Why Marriage?
Be careful.
Spring has finally arrived, and with it — perhaps — love, and even marriage. As a Frank Sinatra song, written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, affirmed:
Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
This I tell you, brother,
You can’t have one without the other.
These days, though, love and marriage are often uncoupled. People in love often just live together, “shacking up.” Married people are often no longer in love. The institution of marriage has weakened; divorce rates have soared.
Having myself married a couple of times and cohabited a couple of times and having thought about the difference, I offer some observations.
Marriage is a contract. In marriage, Jane and John are going to be a little corporation, sharing the benefits and obligations thereof. They believe that each will contribute and each will benefit, over the long run, and that there will be a long run, so that their contributions will not seem wasted. They know that it will not be easy to break the contract, and they have some idea what the consequences would be if they did.
If children occur, as one might put it, parental and child interests will have predictable protections…or should have. In sickness and in old age, they will help each other to survive. Hopefully, they will carry out their obligations out of love, not just duty, but these obligations will have some legal enforceability, if necessary.
One of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, wrote half-seriously, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Legal obligations are like fences, setting boundaries that help people behave better and that allow legal appeal and remedies when they misbehave. If we were angels, we wouldn’t need laws.
Not everybody is allowed to marry whomever. A valid contract requires “informed consent,” and government defines the criteria for this through law and legal precedent.
“Informed” requires information and the ability to process it. Marriages can be invalidated, annulled, if fraud or gross error can be demonstrated…for example, bigamy. In certain other cases, “hidden defects” might qualify for this legal dissolution. Below some level of awareness and intellect, set by law, individuals are not deemed capable of making valid contracts.
Consent must be voluntary. Children must be above the “age of consent” to marry. Brother-sister, father-daughter and mother-son marriages are prohibited by law partly due to the likelihood of genetic abnormalities in any offspring and partly, in the parent-child cases, due to the presumption that the child could not be expected to make a wholly voluntary judgment. Of course, most religious traditions oppose such incestuous marriages, too.
America has outlawed polygamy [multiple wives] and polyandry [multiple husbands], though some countries have not. Anecdotes about polygamy suggest that women tend to be placed in disadvantageous positions in such marriages and that lower-status men find it especially difficult to acquire mates. That polyandry is much rarer than polygamy suggests that polygamy is largely a result of male dominance. Generally, men tend to be polygamous [or promiscuous?] and women tend to prefer monogamy.
Can’t we all just get along? If we could, few rules would be needed. The law quickly gets involved when voluntary agreement breaks down: divorce and separation, domestic violence, incapacitation…. How shall responsibilities be assigned and enforced? We call in the lawyers. Children and their care add to the complexity. If we cannot work it out, the lawyers are called, bringing us back again to the law, its interpretation, the courts and the police…with government heavily involved, of necessity.
Marriage can be great or ghastly. Most are somewhere in between. Courtship is exciting, weddings are beautiful, “happily ever after” is possible…but when things go awry, you are likely to find yourself appealing to the law.
“Shacking up” has fewer rules, fewer protections, and much less poetry.
You’ve been warned.
Dr. Cooper is a retired scientist, now a writer, author and writing coach. His first book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion, was published by Outskirts Press in 2011 and is available from Outskirts Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, in paperback and ebook formats, as are his co-authored memoirs The Shield of Gold and Ava Gardner‘s Daughter? His writer-coaching web site is http://writeyourbookwithme.com.