A while ago, we had a medium-sized crisis involving one of our kids. One of the first thoughts that raced across my mind was “Just when I finally thought I had my act together — now this!!” Then I immediately caught myself. Would I rather it happen while I’m drowning in three other crises? Or when I feel like I’m in a position to let everything else slide for a bit while I focus on my child’s problem?
Meanwhile, my husband jumped up to the plate as well, and we both found solace and emotional replenishment in each other’s arms while dealing with the problem.
This incident came to mind when I read the following comment:
Excuses like the kids would want me to be happy that adults use to justify their divorce (news flash your kids dont give a damn if youre happy. Kind of like how you dont give a damn what they think about the divorce. Funny how that works).
Sure, most kids (being, by definition, immature) don’t consciously care much about other people’s happiness. But having the emotional and physical energy to deal with crises (as well as with day-to-day parenting) is not something you can fake or simply conjure up by force of will. It’s the parents’ responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment for their kids, and it’s the adults’ responsibility to figure out what they need to do to create that environment. It is the couple that knows whether their marriage is a source of comfort and solace or whether it is a source of additional stress, hindering the parents’ efforts to focus on their kids’ needs.
When people say that no-fault divorce is destroying the family, I take issue with that personally — because if it weren’t for no-fault divorce, I probably wouldn’t have the happy family that I have today. I remember thinking that if the point of restricting divorce is for the sake of the kids, I shouldn’t have even had the six-month waiting period for my no-fault divorce. If a childless couple has already decided to call it quits, the last thing you want to do is insist on giving them another opportunity to bring a child into this picture. Of course, even for couples with kids, if they’ve decided to split amicably, it’s not necessarily in the kids’ interest to insist on turning it into a fight.
Now, I know that the defenders of traditional marriage will say that the point is that if they create more obstacles to divorce, maybe the couple will choose not to divorce. Because that’s what a stress family needs: more obstacles. (Aside: A historian studying Victorian-era illegitimacy told me that there was a high rate of cohabitation and illegitimacy due to one or both partners being unable to obtain a divorce from an earlier union.)
Studies on kids’ “outcomes” have shown that kids whose parents stayed married do better than kids whose parents are divorced. But if these studies are used to tell people that they need to stay together “for the kids” (and they are used for that, consistently), then the fact that some of families in the “married” category actually didn’t even want to split up is a major factor that should not be glossed over. The only relevant studies are the ones that specifically compare outcomes of families where the parents wanted a divorce (but decided to stay together for the kids) to the outcomes of families where the parents divorced and cooperated in child rearing. And, to be credible, such studies should be free of major funding conflicts of interest.
Sometimes I get the impression that people who want to “defend” (heterosexual-only) marriage don’t really think very highly of marriage, even straight marriage (see this recent critique of straight marriages where the spouses are in love with each other). Personally, I think marriage is a commitment rather than a prison, and — even though it represents some amount of work — on balance it is a comfort and joy rather than a punishment.
At this point in my life, I am not a huge fan of marriage of any sort, gay or straight. Qualifying this, I have watched the hoops that people have to jump through to dissolve legal relationships-gone-wrong as a way of holding one or both of the partners hostage to the bad relationship. The adults often stay in relationships not for the children’s sakes, but because of other stigmatic factors and lack of emotional or financial support for single parents. When this happens, the fall-out for the kids has been horrific, since the custodial parent must deal with the break up of their relationship AND to try to mop up the mess of what his/her child is dealing with. I take care of a child who was created out of an affair that occurred because his father could not (would not) leave his marriage.
Chanson, you are right that children often seem so wrapped up in their own needs to see that a split is the very thing that will reduce the strain of adults cohabiting in a rubbish situation and those who support the institution of marriage (not necessarily the ideals of a committed and healthy relationship) use children’s egotism and inexperience to argue that the children will be irreversibly damaged by mummy and daddy’s divorce. What proponents of marriage fail to see is that children also fail when exposed to a loveless or antagonistic marriage.
As for those who argue that the destruction of the marriage is caused by no-fault divorces (it was gay marriage last week, remember?), divorce and marriage as should be equally easy or difficult to obtain, especially where there are only assets to divide not children to make arrangements for. A painful and difficult divorce guarantees that children will continue to suffer beyond the physical break between their parents.
BTW, I hope the crisis with your child has been sorted, chanson…
@1 — I totally agree, except that I am actively in favor of marriage**, especially with a happy, healthy marriage as an ideal.
