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The Case Against Marriage
A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell “Read it or weep!” Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Production Notes This is a ROUGH DRAFT of a book that still needs a lot of work. I have set it aside for now but expect to come back to it later Your feedback is encouraged, but I recognize that the chapters don't yet flow together as they should. FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
All of us should be growing, learning and changing throughout our lives, right? The person we will be ten years from now ought to be far more mature, morally and intellectually, than the person we are today. If you look back at yourself ten years ago, weren't you hopelessly naïve back then? A decade from now, you will probably look back on today's you and think the same thing.
Growth is natural and healthy, and we ought to be planning for it. Unfortunately, you can't "plan" specifically for your own growth, because you don't know what direction it will take. It isn't really growth if you think you have life all worked out in the beginning and you leave yourself no option to change. True growth implies that you are going to deviate from your original plans in unexpected ways.
You encourage growth not by nailing down a rigid plan but by leaving yourself as many future options as possible. If you contract yourself to travelling on only a single highway, then your growth is going to the limited to that road and you will always be ignorant of the rest of the world.
Because it deprives you of the freedom to deviate, marriage tends to freeze your personal development at the state it was on your wedding day. If your marriage is "successful" you will be pretty much the same person ten years from now as you are today. Marriage assumes a steady-state condition: You are so confident of your current path that you are locking yourself into it permanently.
In marriage, anything unusual you do has to be negotiated with your partner. That means to have to put all anticipated changes into words in the required format and submit them explicitly for consideration. Then you have to go through the expensive political process of achieving a consensus. You can't just wake up with a good idea and then do it. There's bureaucracy you have to deal with.
And you shouldn't think that just because your spouse says, "Okay," that your proposal has actually been approved. Surface approval does not imply subterranean compliance. Even if your spouse agrees verbally to something or doesn't raise a protest, there still may be grudges and grievances building up below the surface. No matter how cooperative the two of you seem to be, there is always a power struggle going on behind the scenes, and eventually it is going to erupt into the open.
You have probably learned from previous eruptions that it is best not to rock the boat if you don't have to. Successful couples tend to find a comfortable routine and stick with it. Every morning, they wake up and go through the same rituals and motions. The less deviation there is, the less there is a possibility of conflict.
People who are about to get married typically point to some older couple as their inspiration. Betty and John Smith have been married 50 years: Don't they look happy? Well, yeah, but here is something else that is usually true about Betty and John: There has been very little change in those 50 years. They've probably lived in the same house for most of their marriage. They each have their hobbies that have been set in stone since the beginning of time. The only significant changes in the relationship have been forced from the outside, like economic hardship, illness or the deaths of family members.
A long-term marriage is not a vehicle of growth. At best, it is a vehicle of repetitive stability, which is often the enemy of growth. If you are going to hold out Betty and John as an example of what you are working toward, you also have to ask yourself: "Do I want to be doing the same things for 50 years?" It may be fine for Betty and John—both the product of an earlier era that wasn't so driven—but is it right for you?
The critical thing about Betty and John that made their marriage last is they don't have huge expectations. They don't expect major growth or change; they expect each new day to be the same as the last. Young people, however, demand change. They expect "excitement" in their relationship at the same time they want "stability." Unfortunately, these two goals are often incompatible. There is no way you can expect excitement if you have been living with someone full-time for years, because you already know all their tricks. The most you can expect is a sort of comfortable sibling relationship were there are no surprises. Is this really what you want?
To support the highest level of personal growth, you have to have the ability to entirely change your lifestyle on relatively short notice. You can't say that you want real personal growth and still want to keep your nice house in the suburbs with two cats, three cars, a garden and all the attached anchorage. It may be a velvet prison, but it is still a prison. Within a prison, you can still be learning: You can learn how to better deal with your imprisonment. That's not the same, however, as really being able to explore the world.
If a unique opportunity arises tomorrow to do something your never expected and you are able to jump on it immediately, then you will experience real moral and intellectual growth, especially if things don't go to plan. As an adult, there is no reason you can't grow as much a young people do when they move away to college, but only if you are willing to make big changes like that. If an opportunity arises and you can't jump on it because you are committed to a preexisting plan, then you will not grow much. You will remain in stasis.
Every relationship is a trade-off between freedom and engagement. To sustain any relationship, you have to surrender some of your independence and some of your ability to change. In return, you perhaps find more meaning and a greater sense of belonging. It isn't necessarily true, however, that by giving up more of your freedom you are gaining more meaning. The returns diminish if you commit yourself too much to a relationship at the cost of your own growth.
Certainly, you have to give up a lot of your own potential if you commit to raising children. In that case, however, you are transferring some of your own freedom and potential to them. Hopefully, your sacrifice is an investment in their future and the future of society. A romantic relationship is not the same kind of investment. Your partner has already grown to adulthood and is pretty much set in their ways. It is hard to say that your sacrifice to them is going to improve the future of humanity.
Raising children is a unilateral engagement: You will do your best for them regardless of whether you are directly rewarded for it. A romantic relationship, on the other hand, is a mutual engagement, where real current benefit is expected on both sides. In romance, you should expect to be rewarded for any compromise or sacrifice you make, and relatively quickly. If the relationship is not beneficial to you personally, greater than the energy you are expending on it, then it simply needs to end. It is not your responsibility to be the parent to an adult.
It may sound greedy and selfish, but you should be involved in romance mainly for one thing: as an avenue for your own growth. For growth to happen, the relationship has to remain dynamic and alive and to a certain extent dangerous and uncertain.
There must always be the possibility that you will break up tomorrow. If this isn't true, then it means you are trapped and that growth will slow to a crawl.
Next Chapter Coming Tomorrow!
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