Marriage: Classic or Dud?

My guy was married once too. His was not so good. I think we'll both continue being part of the 'domestic partner' movement.

although, at the other friends' wedding reception last week we SCANDALISED some poor woman by telling her that, if we were still together in 2014, we'd be getting married. she said "that's so selfish, if you love each other you should do it now. what if you have children before then?" at the risk of sounding like Ally, what the hell?

My parents still together, got married when my dad was 26, my mom 22. By the time my dad was the age I am now (31), I was born. I grew up thinking that it's a lurvly thing and still think it, and I'm terribly pleased whenever someone I know and count as a good friend -- my cousins Mark and George, Dan, Nicole and so forth -- find that right person and get married. I think nothing less of folks who are together who aren't married, not at all, but however socialized I've been made to the concept of marriage, it still seems right to me, somehow. :-)

That my own romantic life is a collection of fits and starts and mistakes on my part is my own burden to bear -- and I admit lately it's been eating at me a bit. :-/ Beating back feelings of jealousy at those who have found someone who they can chat with intelligently aobut things and snuggle up cozily to as well is sometimes a chore, thought thankfully it's not a constant situation or dwelling point. Yet I fear I will have these long stretches of my life to look back on now where...*taps fingers together*...where someone else and I could have been making each other happy for years then and years to come, but those years of the past will never be returned or replaced. Yet maybe I needed time to grow into a certain maturity? Or maybe I still need it? But that time is still irrecoverable.

There was someone in my past who I was thinking about asking to marry -- it's not someone who reads the boards, but no names given due to googling worries -- but whether it was my indecision or her changing thoughts or more besides, it was never asked and things ended. Who knows what might have happened?

Hell, I don't even want to be in a relationship right now, much less get married anytime soon. (which has no bearing on how my date went -- we both had a good time, and will be seeing more of each other very likely) Of course, I still want to have a network of very close acquaintances... whether it's "friend" close or "physical" close. This could change, of course.

As for MARRIAGE: C or D? ULTIMATE Classique if both are crraazeee for each other after all this time and are excited to settle down. ULTIMATE Dud if done because of parental or general societal pressures (i.e. oh shit all my friends are getting married, I wanna get married now)

Personally, I don't see the point. It was much easier to get the tax break then if you were married, and we did get a few presents (rub, all of them), but the divorce was lots of trouble. It didn't cost me anything because I didn't hire a solicitor. Bizarrely, she did, at great expense (2-3 grand, I believe), because I was (her version) being deliberately obstructive and unfair. After lots of acrimonious legal argument, I accepted a proposal of her solicitors. It involves me paying rather less than my pre-solicitor offer, and with a longer deadline. Don't ask me. How much of this we'd have gone through without the legal business of marriage I don't know.

I think how you feel about marriage depends on how you feel about 'a total solution to various problems of human life'. The problems marriage solves are to do with sex, loneliness, feelings of pointlessness, feelings of incompleteness, feelings that you might never achieve alone what you might achieve as a team.

How you feel about marriage as 'the total solution' to these problems depends on how pressing the problems themselves are. For instance, I'm highly effective working on my own. I also have a good sex life when I'm single. I suffer very little from loneliness and never feel that my life is pointless. For someone like me, thriving on volatility and enjoying insecurity, marriage actually doesn't offer very much. It tends to make visible a lot of practical things which are invisible when you live alone. It also cuts you off from the education you get from having affairs with interesting people. (In theory! In practise, we know that marriage and affairs go together like strawberries and cream...) I also regret enormously the tendency of marriage to take some of the most interesting people out of social circulation. You don't see them around any more. Their views, their faces, their conversation is missed.

Personally, I'm attracted to communal living. Like the rock tour I'll be doing next month with a bunch of young gay / experimental musicians on my label. Ten sleeping bags on the floor, that's the life for me!

I would have thought that you could do sarcasm better than that, Momus.

My take on marriage as a legal institution: historically it only had to do with assuring the transfer of property from one generation to the next, to a legally "legitimate" heir. (And those matters are not to be dismissed lightly; if an unmarried couple has a child and one of the parents walks away from the relationship or dies, what guarantee of support does that child have from that parent or his/her estate?)

