avatarDr Emmanuel Ogamdi

Summary

The article argues that marriage is an outdated institution ill-suited to modern society, suggesting a need for more flexible and realistic relationship models.

Abstract

The article "Why Marriage Is an Outdated Idea" critically examines the institution of marriage, asserting that it is an archaic social construct that has not evolved with society. Despite its deep-rooted expectations, marriage often fails to meet the needs of modern relationships, with high divorce rates indicating its inadequacy. The author posits that marriage was originally designed for practical purposes rather than love, which is now the primary reason for marriage. The shift towards individualism and the breakdown of community support have placed unrealistic expectations on the institution, leading to a rise in loneliness and the pursuit of unattainable ideals within marriages. The article suggests that the societal pressure to conform to traditional marriage models is strong, yet increasingly, people are questioning these norms and exploring alternative relationship structures. The author proposes a more flexible approach to marriage, with renewable contracts, to reduce the stigma associated with divorce and better accommodate the dynamic nature of contemporary love and partnership.

Opinions

  • Marriage is based on an outdated model that does not align with the needs and realities of the 21st century.
  • The expectation that marriage should fulfill all aspects of emotional and community support is unrealistic and contributes to its high failure rate.
  • The societal pressure to marry, reinforced by media and cultural norms, often leads individuals into marriages that are destined to fail.
  • The article challenges the notion that marriage should be a lifelong commitment, suggesting that renewable contracts could be a more practical and humane alternative.
  • The author believes that the current model of marriage, with its emphasis on romantic love and lifelong commitment, is a significant cause of relationship dissatisfaction and breakdown.
  • The article criticizes the stigmatization of divorce and proposes that society should normalize the end of marital contracts without judgment.
  • The author suggests that a shift towards more flexible marital arrangements could lead to healthier relationships and less acrimonious separations, particularly benefiting children involved.

Why Marriage Is an Outdated Idea

Marriage is an archaic institution. What can we replace it with?

A heap of old clocks. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The institution of marriage is very old; it predates recorded history. As a result, it has seeped into the fabric of society and has created a natural expectation that everybody should get married.

Surprisingly, we all conform to this expectation; most people get married at one point in their lives. Marriage, however, is not an easy affair. It requires you to be adept in courtship and dating rituals, to be knowledgeable about the countless rituals that adorn marriage, and to acclimatize to the complex and monotonous requirements of life as husband or wife, with its accompanying responsibilities. Considering how difficult marriage can be, it is surprising that young unmarried people look forward to getting married as they would look forward to getting a flashy new job.

The craze about marriage would be totally understandable if the benefits, joys, and rewards that marriage brings were undeniable. The truth is more nuanced. Everybody who goes into marriage knows or has heard that marriage isn’t easy. This is not to say that no marriage can ever work or that marriage doesn’t work. On the contrary, there are many examples of what can be termed ‘successful marriages’ — you might know one yourself.

Apparently, as tough as marriage can be, some young people are lucky or smart enough to find a person with whom they can carry out the functions of marriage in a way that is equally satisfying to all the parties involved. These successful marriages are not what I want to focus on here.

I am concerned about the many and increasing number of people who without doubts in their minds about the suitability of themselves or their partner for marriage, or with their apprehension about the institution of marriage, still jump into it. Just like everyone else, they openly say “I want my marriage to succeed” — although they are aware that a lot of marriages have failed. They have seen the data on divorce rates; they have heard of ugly divorce court battles. Some of these failed marriages are their parents’ or friends’ — or maybe their own previous marriage(s).

According to the latest statistics, half of all first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rates are even higher for second and third marriages. Despite this knowledge, these people — who are otherwise smart — somehow believe that their marriage will somehow overcome the odds despite the unfavourable statistics — talk about hoping against hope.

For intending couples, there is no shortage of pre-marital counselling. When a person is about to get married, religious institutions, secular institutions, and their family will offer them some advice about marriage. But no one really speaks the truth, the open secret that no one dares to say. The truth is that marriage is a broken institution. Eventually, what starts as a beautiful love affair slowly transforms into an unexciting and ultimately destructive union. From a beautiful love affair to a bitter and thorny contract.

