The Luv Connection

Marriage is one of society's oldest traditions. It's the bedrock, goal, focus and obsession of many societies around the world—the Golden Ticket, even if to where is in question. Even the communities that are liberal about it have their share of tears when someone they know is, and has been, of age for a long time and yet unmarried. The latest addition to it is - love! As much as we'd like to fool ourselves otherwise, love played has a very new role in marriage. Its mostly winning competitors have been *status elevation maintenance, property, honour, security and protection (usually of women), family and childbirth, generational extension, and stability & support.

But what's love really got to do with it? Love probably worked its way in because if you're going to get married anyway, you may as well like who you're with, and then take it another level. If you don't, the other factors will make you—living-in, with and alongside another person for the rest of your life. Unless they are particularly detestable, you can't really not love them if that's how much your lives centre, and feed off, around each other. There's the off chance that it could just be that you never cross that bridge too. Then, let's not forget hormones and attraction. Most times, all it takes to make the love spark is two decent human beings and a desire for that kind of companionship.    

So, let's break it down. No one invented marriage. It came along and it is generally a good deal. It has its benefits, and its drawbacks vs. bachelorhood. No man is an island. Depending on the case, the list discussed earlier in the post* can be divided into intended purposes and by-the-way benefits. Each society has its own priorities, thereby doing this differently. The question is if it's the only way we can achieve all, some or most of that.

What we've made marriage into is a convenient mixture of love, sex and family - a simplistic route that leaves society with less to handle about some of its deep-rooted values. They've taken largely freewheeling principles and tied them to a post. Let's decipher them. 

Love: In its wildest form, it just happens to you and has its own inexplicability that's best understood by the people involved. When you love truly, you love who you do and it's love that controls you—it's its own force. It isn't always good, healthy, sustainable, beneficial or sensible, nor is it always stable. What love is and what it's not is a debate that can go on forever and those who are vested in it will find ways to make sure their idea of it at that time stays true in their head. It's all feeling with no direction. It's floating in the moment with no feet on the ground. Marriage sticks its feet into the ground, giving it full direction, hurtling it towards commitment and family.

Sex: We're talking about the entire phenomenon, not just the act or craving. It's perfectly biological, natural and good with all its natural consequences. It is never eventually meaningless i.e. more than just a physical need, but still something that is centrally always a physical act that is pleasurable and good. It goes where this overall feeling takes it and love's a really big cherry on the cake—and sometimes the whole cake. Marriage gives it a specific purpose and value, to be as pleasurable only within a bonafide marital relationship and be valued more importantly as the means of family creation.  

Family: Always the first love. Even if you don't have a family, you end up having someone/a group of people who become family to you. Whether you were fortunate or not, it is irreplaceable. There will never be another bunch of people whom you will always love more because of the history you have shared. They are people who you respectably bear, even if you don't like them all that much. Marriage takes family and makes it the only socially acceptable & integrateable form of a unit of people—so much so the person you marry (who becomes full -fledged family) is someone who you accord the said respect too.    

We've taken three essential, originally pure as-is elements of life—each one wonderful by themselves, turned them around to serve the purpose of, and celebrate, marriage with a morphed, and sometimes stunted, version of all three of them. It seeks to monopolise them so that its vision can work. If you fall in love, make sure it's marriage worthy*. If you're going to have sex, make sure it's someone you're married to, and only them. If you want to start a family, it will layout the red carpet for you but on its terms.

There are theories that these would otherwise be wild virtues wasted on heartbreak, promiscuity and half-childhoods if not kept marriage-intact. **But if two people pursue a primary soul-to-soul relationship because their lives cross each other's, express it to each other through sex (with each other) and build a history together which makes them stick like family does, you have the same objective achieved—which is how love does actually work! when these things are unregulated. Marriage is just a final stamp on it. This is the new ideal, and exactly what love should have to do with it. Even if one was obsessive about the goal, more than they should about what it takes to get there, this view is a better fit to their purpose - wholesome, and more meaningful and sustainable.

