I could talk all day about the scientific reasons, the consequences of obsession, the problem of co-dependance, the 'natural' state of the human species, but you probably won't listen to that. You still seem to think that marriage is a good thing. Yes that's right, I'm talking to you. The person who heard me say marriage is unhealthy and responded with statements such as, "That doesn't make sense," and "To you who is famous for being unsocial, and never been in love.. so you wouldn't know.." and "You sound totally closed to the idea that you could be wrong," and "your apparently totally-one-sided arguement that marriage is bad and totally unnatural and that people shouldn't do it." Well I'll tell you why it isn't up for debate, why it is unhealthy, and why someone who doesn't fall in love is perhaps the ONLY person who could realize this.
Marriage is one of our oldest rituals. It goes all the way back to our tribal roots and touches on some very fundamental human instincts. As such, people who are either not aware of these instincts, or who are influenced by them, such as my friend above, will abandon logic and resort to ad hominems, hasty generalizations and unsupported arguments that they just "know in their heart" is true. I'm all for intuitive reasoning, where you just know something is true, but in this case it's wrong and I can prove it. People are being manipulated, and marriage is the center of a lot of that.
Historically, humans lived in small groups of extended family and friends, aka tribes. Usually they killed people in other tribes, and were mostly nomadic, not stable enough in their food supply to build permanent residences. Ironically this was the best time for family in our history. Nobody really controlled it, or decided what it would be on a large scale. It just happened as came naturally. Kids who were born were raised by the tribe, the clan, or whatever you call it, mothers were respected for their ability to have children, and humanity's tiny population largely dependant on manual labor needed as many kids as it could get. It was a very unhappy time, true, with some horrible stories I'm sure that have faded out of even oral tradition. But it was also the most stable family structure, and to this day indigenous people remain the strongest, most well adjusted families on the planet. Starving to death, but at least they do so together!
Then came the agricultural revolution, and the invention of...institutions. Specifically the institution of religion. Once people found they could grow crops and raise livestock, they became well fed, tied to the land, and much wealthier and able to destroy their environment than ever before. The agricultural revolution enabled many freedoms and empowered many people, but some of those freedoms and powers were horrible things indeed. Once you could mobilize many people at once, humans gained the freedom and the incentive to enslave each other. Farmers with slaves can produce more food and wealth than farmers without slaves, and since everyone gathered together there was no way to escape the people who were controlling others.
The combination of religious bureaucracy, and the emergence of slavery, lead to the design of a concept known as 'family'. The church, seeing that its victims were very moved by their close ties with kin and their bonding relationships, invented something called 'marriage.' Marriage was intended to usurp our natural instincts and give the church credit for their results, and it worked terribly. Soon people were raised from birth to death with the constant message that their instincts are not good enough and they must obey the church or they will have no family, and no happiness. No social satisfaction. In establishing itself as the only gateway toward stable groups of humans (families), the church established itself as an indisputable power and authority that no one would question for thousands of years.
So this good thing, that is the close ties we feel instinctively compelled to form, is now the desire to become married as sanctioned by the church. Families formed under strict and rigid social rules designed by the church to make them unhappy and disempowered, to be explicit to keep people under their control. Women were treated like property not people, children were subject to rigorous brainwashing as a condition of a 'healthy upbringing' and people were encouraged to distrust each other beyond their sacred unions, so were prevented from say for instance forming a loving brotherhood and well.. uh... trashing the church.
But wait you think, we've advanced beyond those primitive times! Women now are treated like people, and children are raised with nurturing goodness! Well I agree that we've improved in recent decades, and I also agree that the family structure has started to fall apart in recent decades. This is no coincidence.
Family eventually became the situation where the man farmed the land, and the woman processed the food into edible cooked stuff, and took care of the children, and cleaned the clothing, and went looking for edible roots and berries, and chopped the firewood, and mended the house and... well you might guess that wives were the earliest form of slaves. Everyone was caught in this web too, a web encouraged by the increasingly wealthy church, and also by the noblery who ruled the land with military force maintained by the fact that they had vast resources to draw from (caused by the ag revolution). It became a heresy to disobey the social order, neither forming intimate relations outside of the church sanctioned prison we call marriage, nor working towards personal freedoms, instead taught from day 1 not to question the place their Lord God commanded. Is it any coincidence we call God a 'Lord'? Far to the contrary! This is direct evidence of how religion was used as propaganda to force people to accept a system where they allowed this "Lord" to steal their food for free, under military threat.