The reason for the downward journey from a love affair to an acrimonious marriage is simple; marriage was not designed for the 21st century.

The idea that marriage is an irrevocable contract that condemns the participants to a lifelong commitment to romantic endeavors is preposterous.

The first recorded marriage was in 2350 B.C. — more than 4000 years ago. When marriage was designed, it was designed for that particular time and culture, to meet the particular needs of the societies of that time. 4000 years ago, the world was very different; societies were smaller and there was no civilization.

Since then, marriage hasn’t changed much. The implication of this is that we have adopted a marriage that was designed for a non-industrial society and tried to force it to fit in an industrially civilized society. This is a classic square-peg-in-a-round-hole phenomenon. Today romantic love is seen as a prerequisite for marriage whereas when marriage was created, romantic love wasn’t a consideration. Instead, people got married for more practical reasons such as building inter-familial alliances, economic reasons, and childbearing. When marriage was designed, it was not created to serve the purpose of providing lifelong friendship, personal fulfilment, or continuous friendship. It is no wonder that marriages bend and crack under the burden of expectations that modern society places on them.

The idea that marriage is an irrevocable contract that condemns the participants to a lifelong commitment to romantic endeavors is preposterous.

Because earlier societies were smaller than they are today, there was a richer sense of community. This was the kind of environment in which marriage was invented. In these societies, people didn’t have to rely on a very small family unit to derive all their needs of intimacy, community, love, or a sense of belonging. These needs of intimacy and love are important to us as humans, and we have been wired by nature to always seek out community. In smaller societies, a person’s immediate family isn’t solely responsible for these needs. Instead, the person’s society — neighbours, elders, kin, and relatives — unite in fulfilling each other’s basic needs for security and community.

In our world today, societies are larger and more individualistic. Scientific research has found that there is an epidemic of loneliness in our modern society. Because our modern industrialized society is largely built on the foundation of capitalism and individualism, societies are not tight-knit groups. They cannot offer the same level of emotional and mental support, nor can they meet the intimacy and community needs of their members like ancient societies used to. But people still have these needs — they are deeply wired in us and must be met. To satisfy the need for support and satisfaction that we no longer get from our society, we seek to recreate this by creating our own community through marriage.

To complicate matters, we lock ourselves in a continuous pursuit of unattainable ideals. We desire perfection in our relationships and to achieve this, we demand undivided devotion but also complete honesty. We expect that within the marriage, there should be no hypocrisy, no dishonesty, and no games. Eventually, we are confronted with the ugly paradox that complete exposure leaves us vulnerable and can destroy the relationship in the long run.

When the parties in a marriage have spent a lot of time together and are wearied by the inescapability of each other’s presence, the marriage — having started as a tender, loving, and romantic affair — slowly turns into animosity, disillusionment, or at least doubt. The once love-struck partners then begins to entertain the question ‘Is he/she really the right one?’ — another telltale sign of a marriage that is almost certain to bite the dust.

It is obvious that the purpose of marriage has changed, so why we have refused to let go of the marriage models of the past?

We teach these models in schools and marriage seminars. Classes on marriage and sex are loaded with lessons in sentimentality under the guise of objectivity. Prospective couples are given housekeeping advice and told to work on making their marriages last a lifetime. On the other hand, we stigmatize people who do not keep their marriages for their lifetime. If a person’s marriage fails, we blame the person, not the institution — because in our collective minds, the institution of marriage is perfect.

As a result, we have continuously raised generations of individuals who are either unable or unwilling to question or challenge the basic structure of marriage. We have failed to consider or propose more functional alternatives, and our laws are still based on our archaic understanding of marriage — an understanding that is defined by a dysfunctional interpretation of marriage.

So why do people still get married anyway?

The reasons for the prevalence of marriage are related to the predominance of a culture that is preoccupied with romance and sex. This prevailing culture puts a lot of pressure (consciously or not) on young people to conform.

