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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 |
Under modern law, marriage has little to do with love or family. It is a legal contract concerning money and property. When you get married, you are agreeing legally to share your future monetary life, erasing or blurring the financial boundaries between you. On your wedding day, you will be joined into one "community" where you will share each other's assets but also your liabilities.
At the beginning of your relationship, during the hormonal affliction of "falling in love," money seemed irrelevant. You were so thrilled to finally find your apparent soulmate that you were eager to share with them everything you had, often to an absurd degree. You often see it in sidewalk cafes: amorous couples feeding each other from their own plates like they were children. It doesn't really matter whether I order the Combo Plate #1 and you get Combo #6 or the other way around, because we are both going to share each other's meal, generously and without conflict.
This sentiment lasts for about two weeks, until natural territoriality reasserts itself. Listen here: I ordered #1 because that's what I want, and I'll stab you with a fork if you try to steal any of it! I love you dearly, but if you wanted #1, you should have ordered it yourself.
Even if couples try to erase the financial and property boundaries between them, this Communist condition soon becomes uncomfortable and cannot be sustained. There has to be a mechanism that holds each person responsible for their actions; otherwise, disequilibriums will emerge where one partner starts draining the resources of the other.
In reasonably successful marriages, pseudo-ownership rules are created, even if they have no legal standing. Certain objects or domains are labelled as "his" or "hers." She might "own" the bedroom while the garage is his territory. There is an understanding between them that each person has discretion over their domain and will not interfere in the other's without permission. This system works up to a point, as long as there are plenty of resources to go around. The system tends to fail when the going gets tough and difficult decisions have to be made in a domain that isn't clearly his or hers—namely the finances.
Informal boundaries don't work when one or both partners have a problem with impulse control. If an unmarried person has a weakness for gambling or shopping, they are going to keep doing it until they run out of money and their credit cards are maxed out. At that point, economic reality will curb their behavior. They can't shop or gamble anymore if they don't have any money for it. The situation may be painful, but precisely because it is painful they will eventually learn to control their impulses.
When this person gets married, however, they now have a bigger pot of money and credit to draw from and a longer way to go before they hit rock bottom. They don't have to face "hard" reality until they have burned through their partner's resources as well as their own. The partner has few mechanisms to counter this. They can offer only a "soft" reality that isn't nearly as powerful: verbal warnings, requests and pleadings.
You can try to draw a line in the sand and say, "I'm not giving you any more than this"—but where should you draw this line and how do you enforce it? If I have my own paycheck which I deposit into an account that is only in my name, I can tell my spouse, "You can't have that money." Legally, however, this division is fictitious. Under the marriage contract, it is their money, too! If my spouse goes into my wallet and takes $500, it is not legally theft, because everything we have is community property.
What if the impulsive partner gambles away only their own paycheck but fails to pay the electric bill as agreed? Is the non-gambling partner going to allow the power to be shut off? Probably not; they will grudgingly pay that bill from their own paycheck. Thereby, the impulsive partner receives no negative consequences for their action. When financial boundaries have been legally abolished, nearly all rules regarding money become likewise fuzzy and difficult to enforce.
If you are married and you have certain expectations of your partner that aren't being fulfilled, you have very few mechanisms to enforce compliance. There are many aspects of another person's behavior that love and talk have no effect on. You can try to use words to cajole or threaten, or you can try to set up a system of rewards and punishments like you do for children, but these mechanisms rarely work with adults. You are supposed to be equal partners in the community, which is fundamentally incompatible with one person trying to reward or punish the other. Once your financial lives have been merged, the only real weapon you have is the nuclear one: divorce.
If you never legally marry, your financial lives remain separate and you retain more discretion and control. Your partner gets your money only if you explicitly give it to them. If you decide to share a residence, then you have to agree on how the rent and utilities will be paid, but beyond this, your money remains yours and theirs remains theirs. No negotiation is required—and no guilt involved—when you spend your own remaining money however you see fit.