The various other benefits people ascribe to marriage (apart from promarriage social engineering policies, such as favorable tax policies) are cultural expectations; if they actually exist in a given marriage it's because both parties are cooperating with each other. That cooperation is not bestowed upon a couple by the marriage ceremony.

(Note: I'm deeply skeptical of marriage, because my parents' marriage didn't have much of anything to make the institution look terribly attractive.)

so if getting married minimises the amount of hassle in my life I am all for it.

I incline towards the idea that if you are going to have children you're probably better off doing it with someone you intend living with at least until they're grown up, and it can't do any harm to affirm that publicly in front of people. I don't think getting married serves any real purpose if you don't intend having children.

I don't accept the notion that marriage automatically turns any relationship into a patriarchal nightmare. Unhealthy relationships are unhealthy relationships regardless. Gay and lesbian couples can now marry here in the Netherlands, and rightly so. Asked why he wanted to marry his partner I heard a gay man talk about having his long-term relationship acknowledged, officially recognised, amongst their families, friends and the community they lived in. For those excellent reasons, Classic. For reasons of 'obligation' or outside pressure, Dud.

This is a bit weak Stevo - what would your wife think. One of? One of?. Or have I got my head in the clouds re:marriage.

I just asked her Nick, she didn't have a problem, felt 'honoured' in fact. 'The best thing I've done in my life' doesn't really fit. We'd already lived together for 6 years after all, and didn't think we were suddenly about to enter 'marital bliss', or some state of utopia, because we'd made marriage vows.

Not sure what 'the best thing I've done in my life' actually is though, (good question for a thread perhaps?)

when I was 22, I found myself in a psychiatric clinic for four months. In Australia. Unmarried. WIth a tattoo of an ex-girlfriend's name onm y right shoulder.

I'm nto sure what to think of marriage.

I don't really want to raise the spectre of "polyamory"/non-monogamy however I can't separate it from my views on marriage and I couldn't resist pointing out to Archel that for me the above is not a problem - the reverse assumption is, ie that because you (I) have a partner/boyfriend we are therefore not available for others. So from this perspective, marriage or saying my boyfriend was my husband would likely make this worse. Also, why not just refer to them as your wife/husband if it's just for strategic reasons of wanting to spurn advances?

This knowledge may make it very hard for me to trust people I would consider doing the marriage/ joint morgage thing. (even though they are in the minority and want nothing more than an ego boost)

the hebrew word for husband is baal

it more closely meens "one who rules over" or "the one who possesses" but I am told it has shades of rape in it

oh, okay. but that doesn't mean 'the one who rapes me,' it means 'master.' like the 'baal shem tov' was the 'master of a good name.' but yeah, obv some outdated gender ideas coded in that word for sure.

also baal peor - master of bowels, bc ppl worshipped him by defecating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy_of_Peor#Ba.27al_Pe.27or

I can't find a source for that now so idk. It definitely has unfeminist connotations regardless.

master of bowels!

I see it with my grandparents. Fuck they still bicker continuously after decades together.

Both dead now.

I don't really think that it's okay for intelligent, politically conscious young people to get married.

I like commitment. The feeling that there's an anchor in my life. The way you finish each other sentences. That he is there for me. I am there for him. The father of my children. How he changed me and I influence him. I like the shared memories. Something I didn't have as a (single) kid.

human relationships reify the socioeconomic structures that produce them

human relationships can deterritorialize, undermine, challenge those structures

we're all bundles of unthinking reification, mostly

anything that wakes us up for a second is a good

what if it wakes us up for a second and then stabs us to death?

beginning to think i'd lie back and embrace the knife

i liked the habitual, no shame in that

i like "mundane" better than "habitual" but yeah neither of those things is the enemy - this kind of objection to marriage is a kind of false consciousness argument which is usually contingent on a reasonably crummy notion of the authentic

which isn't to say that the authentic can't also be a valuable metric or vision

might marry for the tax breaks but I resent the hell out of them tbh

other than that idk there's an awful lot of shitty marriages and leaving them seems prohibitive for a number of reasons that may not apply to less formal unions (many (most?) of which may also be shitty)

the original argument isn't about the formal structures but about any iteration of union of two souls i think

was referring to:
http://cdn4.pitchfork.com/albums/19042/homepage_large.0aadd916.jpg

lol passing me by

You can say that about any institution though. Doing so completely ignores structural aspects of the institution.

