On Marriage

Among the people I  know, there are very few married couples who will say that they got married because they wanted to. When you ask couples why did they get married, a myriad of reasons will come swimming to the surface like a 5 year old desperately fighting the waters to avoid drowning, however there are very few couples that their first immediate response will be “We got married because we wanted to”. That takes me to think that, as much as we would like to say the world has evolved, there are institutions and human fears that have remained the same along the ages.

               

      When I got married, the priest who officiated our ceremony (we got a church wedding to please the family but that’s another post) said a few things that got to me because if my feminist believes, but the one that got to me the most was that, according to the bible I was accepting a commitment “to serve God and my husband”. “To serve” ummmm, I guess I had a problem with that because nowhere in my husband’s part of the contract said he was supposed to serve me. And if I am to serve him, wouldn’t that make me his subordinate? Don’t get me wrong, my goal here is not to attack religions or their ceremonial requirements (that’s also another post), but to highlight that in reality, when it comes to the institution of marriage nothing has really changed, and what’s worse those in charge don’t want to change it either. Women are still seen a property of the men who marry them, marriage is still seen as an exchange of goods and, the stamp which makes sexual activity affidavit socially valid. I believe that to be wrong. When the idea of marriage was presented to me (and I continue to use my marriage as an example for I do understand that every couple is different) I saw it as a merger between equals; like partners signing a contract, agreeing to start the design and construction of a beautiful project together; as equal investors and therefore equal shareholders. I was never able to see it as a bridge to economic stability, neither as a ticket to leaving my legacy to the world via the birth and eventful lives of my children. Why must we stick ourselves in the archaic foundations of marriage that come from times where women were worth the amount of cattle her family had to offer? Wouldn’t it be better to just modify and adapt the concept to the times and situations which are our accurate reality? Marriage today is not the same experience it was 100 years ago, therefore it should not be catalogued the same either. Nowadays, people should be able to feel comfortable enough within a relationship to see and treat marriage as an evolved institution in which partners incur voluntarily because they love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives with the person they choose, as an equal, not as a servant or as a master and be accepted for it. Why do we insist in seeing I marriage as a death sentence, when it can be a way to make you a better person while helping someone else become better in the process also. Heck! Why see it as an eternal fight to the death when it could be the most precious mutual support system?  If the perspective presented were to be taken into consideration, I think it would most definitively eliminate any problem to make marriage available to anyone who would like to take the journey into spousehood, regardless of gender or creed; for then marriage would actually be a “I did it because I wanted to” kind of thing.