@2 Thanks. I really don’t want to discuss it in detail on the Internet, but it is essentially sorted out.
** for people who want to get married, that is — not as something that people should be pressured into doing out of some misguided sense of duty.
chanson,
I suppose that people who want to get married do so for a variety of reasons. I think my parents said that they couldn’t wait to get married so that they could have sex. An honest answer, but probably not the best one for entering into a legal contract from which children would have most likely been produced after ejaculation number one!
BTW, what does ‘happy and healthy, as an ideal’ look like…does it even exist?
This article by Stephanie Coontz on no-fault divorce, although two years old, is worth revisiting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17coontz.html?_r=1&th&emc=th IN particular, this paragraph is worth noting:
I remember reading another article in a British newspaper a couple of years or so before that documenting the fact that children whose parents are in active conflict do MUCH better after the parents split. They go from having behavioral and health problems to being quite stable and happy within a matter of months, as long as the home provided by a single parent is settled and secure. Unfortunately I didn’t save the link, and I can’t find it by googling it, but it makes sense.
@ Holly:
Perhaps it is this one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/11/divorce-should-parents-stay-together
Nope, it’s this: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/dont-stay-together-for-the-kids-rowing-parents-told-1879980.html
A relevant paragraph:
Great post, and very true. You can’t fake a happy marriage, which makes it even more important to put off or not marry until you’re ready (or because you’re having “too much fun.”) Also to consider the commitment carefully before having children. I’m glad your crisis has passed.
OK, that piece doesn’t comment on the behavioral and health problems, but in some discussion I followed that was raised as well. anyway, the larger point is, I think, that Your Mileage May Vary.
It sucks to have surgery because A) it hurts and B) it’s always risky and C) anesthesia and the trauma are just plain bad for you, and having abdominal surgery can shave a few years off your life, it’s still better to have your gut cut open and a diseased appendix cut out than to die of appendicitis. In the same way, sometimes divorce, painful as it is, is still the best way for people to achieve genuine and lasting health.
Sorry to hear about your crisis and glad to hear everything is getting resolved. Anecdotally, I can say that growing up with parents that don’t seem to love each other is very stressful. And so, in certain circumstances, I do think divorce is the better option.
There is some research that shows that women and children do worse in economic terms after divorce. This is usually because a family takes a significant economic (standard of living) hit by maintaining two households instead of one. I don’t think that should be a factor in not allowing divorce, but rather figuring out a way to make the laws better and more equitable. But it is complicated. Sometimes divorces happen because in a bad relationship, parents also disagree about child-rearing. So one parent wants to remain home (if that was the prior agreement) and the other parent doesn’t want to support that standard of living. A good example that I’m familiar with is a family friend whose mom was so determined that they not sell the family home, they kept the home and could barely put food on the table with property taxes, upkeep. So no fault divorce won’t really stop some people from making bad decisions, or decisions with unintended consequences.
For all the angst, I agree that no fault divorce can really be the best solution. And it’s become so normalized, there’s not the same stigma for the kids (a good thing). Schools, communities, everything is now more open to accomodating blended and non traditional families (separate parent addresses, etc.) I think that the worse outcomes happen when one or both parents use kids as pawns in the divorce. Amicable divorce happens and is more common (and has more support from the community).
Finally, I like to tell the story about our ancestors who remained married but disliked one another so much, they wouldn’t eat together. Why did they remain married anyway? Life is short. And as their great great granddaughter, I’m not sure my life is affected either way.
Ideally, people commit to marriage if and when they want to make that commitment and they’re ready to make it (as opposed to choosing to marry out of social pressure or a sense of obligation).
Once married even though every relationship requires some amount of work on balance the relationship is more of a comfort and joy (to both parties) than a punishment.
does it even exist?
Not necessarily. That’s what I mean by calling it an ideal.
Naturally. I don’t aspire to prevent all bad decisions — far from it. I just want to avoid encouraging people to make bad decisions.
Or, once it becomes obvious that a mistake has been made, compounding the problem by refusing to let them cut their losses, do their best to rectify/ cope with the damage they’ve already done to their own lives and the lives of others, and try to make a better life by seeking out a situation that seems more likely to provide happiness at best, or at least not perpetuate the misery.
p.s. I don’t mean it’s an ideal in the sense of claiming that everyone should aspire to be married. My ideal is closer to “every marriage a happy marriage”. The belief that everyone ideally needs to be married is counter-productive — it encourages ill-advised marriages.
p.p.s. Great article links, thanks!!