With a marriage, unlike most institutions, there are only two members who must find common ground and make common cause. Because you are in control of half the membership and have only one other person to work with, the chances that you can make your marriage responsive to your mutual needs is quite high, if you start in a good place and are willing to work at it maintaining it.

As for "structural aspects", other than a few legally defined obligations, I think you do not understand the degree to which the private aspects and understandings in a marriage are the hidden body of the iceberg, while the public parts are the tip. Even children who live in the same house as their parents get to see less than half of what passes between their parents. That is, unless the marriage is so completely broken that there is no private understanding that remains between the spouses, only a void filled with resentment and animosity.

no private understanding that remains between the spouses, only a void filled with resentment and animosity.

― Aimless, Tuesday, 10 June 2014 18:14 (11 minutes ago)

that is the sort of marriage to be aspired to, please don't denigrate it

its the ideal as demonstrated to my litter anyways

and it remains to be seem whether you would have had the hunger and drive to become one of i love football's most frequently cited poster's without it

lol it recently occurred to me that I strongly feel I would rather get married to someone than live with them. It's not the commitment I fear, it's the cohabitation.

an awful lot of shitty marriages

Yeah, but you see a lot of awful relationships too, no doubt. Also, that is just a moment. It can pass (divorce or they work it out). I have had shitty moments. Thing is, we worked it out. Also, I am happy I saw my parents have their crappy times. It taught me that it's okay to fight.

Like I think it's a choice that tends to isolate people inside a sad little social atom and make them get older and sadder and more lonely more quickly, and I think even when the particular choice to marry this person now is positive and loving, the broader life project to retreat into another nuclear family is often borne of lack of imagination plus a very deep fear. To be clear it's not the legal institution I have a problem with but the ethical form, the lifestyle, the commitment and domesticity--the decision to prioritize a single permanent (often stagnant) relationship with one other person over the twin possibilities of being engaged in a larger world of friendships and connections, on the one hand, and learning to be okay with aloneness on the other. I get the various psychological and economic pressures that lead people in that direction, but it's just not a decision for which I can muster respect.

this guy seems like a real jerk

ime strong nuclear families are attached to broader extended families which can keep the smaller unit from spinning into total isolation

tho families do constitute exclusive communities that a radical egalitarian might have trouble squaring w/ their particular utopian project

Often the root of family tragedies: they are isolated, don't have any support,...

I don't really think that it's okay for intelligent, politically conscious young people to get married.

I can't really get past the blinkered judgdmentalism of this opening sentence, sorry. Only assholes say things like this.

"oh like you guys are in love and want kids and to live together for a long time and shit? HOW UNINTELLIGENT AND POLITICALLY IRRESPONSIBLE OF YOU"

"how dare you decide to hurt yourselves in this way"

Honestly, who took his banter seriously? I think it's hilarious.

there's a strange transactional concept of relationships underlying his critique of marriage as transactional. feel like he's saying the return on investment isn't enough, whether in some sense of social capital ("connections") or political effectivity.

child-rearing does not seem to have crossed this guy's mind, lol

families are kinda the last bastion of acceptable exclusivity + prejudice. no one can really fairly criticize you for privileging your relations above strangers. in that sense it sorta platonically reifies all failures of egalitarianism. i wonder if this accounts for why the reactionary right is historically so gung-ho about family and the radical left so dismissive.

Hm. Marriage/families also extend the self? Like your spouse (esp, traditionally, if you are a man) is you/yours, your children are extensions of you/yours, but also enough not-you that when you sacrifice your individual self for them, it's framed as a self-less act.

Anyway, maybe there's something to the conservative affinity for the amplification/extension of self and the permission to prioritize the individual/individual loyalties over wider ones.

historically spouse + children in marriage are more extensions of the self bc of property than bc of selfless sacrifice of the individual. i think you're right that some selflessness has always been present, and i think it's more characterized that way in modernity, but i think the original impulse of marriage is essentially restrictive. but i think that can be a good/powerful/protective thing to have.

