Marriage - what's it good for?

There is a lot of hand-wringing and soul-searching about high divorce rates in the Western world today, but I think, as a divorced person, that it's not necessarily such a bad thing. In the bad old days, when divorce was difficult, how many couples had to stay together to the bitter end in misery? There are so many tragic novels and plays about unhappy marriages: A Dolls' house, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary etc etc. The overall level of happiness in society is probably higher with a high divorce rate. If you get out of a bad marriage, you have all kinds of problems, but along with them you have a very very precious thing: hope of finding something better one day.

In my case, I was trapped in an "empty shell" marriage with somebody with whom I had nothing in common. We had not enough in common intellectually to string a decent conversation together (she never read a book in all the years I knew her and only watched appalling soap operas on TV). She was also a very cold person with no interest in physical displays of affection, no cuddles let alone sex (yes, there were two children, but sex was a three or four times a year activity, and it was clear she was doing her duty).

The moment when I decided I had to get out was when I found myself saying to myself "Solitude would be better than this". At least if you are lonely on your own you have some privacy. If you are lonely with someone else around you don't have meaningful company or privacy. Every time I feel lonely now, I remind myself that it's better than what came before.

I suggested counselling, but she refused point-blank, and also refused to take any responsibility for the situation, insisting that I had to change but not her. So there was nothing more to say.

I take full responsibility for marrying somebody unsuitable, and the last thing I want is sympathy (sympathy is for losers).

My attitude to marriage now is that although I would dearly love to find a committed lifelong relationship, the institution of marriage itself has no added value whatever,and actually harms relationships. It takes a couple of hours to get married and two years of courts and lawyers' fees to get out of it. Sure, you can do a pre-nup, but if you feel you have to do a pre-nup before getting married, what's the point of marriage anyway - just to get tax breaks? Marriage is not romantic, it's anti-romantic, because it encourages complacency in a relationship. If either person can easily get out at any time, that makes both people more aware of the need to make a constant effort every day to water and feed the relationship.

If two people feel they need to get married to show their commitment to each other, that's a sign of insecurity in their relationship. My analogy of marriage is two people getting into a cage together, locking the door from the inside, then throwing the key out between the bars, so far away that they can't reach it anymore. How can that be a good sign of commitment?

I understand people getting married once (it's good to be young, idealistic, naïve), but I don't understand second-time-arounders doing it. Once you've been divorced once, you should be inoculated against marriage. Not against romance, not against commitment, but against that particular outmoded institution.

And if anybody says, why do all religions advocate marriage to protect social stability, well, Buddhism doesn't. There is no institution of marriage in Buddhism, which is a very respectable religion. And don't reply that Buddhist contries like Thailand have high rates of prostitution and other anti-social practices, because Western societies do too (I'll come back to prostitution in a later blog).

No, marriage should be abolished, in order to promote social stability and better family life (and to reduce the need for lawyers).

RIP marriage!

Oscar