If you got married to another person because you love them and want to spend your life with them – you are one of the reasons why the institution of marriage is being weakened.
That's according to a new paper being circulated by the Institute on Religion and Democracy and Alan Wisdom, vice president for Research and Programs at IRD:
Among the trends weakening the marital bond is the "ideal of romantic love" – a love that is all about "two people who love each other."(Wisdom) argues that romantic love tends to isolate the couple, marginalizing the traditional third parties to the marriage, which include families, the community, the church, the state, and even God himself.
"All are reduced to spectators applauding the all-conquering love of the two," he points out.
So, if you love your spouse, you're an enemy of marriage, according to the IRD, and are in cahoots with the gays and lesbians to ruin this esteemed institution. To strengthen your marriage then, you should immediately dispense with all love for your partner – otherwise you leave the door open to gay marriage, polygamy, and eventually bestiality!
But, Wisdom is not finished. Marriage is also being eroded by its deal with the government to recognize the rights and privileges of these godless heathens who dare to love one another in their union:
"If marriage is just another contract, then there is no necessary reason that it has to be a permanent or total union," he states. "The law increasingly treats the spouses as two autonomous individuals in a temporary and limited partnership. The biblical notion of the two sexes becoming one flesh has retreated from view.""If marriage is an infinitely flexible contract, then the possibility of marriages joining members of the same sex – or even marriages involving more than two parties – is increasingly plausible."
Wisdom might want to check his Christian history. It was John Calvin and his Protestant friends who gave us government recognition of marriage with his Marriage Ordinance of Geneva in 1546. So, we can lay the blame for opening the door to marriage equality for gays and lesbians squarely at Calvin's feet.
The IRD paper really smacks of desperation to knock down the two main arguments for marriage equality for gays and lesbians: love, and government benefits and responsibilities. In doing so, they reduce marriage to nothing more than the meeting of a male and female body for, what exactly? If it's not for love, what is it for? Mere reproduction? If IRD is serious that love and government recognition of rights and responsibilities of marriage are really what's destroying marriage then let's go back to the days of dowries and arranged marriages that enlarge the economic prospects of the families involved. If this is what they truly believe, I want to see them advocating for loveless marriages that have no state recognition. When does the campaign begin, IRD?
Since love and government benefits have no place in marriage, what then is the point of entering into this institution? Wisdom tells us that the true nature of marriage is to open "a window to understanding both God and humankind."
That should be a shock to all those happily married atheists and agnostics. But, wait, they probably love their spouses and expect the government to recognize their marital contract, so they're really enemies of marriage anyway.
Tags: family, love, marriage, same-sex marriage
They would claim that, wouldn't they.
They would claim that, wouldn't they.
Wisdom, based only what I have read here, is not entirely wrong. When marriage is seen primarily as the consummation of romantic love, it is weakened. When romantic love leads to a commitment that transcends the initial romance and passion and becomes an entity worthy of protection and care unto itself, it subsumes romantic love alone and creates a fundamental bond on which successful societies seem to have existed. Regardless of whether you are speaking of heterosexual or homosexual union, romantic love may lead a couple to create a marriage, but the marriage itself, with the inevitable tension, conflict, growth, and challenges, must come to exist for the couple as something that extends beyond its initial beginning in romance and sex. Observation suggests that in the flexible relationships of our current society, that we have forgotten that marriage should be a commitment and not an arrangement.
Yes! Which means any adult, committed relationship that transcends sexuality, gender, politics, even religion, etc... is good for society. Flexible relationships ought to be merely tolerated.
I agree,the writer has a good point of saying that when you commit with someone you want to live with in your entire life,you are contributing to one of the reasons if why is the institution of marriage weakens. In Chicago,love and government has no place in marriage.
A real marriage is the union of a man, who is the husband, and a woman, who is the wife. You cannot have a marriage without both a husband, who must be a man, and a wife, who must be a woman. "Same-sex marriage" is impossible.
So, according to this view: what is the purpose of a man and a woman getting married?
Procreation? What if either one or both of the partners is sterile?
Political alliances? That's why many marriages were arranged throughout history. Should we go back to that motive?
No, no, you're thinking of matrimony. Marriage could involve more than one wife.
Seriously though, the etymology of a word can sometimes be enlightening, but a word's definition can be updated to mesh with common usage.
My mother in law used to say that. And I know she didn't invent it but she was making a valid point.
I'm almost sixty and I've been married for thirty years. Romantic love waxes and wanes over the years but we made a promise to each other that we would work through the times when being together was difficult and we've kept that promise. I think it's that promise that makes a relationship into a marriage and I don't believe that gender really enters into it. If we hadn't been in love we wouldn't have been able to make that sort of promise.
So idealised romantic love alone is not a good basis for keeping a marriage together. There is a growing tendency to believe that the roses and stars last forever and don't need to be worked on. As soon as they start to fade, some people feel it's time to give up on the marriage and consign it to the junk yard of experience. It's unrealistic expectations of love that weaken marriage, not love itself.
Love can be damned hard work at times - but it's worth it!
Just for the record I'm bisexual and I was in a committed relationship with another man until his death in a road accident. It so happened that as I came out of the grief I found love again - this time with a woman.
Candace, you write lovely articles.
There are two things that have traditionally made marriages last.
1: Dependency. When each person is dependent on the other for something he/she cannot provide, the marriage will last. It can be as physical as money, cooking, laundry or as psychological as emotional support. This is the real situation where the phrase 'you complete me' applies. The two become a team which can survive where each cannot alone.
2: Lack of Divorce. When a society does not have structures for the dissolution of marriages they last, although the members may hate each other, have separate dwellings and outside lovers. Withal, they remain legally married.
When I was a child (the '40s and '50s) women had few opportunities to work outside the home and sex invariably led to pregnancy. Consequently, women had strong pressures to marry. On the male side, there were no microwaves, frozen dinners or laundromats. Also, for most men, no sex. So men had strong pressures to marry. And divorce was a rarity.
Since then technology has made it much easier for single people to work AND maintain a home and for women (therefore men) to have sex without the fear of pregnancy. Consequently, individuals do not have the same physical needs to marry. And society has changed to make divorce more available and acceptable.
So now people need only marry if they meet each other's emotional needs. What we call 'love'. Unfortunately love does not always last as long as the need for clean laundry and hot food. So love cannot be depended upon for a lasting marriage.
All in all, this is not a bad thing. In the 'good old days' of indissoluble marriages, many women died in childbirth, so a man - without divorce - could have multiple wives. He could also beat his wife and children with no social disapproval. And if two people, without physical violence, hated each other with a deep and abiding passion, they could remain together and pass that hatred on to their children.
To my mind, the peole who want to go back to those 'good old days' should be allowed to - after they are irrevocably sterilized.
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