(not that treating your spouse like chattel is productive - but that this kind of loyalty, incorporation of the family into the self, etc, can be)

really doe

so many of my left-leaning friends, their child-having especially seems ethically suspect

they can't come up with much better justifications than 'having children was important to me', 'it's just something i wanted to do'

and of course along with the kid comes all kind of social and economic entrenchment, whatever they say about teaching their kid to share and eat cruelty-free chicken fingers

i think i once got trenchant social commentaried for saying that having children is an ultimately selfish act. def reactionary from a biological/survival pov.

first week on the freshman dorms i was fascinated to meet a young woman who was vigorously pro-zero-population-growth

now she is a stay-at-home catholic mother of four

it's not real clear that the world is better off that way

totally unrelated anecdote but that reminds me of a woman i know who was doing her doctoral research on satmar chassidim and ultimately she dropped out of the program, became satmar and now has like 9 kids.

that's dedicated flunking

"oh like you guys are in love and want kids and to live together for a long time and shit?

ya why get married tho

lots of good posts from hurting! i agree that this dude is making sweeping generalizations and is presenting a pretty narrow and reductive assessment of marriage and that he is an arrogant asshole. at the same time i think hurting is right that he may have at least an insight or two.

i'm generally happy in my marriage but there are plenty of times when i do feel like we live in a little isolated social atom. i feel like there are a lot of opportunities when i would have otherwise initiated friendships or accepted offers to hang out or asked a colleague to get a beer after work or see an art show on the weekend or whatever, but i decline because it feels like too much effort to coordinate plans with my wife, tell her about my schedule, talk about who will take care of our son, and balance my need for outside connection with hers. this seemed like a problem even before we had kids but now it feels even worse. it feels burdensome on the other partner if one of us spontaneously drops news that he/she won't be home for dinner that night. it still happens but not that much, feels like we have to plan a week or more out to make things happen with our respective friends.

feels even harder when we try to make plans with another couple, you have four adults' schedules to work around plus kids' naps and bedtimes. we have close friends in the city who we see maybe every 1-2 months, it's kind of sad, but it seems impossible to think about how that could be any different.

befriend your neighbors, institute weekly community gatherings

At the same time, with my friends no longer in their late 20s but in their mid to late 30s, I notice something -- an anecdotal thing but a pretty consistent one, which is that my married friends seem to be doing better financially and their lives seem to be developing in better directions lately than my single friends, many of whom are financially struggling, feeling lonely anyway, and feeling like the dating pickins are getting slimmer. Correlation =/= causation of course. I envied my single friends when I was in my late 20s and I don't now. Maybe I will again in my 40s, who knows. I miss the freer-form, more porous social structure of college and post-college sometimes. I miss the feeling that you could impromptu show up at someone's house or they at yours and you didn't feel like you were invading or being invaded, or like you were a "guest" in some formal sense. But at the same time my single friends don't seem to have that anymore. It could be that they are unhappy precisely because, with marriage as the default mode of existing as you get older, their social circles have thinned out and they face the judgment of everyone.

lots of otm here. i miss that sense of community and connectedness that fostered lots of spontaneous, free-form hanging out that i had in college and a few years after that. it was awesome. i wasn't single then; my wife and i started dating in college but it felt like our relationship was grounded in a community of people. we always were hanging out with a group of friends. shit feels a little isolating some times now.

i feel like there are a lot of opportunities when i would have otherwise initiated friendships or accepted offers to hang out or asked a colleague to get a beer after work or see an art show on the weekend or whatever, but i decline because it feels like too much effort to coordinate plans with my wife, tell her about my schedule, talk about who will take care of our son, and balance my need for outside connection with hers

Right, this. Once it becomes logistically complicated, and once there's all that negotiation and balance to work out, it sometimes becomes easier to just not make the plans. Or you feel like "I don't want to spend the goodwill on this one, it's not worthwhile enough." This is 5x moreso with kids than without.

We are lucky enough to have made a few friends who live very close by and have kids. We live right across the street from the playground/park and meet a lot of families who also live right around here. It's starting to become easier now that we're settling into the neighborhood to just say "hey, bring your kids over" on the spot or to get invited over on the spot. Kids can help you kind of lower your social barriers and break down expectations wrt formal get-togethers. Come over for frozen pizza and show up in your shorts and flip-flops, we're all tired parents here, etc.

Yeah having other casual parent friends is key

i find that we become friends w/ a lot of parents with whom i share very few things in common except that it's convenient to hang out w/ them and our kids go to school together. luckily i find alcohol + sports are pretty popular among almost all adult couples.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/marriage-abduction

I thought this was interesting, if maybe a little panicked and handwringy.