LOVE AND MARRIAGE: Michael Triplett

I think the disconnect between the popular view of marriage and the alleged "cultural" view of marriage is the disconnect between love and obligation. If you stopped people on the street and asked them about marriage, most would talk about love and few would talk about the obligations that seem to form the cultural model.

I've always been uncomfortable with this cultural sense that marriage is about children and obligation and commitment, not love. It feels very "Vaticanic" (okay, I know that's not a word, but it fits). It's marriage as defined by hardline Catholicism where sex is dirty, children are expected, and love is optional. It feels oppressive and ancient and outmoded and patriarchial.

Love, on the other hand, is the opposite of the Vaticanic approach. It's marriage based on passion, not obligation. It's beautiful sex, not sex just for procreation. It's drunken abandon, not optional feelings.

Whenever I hear someone say "marriage is about having children and procreation" my mind flashes to a 1950s classroom with nuns wielding rulers telling straying students that sex is sinful and that women should enter marriages not because they love a man, but because they are expected to be mothers and dutiful wives, damn the consequences. It's stifling and shaming and humorless.

Now, maybe those are my issues, but I do think they inform the collective conscious as we view marriage. People talk about love because most hope to be able to be with the person they love for the rest of their lives. They have children because they want a product of that love and passion and commitment. Most people, I think, feel disconnected from this alleged cultural view of marriage as a procreative relationship where love is optional and maybe not even preferred.

posted by Eve at 8:14 PM VOTE

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