If your partner blows their money on something frivolous and finds themselves broke, you can realistically say, "Oh, well!" and not give them a penny. On the other hand, you can choose to subsidize them if you find the situation meritorious. If you earn more than they do, it is reasonable for you to pay more of the common bills. You have to figure out your own formula, but you can do it thoughtfully and deliberately, persuant to negotiation.
Retaining your own financial independence is a way to preserve natural boundaries. It doesn't mean that you expect your partner to mooch off you. Things just work more smoothly when you control the product of your own labor. If nothing else, there is less bureaucracy to deal with, because you never need permission to spend your own money.
Merging your finances may seem harmless in the beginning. You say, "It's only money," but unless you have oodles of it, money is never something you should dismiss lightly. Money is power, responsibility and boundaries. It is a quantifier of your own labor and, to a certain extent, a measure of your worldly success. If your money derives from your own labor, you should never surrender control of it, even to the one you love. Being responsible for your own money is like being responsible for your own health and your own career—a natural personal domain.
For most of us without independent wealth, money is a regulating system that dictates much of what we do in our daily lives. Money, or lack thereof, forces most of us to work, and we will only participate in leisure activities that we can financially afford. Money may be tyrannical and unfair, but at least it gives some default structure to our lives.
If money were to suddenly become meaningless, most people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. If all beer were free, more people would drink too much of it. If everyone had all the money they needed, no one would bother to go to work. Without money and its inevitable inequities, little in society would get done. There may be better methods for regulating and motivating people, but they have to actually be implemented and tested through experience. Theory alone isn't enough. You can just abolish all monetary boundaries—like Communism tried to do—and expect people to know how to live with each other.
Romance tempts us with a new Communist Manifesto: "All you need is love." This may sound appealing in theory, but the ideal breaks down under any kind of real-world pressure. Love is not a regulating mechanism the way money is. Money eventually runs out and creates a solid incentive for action, but love is supposed to be boundless and never run out. What this means in real life is that you never know how much of your own resources you should give to the one you love.
When you erase the financial boundaries between two people, you are courting a sort of anarchy where neither party knows where their boundaries lie. A Communist relationship may work satisfactorily when the community is rich and there are plenty of resources to go around. Anarchy creeps in when the community starts running low on resources. That is when it becomes difficult to decide who is responsible for what and how much each party should sacrifice for the other.
This is where the "security" and "protection" of marriage take on a darker meaning. When times get tough and the decisions become painful, it is easy for one partner to fall back on the relative strength and apparent security of the other. As long as the stronger partner is willing to give more, then the weaker partner is willing to take more, and this pattern tends to amplify with time. Once this protective-dependent cycle begins, there may be no easy way to stop it short of divorce.
Many marriages have disintegrated when one partner loses their job and starts sitting around the house all day. They try to find work, but they don't try very hard and they aren't forced to make any difficult compromises because they have their partner to support them. The supporting partner is frustrated but has little power to force the other to do anything. They can threaten and cajole, but they have only words to wield, not any real weapons. Their threats are usually empty and their partner knows it. Nothing they say has the same power as "hard" reality—where someone gets evicted for not paying rent and has to sleep in the street if they don't produce anything.
That is the problem with protection: If you offer it to someone, they will probably use it, but not for the life-and-death situations you envisioned. Protection is more often used to avoid personal responsibility. Over time, it creates an addiction. If one partner gets themselves in a difficult bind and the other dutifully rescues them, what happens next? The partner gets themselves in more binds, knowing that rescue is sure to come.
The cycle often progresses to the point where the whole community ship is sinking, and the protective partner can't get the dependent one to take the impending crisis seriously. "We can't continue to spend more money than we're making," they say. Addicted to protection, however, the dependent partner doesn't understand and expects the protective one to take care of everything. The ship can't be sinking, they think, because the band is still playing.
We can't be broke because we still have credit cards!
Continued in Chapter 13
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©2005-07, Glenn Campbell, PO Box 30303, Las
Vegas, NV 89173.
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