@14 Exactly.
@ aerin: I think you are so right to note that women and children suffer most, financially, when divorce occurs and I think that’s what keeps a lot of women feeling ‘stuck’ in marriages that they do not want to be in or are toxic for them. Women tend to be (not always, but mostly) the caregiver who gains custody and who also continue to sacrifice the majority of money and time resources for the child(ren). This is not a tirade against men, but my beef is with the institution of marriage that sets out to create an inequality between men and women. That’s why I’m not really in favour of marriage, or at least the model that seems to be the most accepted and encouraged – which is borne out of archaic property law.
chanson, I think everyone would agree that, bottom line, a happy marriage is the ideal. However, there is a lot of explaining to do if the marriage you have doesn’t (in some shape or form) fit the model that is most recognised or encouraged. I guess that was why I asked about happiness and what does an ideal look like? Part of being happy is the well-being you feel from fitting in with a community and if the community approves of your family because they fit a mould, that’s cool and you win. If you do not reflect a community’s values, you do not fit and face a lot of pressure to conform, so there is a HUGE pressure to ‘fake it til you make it’, I think. I know LOADS of people who have had children and got married to make it easier for their children to navigate socially, at school. My boy’s mother and I have had far more input into his life than his father, but he loves to hear himself say the words ‘Mummy and Daddy’ because those are the words coming out of his friends’ mouths. It hurts, but I cannot fight against convention, even though our setup is far less toxic than some of his friends’ parents who still live together. I guess that’s primarily the reason that I don’t agree with marriage, straight or gay. I’d sure respect people’s right to get married but it seems to me too high a price to pay for what needs to be carefully thought out. As I said before, my parents got married (whirlwind engagement) so that they could have sex at 18. It wasn’t a bad decision but they got lucky and they worked hard on the marriage. Lucky for me, eh?
BTW, have you all heard of the hotels set up in Holland that allow for couples to check-in married and spend the weekend getting divorced?
http://www.divorcehotel.com/en/
@17 I’m just saying that this sort of commitment can be a very positive and rewarding thing for those people who want to make it.
The fact that the marriage is recognized as a family relationship by the community is indeed a component of marriage. However, if this is the cornerstone of your marriage, then your marriage doesn’t fit my definition of ideal.
Any time you do something that is outside of expected norms, you end up having to explain it to people. Yes, it’s annoying. But the phenomenon is not limited to marital-type situations. This is an argument for broadening people’s horizons and expectations, it’s not an argument for saying that people shouldn’t make a public commitment to each other.
Good, then I would advise you not to get married. See my comments above about how marriage shouldn’t be held up as the ideal for everyone.
Right, as I said, I don’t think people should be encouraged/pressured to jump into this kind of commitment when they’re not ready. Some couples get lucky, but I wouldn’t bet my future on it. I totally agree with your initial comment that it should be as hard to get into as it is to get out of.
Well, divorces tend to destroy families, but it’s not necessarily the case that they’re destroying the family, or that a given family can’t recover from a divorce and emerge in a new, better form. I speak from experience when I say that divorces that occur in mid-childhood are very difficult on the psyches of children because they’re used to the presence of an adult who is now not going to be in the home. In a best case scenario, children receive an additional home, but often this is not the case merely for geographical reasons. Also, depending on how many children there are, siblings might have to be split from each other (which was unfortunately the case in my childhood). Personally, I was affected pretty negatively by my parents’ divorce, but I’m sure I would’ve been affected negatively by their staying together, too.
As a gay person, I kinda separate the concept of “marriage” from the concept of “family-building,” since for gay people the two have not historically been linked. Basically, marriage historically has been a state contract (in 19th century Alabama, if you wanted a divorce, the state legislature would have to approve it by a 2/3 vote!). With no-fault divorce, marriage is now merely a demographic category with certain financial benefits afforded by the state. All the responsibilities of a relationship and child-rearing never actually required the state to begin with. In fact, I would say that marriage as an institution has a Machiavellian feeling to it; I find it a tad disconcerting that gay people are so eager to have their relationships “sanctioned” by the state. I disapprove of marriage on those big-brother terms, but of course I approve of it in terms of gay people forming homes, families, and yes, marriages.
