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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 You Need is Love," sang the Beatles in 1967. The song went immediately to #1 on the pop music charts and has poisoned our thinking ever since.
Love is not all you need. There are countless problems it can't solve. Love can be a drug that makes you think it's all you need, but sooner or later you have to come up for air.
Love won't put food on the table or solve your financial problems. It also won't give your life purpose and meaning, at least in the long run. There will be be a period of infatuation when you will be satisfied just exploring each other, but eventually every nook and cranny has been plumbed, and you're back where you were before: "What do I do now?"
It's like landing on a fascinating little island with a castle and a quaint fishing village on it. You may spend days exploring the island, but pretty soon you've mastered it, and everything there becomes routine. That's when it dawns on you: You're on an island, and there's no place else to go. Love might land you on this island, but it alone won't get you off.
Love does give you a default plan. It goes like this: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Johnny with a baby carriage. That last part of the plan will certainly keep you busy, but whether it will give your life true meaning is another question. The baby business will probably slow down your own development, because there's a lot of things you can't do when you've got a little one to attend to.
If you don't take the baby route, then what do you do? If you didn't know what to do with your life before you fell in love, and your partner didn't know what to do either, then what makes you think that once you get together you will have any more direction? Now you are two people who don't know what to do with their lives, except now you both have to agree on whatever plan you come up with.
When two teenagers fall in love and run away together, what do they do? They drive around, go to the city, scrounge for food and gas money, drive some more, sleep in the car, have sex to exhaustion, start arguing with each other, then eventually give up and go home. Love, it turns out, isn't "all they need."
It was irresponsible for the Beatles to claim it was.
The late Sixties were the era of "free love". Contraception became widely available for the first time and spawned a "Sexual Revolution." Sex finally came out of the closet, was discussed openly and practiced prodigiously. Loved became "free" but it didn't stay that way. Eventually reality caught up.
It's fine for flower children to copulate like bunnies, but the age-old question remains: What do you do next? It may be exhilarating to explore your sexuality, but the thrill can't last. Once you've experienced all of the Kama Sutra positions, it becomes like the chocolate cake you've had too much of: It just doesn't give you the same excitement anymore. Instead, you're soon back to the same problems of living you had before.
The Sexual Revolution was perverted by pornographers and tainted by venereal diseases. Free Love got shut down pretty quickly, and a new equilibrium developed that we know today, i.e. "Pay-Per-View Love." Sex was freed from the subscription plan of marriage. Couples could now enjoy carnal knowledge out of wedlock without it being considered a crime or even improper, and a child could be born out of wedlock without being called a "bastard." Thus, marriage lost it is significance as a real transition between stages.
Before the Sixties, marriage was a necessary gateway to sex and the legitimacy of your children. After the Sixties, it was a optional step taken chiefly for emotional purposes. Marriage didn't lose its popularity, however. Turns out, people still wanted the ceremony, even if it had little practical significance apart from finances.
People need ceremonies. When someone dies, for example, their friends and family feel a need to get together to say a few words. It doesn't matter what the ceremony consists of: You can say "ashes to ashes" or anything else. What people seem to crave is official public recognition of a transitional event. After a funeral, people can say quite definitively, "He's dead," and begin moving on with their lives.
Couples aren't satisfied just to be secure in their own relationship; they want public recognition that their relationships exists. The wedding ceremony provides that. It is a sort of notarization service, witnessed by everyone, so buddies of the groom can finally say, "Yup, he's dead."
The modern wedding ceremony is composed of an accumulation of traditions dating back to the Romans. This often includes contributions by Lennon and McCartney, who have become part of our romantic tradition as much as Romeo and Juliet. Whereas pre-Sixties weddings pretty much stuck to the traditional script and emphasized duty and responsibility, post-Sixties weddings began to go free-form, and you never knew what would happen.
The new weddings are all about expressing love in unique ways so it doesn't seem like the couple is signing on to an institution. You have to customize your wedding so it seems uniquely "yours." Today, the ceremony is all "love" this and "love" that, going light on the duty and very light on the "death do you part" part (which is now translated as "as long as you both shall live" or the more realistic "from this day forth"). She looks into his eyes and he looks into hers, and they recite the carefully selected magic words they have been sweating over for months.
Some in the audience, however, are squirming in their seats, knowing full well how corny this is going to look in the wedding video when viewed ten years from now.... that is, if anyone sees the video ten years from now, because it will probably be Splitsville by then and the video will be one of those things lost in the fire.
Continued in Chapter 22
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