Marriage, when hard, fast and doctrinal, has backtracked the process, whoring these elements so that they fit into the agenda. This means that the three elements will be made into must bes and should bes—into a rigid form that does not truly befit true love, in its freeform, that one person would give to another wholeheartedly anyway, and why on Earth they would even do that. There's a different beauty altogether when the wind blows a course of its own mind.

Some of these things are wholesome central life experiences that you engage with at various levels before marriage created a sacrosanct version of them that became their supreme gospel. You don't discover sex the moment your marriage reception or ceremony is done. You don't romantically fall for someone the very moment you are truly ready for marriage. We naturally experience and engage with these things much before we reach modern marriageable age. The naturally rebellious learn boundaries, value and respect as they grow, without throwing these things around valuelessly. Making them taboos when we're curious has only resulted in keeping them taboos when they are allowed even while married. Marriage reduces their natural state to a twisted version, something that has to be formed into self-loops to defend.

So, we've visited the underbelly and discovered the missing ingredient. Love sets it right, but marriage strangles that very love into something else completely** thereby losing a ploy it can very easily win. Talking of extreme unnatural obsessive control, there's a bigger darkness to follow, even with pristine true love. It's the elephant in the room that's ignored for so long it's practically a skeleton that hanging out there that everyone ignores. Let's pull back with the marriage bashing a bit.

Let's go back to an unbound Universe where these three elements are not restricted and distorted. The social institution romantic love endorses a deeper sin: control. When two people get into a relationship, the form it takes and institution that it builds itself on reeks ownership from all sides—even before the ring's on the finger. Prior to it, love was the true version: family, true friends (and anything else that served a true substitute/addition). That is solid rock and never dissipates - to the point that it defines love (and always will when the romantic version that follows fails).   

The dating norms we've accustomed ourselves turn the tables on life as it were. It's not simply an "I like you, you like me, our lives meet, this awesome, let's do this", "You are amazingly beautiful, I want you, I will go the ends of the earth and keep you, what say?" or anything like that. It's "You are mine, I am yours, you belong to me, I belong to you, we've shattered life as we knew it". There's a desire to "be somebody's", as if they themselves are not enough. There is a breakdown/loss/complete absence of wholesome individuality as a person. It's like that's the big dream of love: to have a deep relationship where all your individual progress as an person up to that point can be laid to waste just so that you can be willingly run over to meet someone who will dress, talk and be the way you like them to so that they do what you'd like them to, in devotion to you.     

It's a strange thing to desire be owned by somebody or own somebody as a norm. It's as sick as the distortion of the three core values by marriage. If we strip the unaddressed factor of love it depends on (via the norm which is practiced), we take away charm. We can easily start defending marriage as an economical arrangement that is not based on a primary affection/concern/relationship with each other, that isn't hateful in any way and takes care of the kids with no bad influence on them because the two people involved are minimally civil. We could say it need not require sexual commitment beyond bearing children. We could even argue things like whether partners must marry and live and move together in the same house? Or if the husband's job location and schedule have to take preference over the girl's own career and professional growth? If the two people need to be represented as one whole piece consisting two people wherever they go? If the girl must have the boy's surname name... and many, many more. 

If you choose to sit and crib about marriage, you need to first know that the suggested solution is a deeper part and root of the problem. We need to understand that love was never integral to it to start with. It was about everything else but*! It gave actual marriage a bump up from crude to human. But it doesn't, and didn't, need marriage**. What it needs is a correction of its protocol of ownership. Whatever gets lost in between correcting that, even if a loss of romance, is worth it—because being owned, owning or the taught innocent impulse to do either in the name of love is worse! If love, dating and marriage needs a hard reality check, we may have to be opening to changing its model of operation. If you defend this humanized version of marriage, you need to keep a zero tolerance on the control.