Now that I’m approaching 30, I think I can safely say that a person doesn’t really begin adulthood until around age 30. The fact that people are waiting until later when they know themselves to marry and have kids is a good thing. In the world of Mormonism, I’m bothered by the continued push to have people marry young, but also by the new phenomenon of mixed-orientation marriages starting later in life. Like their heterosexual counterparts, gay folks are waiting until their 30s to marry an opposite-sex spouse when they know themselves better. Hopefully, before that becomes the official therapeutic standard for gay folks in the Church (“get married later in life”), there’ll be enough agitation to accept gay relationships.
I grew up a child in one of those marriages that stayed together “for the kids”. I don’t doubt for a minute that that was genuinely my parents’ motivation but I’m baffled why they thought an environment of constant hostility and recurring late night fights when they thought we were asleep (as though anyone could sleep through WWIII…) could benefit anyone.
The result was two miserable adults and 3 kids with, effectively, PTSD. Speaking for myself, I have virtually no self-esteem, I led a life as a chronic under achiever resentful of meaningless jobs and too scared to try for anything fulfilling and I had a distrust of marriage such that it took my husband-then-boyfriend TEN YEARS to convince me that we had a chance at some happiness.
I know a statistical group of 1 is laughable but my vote is for the dignified congenial divorce before lives are scarred.
@18
“Any time you do something that is outside of expected norms, you end up having to explain it to people. Yes, its annoying. But the phenomenon is not limited to marital-type situations. This is an argument for broadening peoples horizons and expectations, its not an argument for saying that people shouldnt make a public commitment to each other.”
By eliminating marriage (yes, this is a pipe dream…I know, I know) the explanation of having a committed relationship becomes the norm, not the conventional setup of one man, one woman, two point five children.
I agree with you that marriage could follow the same path as the motto, “Against Abortion? Don’t Have One”. However, it’s not as easy as that for some and marriage isn’t always about making the wrong decision about who you want to be with, for sex’s sake or convention’s sake and the necessity of getting out of it easily. Some people have to make the marriage commitment (for many years, and at the expense of other peripheral rights) in order to appease other elements. You might think that I’d, therefore, argue for expanding the umbrella of marriage rather than throwing out the concept of marriage but there are many other issues (usually for women, but some for men, too!) that surround the institution of marriage. I see your point about celebrating publicly the love that you have with your partner and having that socially and legally validated. It is a good thing for you and your children. I still don’t know that I agree with you about how important marriage would be if it was abolished…maybe humans would always find ways of binding people together.
As for ‘Don’t Believe in Marriage? Don’t Have One,’ well…I’ll just have to let it stand that it doesn’t always work that way for some folk.
Really? Like who? I realize that’s part of the whole plot of Tweilight, but does it really apply to that many enfranchised adults in the west today?
I’d really like a more concrete explanation of what you’re getting at.
@22: Sorry, I can’t…
@23 Now my curiosity is piqued. For a green card? To retain the right to a throne?
I certainly know people who married for a green card. But it didn’t seem to involve the expense of many other peripheral rights. I only know of someone who married to retain the right to a throne, but that also didn’t seem to come at the expense of many peripheral rights that weren’t already compromised by the situation overall.
Whatever benefits divorce may be having at the individual household level, it’s hard for me to see it as a positive development for our society at the macro level. I think this 2005 article is well worth considering on the subject:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110402304.html?referrer=facebook
On the historical blurb about Victorian co-habitation.
These arrangements didn’t really count as “co-habitation” in the minds of those who did it. Most of them probably considered themselves married.
There was no centralized government regulation of marriages in those days. When a woman was ill treated by her husband, often she’d leave and seek refuge with family in some other town or state. And if she met a man who wanted to marry her, they’d just head to the local public officials (judge, mayor, pastor, etc) and get married. They didn’t much care about the old marriage because – as far as they were concerned, it was over – writ of divorce or no writ of divorce. Didn’t even occur to most people that you’d need to get government sanction of the divorce from the previous husband. And they didn’t.
But I doubt a lot of them considered themselves to be “shacking-up.” That’s what some of us would call it, not what they would call it. They self-identified as married.
By the way, this is exactly what happened between one of Parley P. Pratt’s plural wives – Elenor Mclean – and himself. She fled an abusive husband and wound up marrying Parley. The abusive husband eventually tracked Pratt down and shot and stabbed him to death. Pratt sometimes gets accused of marrying an already married woman – but she didn’t view her relationship with Hector that way. As far as she was concerned, she was rid of the old spouse for good.