Now comes the Industrial Revolution. This prison the nobles and priests so intricately formed in the greatest doublethink in the history of mankind suddenly became troublesome. Tied to their land, peasant families retained rights to use that land they were willingly and coercively imprisoned on. So the Enclosure acts were an example of how the nobles took about 30 years to upend a millenia old tradition of constrictive families. Suddenly peasants found themselves berefit of home and hearth, and stuffed into little hovels where they were allowed by their powerful nobles to farm their own land. Not only were the nobles stealing the food, they were also stealing the right to use the land, and blackmailing the peasants with it. That remains true to this day, but I digress.
Another thing the Industrial Revolution caused was the beginning of the migration to cities, of the males. Cities existed previously, but now they needed cheap workers, and the existing social institution was too inflexible to allow women to work, so suddenly the man was expected not to care for his family, but to leave his family and go work at some faceless factory where his employers so sheltered from his suffering had no qualms about torturing him slowly to death with work.
So that led to a problem. Now that the man was torn away from this contrived family of his, it was no longer a stable relationship. Also with the advent of Individualism people started wanting to act for themselves, and not for their king or their god or their social caste. So a new form of propaganda was devised: a cute little nam shub known as "True Love." True Love is an equivocation fallacy that cleverly combines with a false prophecy to form a truly insidious little social meme. Suddenly it wasn't enough to have a good relationship, nor to make a good living for yourself, nor to have lots of children and please your parents. Suddenly people were flooded with stories and speeches championing this cause of True Love, this noble and holy feeling that you would feel for someone forever and ever, this magic spell that would make you 100% absolutely sure of yourself and totally committed to this one specific person. "Till Death Do You Part," to coin a phrase.
So this True Love notion is a mental virus, and once people are infected with it they can no longer be entirely satisfied with just plain old love. They keep thinking there must be something more, something divine that they just have to work a little harder to find. And in the end, people feel normal love, and think that it's this True Love thing they've heard about, and they are encouraged to focus more and more and more on the object of their affection, until they form a bond that can never ever ever be broken.
So basically True Love is the upper class's attempt to keep people willingly imprisoned in their family. Even if the man moves away, the woman will "Wait for him." Just like in Homer's Oddessy. Even if the man moves away, he will still feel deep in his heart even if he doesn't because he's just not aware of it then, the truelove that forever ties him to that wife back home who gave him those kids, and he no longer feels any need to form close relationships with anyone else, say for instance to form an organized protest or an underground resistence movement / gay orgy club.
And that's why marriage is unhealthy. It never was designed to be healthy, or helpful. The intimate bonding between people, and the formation of small social units who work together is natural and good, and many people think this is what marriage is. But it's not, it's a poor substitute for what we should be doing: acting on our feelings and working towards a common and individual satisfaction, and most importantly not allowing ourselves the freedom to take away the freedom of others. Do the words Free Love have any meaning in this post 9/11 world, where suddenly terrorism is so much more of a threat than it ever was before? Have we forgotten about the 60's, the hippies, the naturalists? How about the original hippies, back in the Romantic period? We keep trying to impose these closed relationships on each other, and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt into the minds of any who wish to depart from that church sanctioned form of obsessive pair bonding.
Furthermore! There are other reasons marriage is unhealthy too. It's unhealthy for our government, because it's the most blatant combination of church and state that we have. If marriage is such a 'universal' thing that the church 'does not' influence, then why can't gays get married? Why do interracial or cross religion couples have so many problems from outside sources? Why do people abandon common sense and get married for bad reasons but True Love, when instead they could come together for both good reasons and love?
Our society is horribly infected with this destructive institution, and it even shows in our laws. Gays can't get married, so why are they complaining? Did you know it's a jail sentence in at least 12 states for people who have intimate relations with each other while single? People love each other, so why am I complaining? How many boyfriends who beat their girlfriends get away with it? Now how many husbands do? I don't see that as a healthy thing! Sure people who are very good and lucky can make a marriage work, but people who are very good and lucky can also drink alcohol and not have something unfortunate happen, and that hardly excuses the violence perpetuated by marriage and alcohol, or both!
So yes, I'm against marriage. I think it's unhealthy. If you have a healthy marriage, fine. I still think you're too obsessed with your significant other, but you might lead a happy life without anyone else. Given the historical context and the pollution of special interests redefining marriage and love over the centuries, there are so many better contracts we could make for collective child raising than marriage! But people don't do it! Or at least most people don't. And even more dangerous than that, most people such as my friend have internalized the idea that marriage is a good thing no matter what, and they lose the ability to even imagine its problems, and so more husbands go unnoticed when their wife keeps "falling down the stairs" because we're in such denial that this wonderful union between two loving, responsible adults could ever be anything less than God sanctioned.
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