Marriage For My Generation

“Your generation is so scared of marriage.”

I was sitting in a tapas place when my Mom said this to me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You all want to wait to get married, even when you love that other person.  Just do it.”

I found this an incredibly interesting comment coming from a woman who divorced her first husband.  As I sat and talked with her, I realized that all but two or three of my aunts and uncles have divorced.  I thought about how both sets of my grandparents either divorced or separated.  I thought of my numerous friends whose parents and grandparents had been divorced.  And then I agreed with my mother.

I can’t speak for everyone, but seeing my entire family go through divorces has altered my ideas about marriage in a few ways.

First of all, I want to make sure I’m making the right choice.  I know hindsight is 20/20 (mostly), but I don’t want to get into a marriage only to realize that it was the wrong idea.  I want to be sure.  But can I ever be?

Second, I don’t regard marriage as the be-all, end-all, so it is not a priority for me.  With both my parents divorcing their first spouses then marrying one another, I’ve come to see that marriage, for most people, is not a permanent state.  Forget all that malarkey about “Until Death Do Us Part.”  Actively loving someone else and being in love are different things.  I have loved many people already in my life, but I have only actively been in love with three or four people.  When the act of loving starts to wane, the bonds of marriage are tested, and marriage is secondary to actively loving someone else.  That or marrying for tax, property, or citizenship purposes (none of which I oppose).

Third, seeing a bunch of adults I admire go through what most people call a mistake (i.e. a “failed” marriage) has shaken my belief in the supposed institution of marriage.  I am an agnostic, so marriage holds no religious value to me, and if I want to wed a man, that is not legal, so I can only marry a woman, and if I can only marry a woman but I do love men as well, marriage is literally insufficient for my life.  I’m saying that marriage in the USA cannot supply for the range of my love.  How do I maintain respect for something that many people wish to deny me?  I repsect others’ beliefs (or at least their right to said beliefs), but with the current blocks in place, marriage seems like something I’m supposed to do because….erm….because I’m supposed to, dammit!

And, fourth, I usually say that I will believe anything that either A) can be explained to me in terms I understand or B) I can learn enough about to understand.  This is what keeps me agnostic in my spiritual ideas, because I know people who can explain Christianity, Judaism, Wicca, Islam, and other faiths to me in terms I can comprehend.  Post-Modernism is, to me, non-existent because I’ve yet to meet someone who can explain it to me, nor have I been able to ascertain for myself what it is.  This same bit applies to marriage.  When I drop all the expectations about raising a family and what a family is, marriage is nothing more than a legal contract.  I can accept it on that level (which is why I so strongly fight for the rights to gay marriage: not for reasons of love, but for reasons of law, taxes, and property).  But none have yet explained marriage to me in a way that makes sense.

And if I have to listen to one more person tell me I won’t get it until I do it, I will scream.  That, my friends, is called a scam.  Like Scientology.  If someone or something can’t tell you about the thing until you COMMIT to it, then they are playing you, and you should consider suing them.

This is my beef with marriage, and I wonder if anyone else my age has similar experiences.  Many of our older family members grew up in a time where marriage was expected as part of the routine of growing up.  How have things changed for us?  What will our children think of marraige?