A gay marriage advocate I was arguing with on another blog post pointed out to me that marriage has always been a rather changing institution and the idea of marriage being equated with these “marriage licenses” is a rather recent phenomenon. I quibbled about the details at the time he made the argument, but I think he’s probably right in some respects.
“Traditional marriage” and “traditional family” may very well be artificial constructs to a great degree, and terms that mask a much greater historical diversity in human relationships than we give credit for.
This is one of those times when it might be good to ask at the beginning what you think terms mean.
What does “Victorian” mean to you, Seth? What dates and regions does it generally apply to?
Because based on the generally accepted way of invoking and applying the term “Victorian” in terms of history (England, 1837-1901, England being the land of Victoria’s reign and 1837-1901), which is what the comment you seize on from the OP referred to, you’re wrong.
If that’s not what you’re referring to, you should provide another term, so that you aren’t just plain old wrong.
Until you explain yourself, I won’t worry about the other elements of your comment, except this:
Well, good. Then we know that gay people who consider themselves married are indeed pretty much married.
And of course this applies to gay people as well: if they identified as married, well, that’s what matters. No matter how vigorously people like you assert the basic inferiority of the union, no matter how opponents of gay marriage insult gay unions, if they self-identify as married, well, they’re as good as married.
Indeed! Some of us have even studied the topic and read books and articles about it. In any case, it’s so nice of you to drop by and admit that you have failed to give credit to ideas that others of us have taken quite seriously for quite some time.
Oh. That should be “1837-1901 its duration.”
I don’t think any of my comment needs further explanation. And if you choose to ignore it Holly, I daresay I’ll survive the loss.
I am confident, Seth, that you actually breathe a long sigh of relief when people choose to ignore most of your comments, given how often they are grounded in error and poorly argued. Yes, finding your comments ignored must be a heavy “loss” for you indeed.
Regarding the historian I mentioned above: It’s been nearly three years since the conversation I had with her so my memory may be faulty, but it was my understanding that she was indeed studying illegitimacy rates in Victorian England.
Interestingly, one of the points I recall from that conversation was that there had to be an innocent, injured party in order to qualify for a divorce. If each party accused the other (of, say, adultery), then they couldn’t get divorced because neither one deserved to be free of the other. This same point was mentioned in the article Holly linked @6:
(A different time and place, but similar laws produced similar results.)
Regarding Seth’s article, linked @25:
It would be nice if the author provided more details about this research, what journals it was published in, etc. She seems to indicate that she did the research herself. Here’s her end of article bio:
Both articles note that divorce is declining:
I think you can explain the falling divorce rate largely by self-selection. People just aren’t getting married anymore. And perhaps the demographic most likely to divorce is instead just not marrying.
I’d be interested in knowing where the “Victorian” study sample of divorces was coming from. Out in frontier America, I can’t imagine that the legal system was even established enough for formal divorce to even be necessary.
Unless there was a need to divide property through a divorce proceeding….
Then I can see it being necessary. Are you sure the divorces in the selection weren’t predominantly over property disputes?
Also, were these women who wanted to stay in the same town that their troubled marriage was in? That would make a difference too.
Which would make sense. in Victorian England, bigamy was both a crime and such a preoccupation that it produced a genre known as the bigamy novel. The period is notable for a great many novels about people trying, with various degrees of success, to escape a spouse who brought them misery and ruin, as well as the difficulties of someone unlucky enough to fall in love with such a person. In fact, Jane Eyre, one of the most beloved British novels of all time, is about just that subject. Charlotte Bronte’s sister Anne also wrote a novel about someone unable to marry because of a spouse they can’t escape, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
And of course a very popular and successful novelist of the era was Mary Evans, aka George Eliot, who endured all sorts of social opprobrium because she was known to cohabitate–for over 20 years–with a man who couldn’t get a divorce.
John Stuart Mill, an important philosopher and politician of the era, argued in On the Subjection of Women written with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, that marriage was akin to slavery for women. Plenty of people thought the entire institution needed reforming, and plenty of people were keenly aware of just how all but impossible it was to escape a bad marriage and how devastating it was to be stuck in a bad marriage.
