Half of You, For Half of Me

While I was contemplating the direction I wanted to take on my blog entry this week, I decided to make a quick trip to the thesaurus and type in 'marriage'. All kinds of things came up, but one word struck me as appropriate. Wedlock. In my head this word conjures up the image of a pair of delicate, white-lace trimmed handcuffs. Aja Gabel, in his essay 'The Marriage Crisis', shares the ideas of a psychology professor, Robert Emery, who believes that a definite cause for the decline in marriage is the substantial rise in divorce rates. Why? Because divorced couples who have children, run the very high risk of jading their children to the ideals of matrimony.

However, an unstable marriage can have just as must effect on a child's conscious and unconscious thoughts towards the idea. And as they say, children are our future. Although there are plenty children who come from happy families with no more than the usual amount of marital dysfunction, not all have that privilege. I believe that too many kids have seen parents, relatives, friends, etc., go through unsuccessful or even disastrous attempts at marriage and have become weary of the seemingly useless efforts. Many people would call me negative or say I am only playing devil's advocate. It is true I am fond of playing devil's advocate, but unfortunately I am not is this case. Marriage is an idea that gets tossed around amongst girls, and from what I have seen and heard, my generation is not exactly thrilled at it's implications.

This may be a good thing; a generation less willing to rush into marriage. That brings us to a new suggestion. Temporary marriage. Personally? I love this thought. In my second-hand experience, a lack of real understanding of each other is a frequent cause of unhappiness in matrimony; this would solve that. Turn in your temporary license, commit to each other for a limited time, and if you decide, "I cannot possibly stand [insert irritating habit/behavior here] for the rest of my life," you have a much less complicated situation on your hands. If you decide that spending the rest of your life together does sound wonderful, it is easy to then make the marriage permanent. A great fear of mine in regard to marriage is, finding a wonderful person whom I believe I could spend my life with, deciding to tie the knot and then suddenly I am living with a different person entirely. I have watched this happen to friends and family and have seen the awful repercussions such occurrences can have.

A likely cause of these issues, is that marriage is often not taken seriously enough. Getting married is not just vowing to love each other until one of you is pushing up daises, it is committing to sharing every aspect of yourself with another person. You have sworn to give the other half of yourself, and receive half of your chosen partner. Admittedly, I don't think it's possible to know every bit of a person, but I do think that if you are promising to give someone half of yourself, in return for half of them, it is wise to have a fairly good grasp on what you will be getting.