things we say in private will change the way we feel about each other. At the end of the day we all are in a negotiation with our society, we can’t make all the changes we want to in a single generation. But in writing this down I want people to think more critically about the institution of marriage and in doing so take love seriously.
When I go on these feminist rants, I get the impression that I come off as cold and bitter and unloving, but it’s quite the opposite. I love love, in the deepest spiritual senseI think it’s the point of why we are all on this earth. Love is the guiding force in my life and whenever I have to make a decision I think to myself which feels the most like choosing love. It is for this reason that I critique marriage, marriage was never about love it was about survival. What would love look like in a world without marriage?
What scares me the most about wedding culture today is the way young women talk about marriage, like it’s a box to check. It’s a race to get a ring on your finger, if you get too old before someone wants to marry you you are a less valuable human being. People talk about it like it’s a competition in the same way getting a job is a competition. You go to a party because “hus is there” and the goal is “husband hunting”. People are on dating apps to find a wife to settle down with, it’s a prerequisite to the life they want and they just need to find a warm body to fill the other role.
The really scary reality is you don’t control when love walks into your life. I love my boyfriend so much and for a lot of our relationship it was wildly inconvenient. A friend of mine was into him and called dibs before me. He and I were best friends, and I didn’t want to risk ruining the friendship (queue Taylor Swift, always ruin the friendship) when I finally worked up the courage to make a move, it created drama in my friend group for months. Then we went to college on separate coasts and it physically hurt to be so far apart for so many years, but I pushed myself to be present where I was and make the most out of my college experience. Love is something that happens to you and then you build your life around it. You don’t get to decide when you are ready and walk into a store and buy the best one you can afford off the shelf. It’s a blessing and you have no control over when you get it or what it looks like.
I won’t claim to know what love is for other people, but in my world view the two fundamental human emotions are love and fear. Love is present and fills up your soul; fear is living in the future or past, try to heal your past self or protect your future self. Love and fear are always in opposition, and the internal struggle I face is to keep out fear to protect love. When I’m feeling the most loving in my relationship, I am so in the moment. I am gushing with gratitude that I get to live alongside this person, I am not scrambling to lock it down with a ring. If anything, I am thinking about how I want to live in this moment forever, not how I want to brag about it in front of my friends and family. The times that I want to get married are when people make judgmental comments about us living together and not being married, or I realize that he could walk away at any time. The urge to get married is usually motivated by fear, and isn’t present in my most loving moments.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. — Martin Luther King Jr
For most of history, marriage came first and love came second. We married because it was strategic or convenient or necessary, and then hopefully grew a love within that new life. Since the enlightenment we have allowed love to be a guiding force, and having love come before marriage, but we haven’t stopped to consider how that fundamentally changes our social structures.
I think we would all be better off if we took love seriously. If we didn’t say things like “he’s not my type” or “I got the ick” or make lists to describe our dream partners, like people are Frankenstein we can design. What if the cadence of a relationship wasn’t finding someone you find attractive, mutually evaluating if you can stand each other as if dating was some sort of an audition, and then entering into a contract to say you won’t ever leave, wiping your hands like you are done with the matter? What if we really internalized that love is a feeling we are blessed with, one that needs to be protected with intention, and is something that might go away as quickly as it appears?
A snippet from the movie The Materialist —
Patricia: I mean look at me. I’m a catch.Match maker: Patricia, I know that every year you go without having a husband… raises your expectations for him exponentially.But that doesn’t mean that you’re due to get one. And it doesn’t mean that you can customize… because this is not a simulation. If the service I was providing you was building you a man then, of course, I could build you a man with everything on this list…But I can’t. Because this is not a car or a house. We’re talking about people.People are people are people are people. They come as they are. And all I can hope to find for you is a man that you can tolerate for the next 50 years who likes you at all. And you are not a catch… because you are not a fish.
The idea that love is fleeting is the scariest reality of all. Love is famously hard to describe and I know it when I see it, but I don’t know if you are entitled to it forever just because you feel it at one point in time. People are allowed to grow and change, sometimes in different directions. We all have different life experiences that shape who we are. What if we had the freedom to really become ourselves, in whichever direction life takes us, and not feel like we have to mold ourselves to someone else no matter what? When would it be ok to mutually and peacefully exit a long term relationship because the love has been lost, and not to place blame on any individual but to accept that experience as one of the hard realities of life? Should we be bound to endlessly try and make it work with the same person, just because it worked at one point in time, or should we free each other to find love again elsewhere? I don’t even have the answers to these questions for myself, let alone everyone else, but I think we should seriously consider them.
In the same way people who are faced with their own mortality report more life satisfaction, I think being honest about the realities of love would allow us to savor it more. I want to live in a world where people view each day in love as a gift instead of a means to an end, where people trace the edges of their relationships and soak it up the way we stand in front of a great work of art, letting all the details wash over us. I hope someday my kids live in a world that takes love seriously, not just marriage.
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