It is a fairly recent development in English law that a husband’s adultery was grounds for divorce. Women could be divorced and their dowries retained if they committed adultery. But even if a husband had a slew of mistresses and flaunted them before his wife, that was not grounds for divorce for most of British history.
the fact that you can now imagine that there’s a difference between Victorian England and frontier America is at least a start. Hopefully someday you’ll imagine a way to research these questions you’re curious about.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=19th+century+american+divorce+law
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marriage+and+divorce+in+the+american+frontier
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=divorce+in+victorian+england
Actually, there are over 2.3 million marriages in the US each year, or over 6,200 every single day.
I know you’re an advocate of taking things of faith, Seth, and very dismissive of evidence, but seriously, you can look this stuff up, and you CAN’T expect anyone else to respect or take on faith such a ludicrous assertion.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+marriages+occur+each+year+in+the+us
OK, I perhaps misunderstood/extrapolated that part. I had one conversation with a historian at a dinner party when I was at the Institute for Advanced Study a few years ago, and now I’m a little vague on the details. The part that I really thought was interesting was when she explained that if your spouse accuses you of something that is grounds for divorce, you might be tempted to turn around and accuse your spouse right back. But if you do that, you ruin your chances of getting a divorce since then neither party deserves it.
The other thing that was interesting was that she said that cohabitation (without marriage) was fairly widespread because of the the difficulty of obtaining a divorce from a failed marriage, and that many children who were born into stable unions were nonetheless considered bastards because of it.
Thanks for the added detail — it’s a very interesting topic!
And bastard was a real legal status, and people who were bastards would, if the authorities had their way, have “bastard” stamped prominently on their birth certificates. In “Marriage: A History,” Stephanie Coontz discusses all the legal rights bastards did not enjoy in the US well into the 20th century. The most egregious I remember was that if their mothers were killed through someone else’s negligence, the damages they were allowed to sue for and entitled to receive in any wrongful death suit were drastically reduced.
Of course, bastards could make no financial claim whatsoever on their fathers. A bastard was entirely a mother’s shame and a mother’s responsibility.
Holly’s point of the stigma attached to being a bastard is one of my main reasons for feeling the way I do about the whole institution of marriage. Usually people who ‘want’ to be in power are people who care about the rules. Most rules will usually discriminate against someone, somewhere who will suffer for those rules being in place. The idea that justice should be blind and, therefore, punish the exceptional cases who may have had NO OTHER WAY of having a family or being with the ones they truly loved or escaping from a bad marriage is enough of a reason for me to be against an institution. That’s the reason I left the church – it’s a cookie cutter mechanism for religious belief and if you don’t do it the ‘right’ way there are consequences. If you do not get married in the traditional sense, there are consequences and, okay, maybe people should be willing to confront ignorance daily to explain when they fall into ‘exceptional’ categories, but Jayzus, it gets old. And tedious. And you really do just want to flip the bird after a while. Or you want to join convention so you don’t have to fight any more.
@38 Your logic appears to be that people shouldn’t do thinks that are typical or popular because then people who don’t do the typical or popular thing have to explain themselves, and that gets old. Like the very existence of a typical case oppresses atypical cases.
For myself, sure, I’m married — I’m even right-handed! And yet, I fall outside of a lot of popular social norms. I have the same “it gets old” experience when a standard topic of polite small talk is something I don’t want to have to discuss with every random stranger, see here.
But in general I’m glad not to always fit the mold. I’m not going to insist that everyone be different in the same ways that I’m different.
Actually, let me quote you the relevant part:
Then a comment:
My response:
Now, how does your argument not equally apply to the proposition that people shouldn’t settle in the country they were born and raised in, because that turns the foreigners — some of whom had no choice but to leave their home country — into an exceptional case, always having to confront ignorance about their status, etc….?