Mass media, fashion, education; basically, every section of society has been co-opted to perpetrate and exploit sexual tension. According to psychologists, the individual is sexually aroused from an early age but is expected to put off getting married till they are old enough. The young individual then resorts to filling a sexual gap with dating and romance with an ultimate expectation that dating will ultimately culminate in a lifelong relationship — marriage. As a result, young kids in their adolescent ages are expected to play a role that is reserved for adults. Though the young individual barely realizes it, the pressure from society to provide care, love, and even have sex in their dating relationships prepares them for a responsibility that otherwise had been reserved exclusively for marriages. Adolescent relationships have become a practice of the real thing; they are all but marriage in name only.

This explains why young people frictionlessly transition from dating to marriage. The adolescent has been taught that government is corrupt, and he thinks that the world is against him and that his parents want to control his life. As a result, he adopts a stubborn position, in opposition, to society and his family. The one institution that seems to be largely exempt from his loathing is romance and the institution of marriage. And so, with knowledge of the high probability of their marriage ending in failure, the young groom leads his bride down the aisle all the while fighting his knowledge of certain failure by saying to himself “My marriage will be different”.

Can your marriage be different?

Swimming against the tide is a predictably hard endeavour. When young couples enter the institution of marriage with hopes of swimming against the tide, the end is equally predictable. What the couple ends up in is either separation, divorce, or a bitter marriage that they refuse to leave because of the children, religious or societal stipulations — a cold, dull, and lifeless marriage.

How to fix the institution of marriage

Despite all its obvious flaws, the question of what to do about the broken institution of marriage is a difficult one to answer.

Since this broken system has been perpetuated for a long time and has successfully engrained itself into the very fabric of our society, there is no easy fix, especially in the short term. While a few courageous individuals work out creative solutions to the question of marriage, the majority of us are bound to suffer the disappointments of marriage as if it is a destiny fostered on us that we must bear without choice.

With time, it is possible that the actions of a few courageous individuals who dare to break the social norms of marriage will cause a shift in the disposition of the rest of society. Already we can see this trend. Even in traditionally conservative societies, we can see a shift towards earlier premarital sex, earlier divorces, and multiple marriages over the course of one’s lifetime. There is a slow but certain shift from expected lifelong monogamous relationships towards serial polygamy. A few decades ago you were expected to stick to your first partner till death do you part. These days, an increasing number of people will have more than one husband or wife in their lifetime.

This shift in trend puts the absurdity of marriage in the limelight;

Why should we pretend that marriages — which can be of short duration — must be a life contract?

Why do we still recite archaic vows on the altar that bestow on the couple the expectation of an unbreakable contract?

Perhaps a better or more functional alternative might be to make marriage a flexible contract, with a possibility of periodic extension.

There are two advantages to this;

  1. A couple who feels like they cannot continue together has the option of not extending their marriage contract when the next extension is due.
  2. It relieves the couple of the destructive pressure to make the marriage work at all costs.

When a couple chooses not to extend their contract on the next due date, they would not be stigmatized as failures, instead, they can be free to look for other romantic quests with as much freedom from judgment as an unemployed person looking for their next job. For a large part, this trend is already in motion. Whether or not we agree to formally alter the inherent nature of the institution of marriage to fit the modern culture, I suspect there is not much we can do to fight the trend.

Some people might oppose the idea of multiple short-term marriages based on the assumption that it would be bad for the children produced in marriages where their parents have been married multiple times. Nothing is further from the truth.

When we pretend that marriages are life contracts but our marriages inexorably end in messy splits and bitter custody battles, the children are the biggest victims. A messy split turns the couple into bitter foes, leaving the children hanging in the middle. If the messy process of divorce can be avoided by replacing life-contracted marriages with fixed-term renewable marriages, the couple as well as their children will benefit. Everybody benefits from a system of reduced friction and acrimony.

Marriage
Culture
Religion
Philosophy
Psychology
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