@38: I can appreciate I don’t always follow a logical path when arriving at my feelings about things! : ) I don’t want to make people (most certainly not yourself, who has brought up an interesting topic and one that has, at this point in time, hit a bit of a nerve with me…) who have made the choice to get married feel rotten just because my situation is an atypical case. I can see the good in relationships that are stable, for the consenting adults in the relationships and for any dependents in the family. The ‘powers-that-be’ (sorry Holly, I know that sounds a bit ‘Twilight-esque’) who set up marriage brought some really horrible conditions that discriminate against exceptional cases and, to be fair, I’m not sure whether a typical case even exists in society…there’s just an ideal to strive toward and a feeling of failure when the ideal isn’t met. I truly don’t think that’s enough to throw out all of the infrastructure of marriage, since that would be like me wanting to ruin a party just because I wasn’t invited. I believe in things like the legal rights that dependents have to their parents’ attention and resources within a relationship, but also to their rights to have that attention and those resources outside a relationship. Marriage conveys those rights to the children and that’s why a lot of people I know ended up getting married after their children were born, not because they wanted to be husband and wife (or hh or ww, whatever the case may be) to one another. Maybe marriage needs to be redefined to be more inclusive, but maybe the whole feeling of entitlement that accompanies married couples just needs to be shot down, too. I don’t know.
Chanson, I know that you don’t fit the mould/mold and wouldn’t insist that everyone be different in the ways you are different. I doubt that anyone posting on this forum fits a mold/mould, even the TBMs who often seem to trot out the party line. I think there is a case to be made that there are enough victims of the institution of marriage that ‘it’ really doesn’t deserve the protected status that it has had for generations. That I haven’t really made my case isn’t surprising. I’m not that brilliant at arguing a point, but hey that’s cool. Thanks for letting me weigh in anyway!
When something is not working, the question becomes Is it worth fixing, or do we throw it out? Some things deserve to get thrown out, and certainly, ‘the institution of marriage’ has left a lot of victims in its wake (especially when combined with political/economic disenfranchisement for women). OTOH, the institution has made some major progress in the last few generations, and IMHO has enough positive qualities to be worth fixing rather than tossing.
chanson,
While weighing those things, it’s also worth considering how well alternatives to marriage have fared in society as well. I would submit that other methods of living together have had their own set of social problems as well. Some of them have had even more problems than marriage has.
If we just myopically narrow the focus down to marriage alone, and ignore the rest of the ways people have tried to live together, we run the risk of inflating marriage’s negative points and not realizing how good or bad the alternatives are.
Just what are these alternatives, Seth? Historically and across cultures, what are “other methods of living together”? You already stressed above that many people previously who did what some of us would call shacking up “self-identified as married.”
No one here wants to “ignore the rest of the ways people have tried to live together,” but before anyone can consider the ways in which “Some of them have had even more problems than marriage has,” you need to explain what these “other methods of living together” are. And since you want us to consider their myriad problems, you should probably list those as well.
As someone who was married lonnngg before she was legally married, I couldn’t help noticing that the government privileges some relationships and undermines others.
I don’t think government is going away any time soon and they will continue to collect taxes and give out benefits. So I think the best we can do, is try to be as fair as possible, whatever that means.
For instance, I worked at a job for years that provided health benefits for their co-workers and their families. Well, not mine. My legal strangers undermined the very foundations of civilization.
Here’s the thing, my family didn’t count when it came to health insurance. Yet I was legally responsible for their medical bills.
People want and need protection for their little bastards.
I don’t need the government to tell me who I love and are committed to. But I need government to stop punishing that commitment.
Some have been pushing for the implementation of a comprehensive civil union code across the board to provide needed protection for a variety of relationships – not all of them romantic. For example, two elderly sisters who live together and take care of each other.
Certainly people in many cultures and many times have continued to live throughout their lives with members of their family of origin, which was typically the product of a marriage. But I don’t see how mentioning one instance of something that has yet to happen–we have not yet “[implemented] a comprehensive civil union code across the board to provide needed protection for a variety of relationships”–constitutes “considering how well alternatives to marriage have fared in society as well,” which is what you call for.
They’re obviously two separate issues.
OK, I’ll bite. What’s the difference?
I think for Mormons, even singleness would be considered “an alternative to marriage.” Other examples: a parent and a child household, cohabitation, polyamory, other relationships that have historically not been accepted by the state as ‘marriages,’ whether or not the participants call them that.
Suzanne @ 45:
Even though there’s a good chance Washington State will soon have same-sex marriage, it’s just really not something my partner and I are even considering. Not because we’re not committed to each other, but I guess no one ingrained in us as children that the central romantic relationship of our lives will be a “marriage.” We had to come to our own terms that the relationships we form are not wayward altogether. The only reason I’d consider a marriage is because of benefits provided by the state, but that just makes me annoyed that I have to “register” my romantic relationship with the state. I’m not sure that legal same-sex marriage is a correction to the institution when the brokenness is the institutionalization of marriage.