Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage. – Sammy Cahn
I finally figured out what it is about gay marriage rhetoric that irritates me. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the concept, except insofar as I think the government should get out of the marriage business entirely and that all “marriages” should be contracts between two or more consenting adults of any combination of sexes, with the terms, privileges, responsibilities, duration, etc spelled out in writing, and disputes arbitrated under standard contract law. Yet every time I read the arguments of same-sex marriage advocates, especially in the last couple of years, I’ve found myself getting annoyed for no reason I could adequately pin down. But one cold morning the week after the elections I was walking to my barn to let the animals out and it suddenly came to me (and you’d be amazed just how many things come to me during such walks): the culprit is “love” rhetoric, as in calling same-sex marriage “freedom to love” or Google’s calling its campaign for the issue “Legalize Love”.
Regular readers probably already see where I’m going with this. For quite some time now the Western world has sunk more and more deeply into the delusion that marriage is “about” love, that love can keep a marriage together by itself, and so on. As I wrote in “Housewife Harlotry”,
…love is the icing, not the cake…Marriage is first and foremost a socioeconomic relationship, and the modern insistence that love is the be-all and end-all of marriage is one of the primary reasons for the skyrocketing divorce rate, because couples who share no bond other than the biochemical one we call “romantic love” have no reason to stay together when time and adversity weakens or destroys it. True love is a much more complex emotional bond, but it takes time to develop and rarely does so between people who are not already bound together by other, more mundane bonds such as blood or mutual dependence.
This adolescent refrain of “love love love” (like a scratched Beatles record) whenever the subject of marriage (same-sex or otherwise) comes up gets on my nerves, because for those laboring under that misapprehension all same-sex marriage will do is to slightly increase the divorce rate.
But there’s another, more important concern, which is: why is the reason two people choose to live together, sign a contract together or have sex with each other any business of the government’s? I find the notion that a contract of mutual economic interdependence can only be drawn up between two people who boink each another to be just as inane, irrational and offensive as same-sex marriage proponents consider the notion that those two parties must be of opposite sexes. For example, why can’t two heterosexuals of the same sex make a contract to pool their resources, share insurance, secure inheritance, etc, without having to pretend they sleep together? Traditionally, marriages were given special rights to protect minor children, not to confer a special state sanction on people sticking their body parts into one another’s orifices; since many couples (hetero- or homosexual) nowadays choose to remain childless, why does it matter whether they have sex? And please, don’t yammer about “love”; not only is it totally legal to marry for money or other practical concerns, I also think it’s a bit hypocritical for a government which spends billions trying to keep some people from getting high to subsidize others making life-altering decisions while under the influence of mind-altering chemicals, merely because those chemicals happen to originate inside their own bodies. Furthermore, it’s highly discriminatory to subsidize only sexual love, but not fraternal love.
Governments have no right to set any limits on relations between consenting adults. They should not be able to bar people from having sex, nor to require that parties to certain contracts must have sex. They do not have the right to control the gender, number, acts, frequency, duration, terms, reasons, compensation, or any other factors between adults who do choose to have sex, nor to harass them for their choices. And they certainly don’t have the right to declare that sexual relationships are only for people who are “in love”, or to give special preferences to those who are. Though Western tradition of the last couple of centuries increasingly frowns upon marriages contracted for reasons other than romantic love, it is not the state’s place to enact such mores into law any more than it would have been its place a century ago to legally require all wheeled vehicles to be drawn by horses. Sammy Cahn was right; love and marriage do go together exactly like a horse and carriage: traditionally associated, but not the only conceivable arrangement, and perhaps not even the best one.
Some of the same absurdities are handled here, in relation to UK legislators discussions of how to define consummation in gay marriage: http://lawandsexuality.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/same-sex-marriage-and-de-sexing-of.html#links
Thanks for all your good work Maggie xx
More about consummation here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/dec/10/legal-definition-consummation-gay-marriage
The UK government is to publish its proposals tomorrow, 11 December.
Two issues here. Yhe overall issue, as to whether a government ought to be involved in determining the nature of a contract between two people, and I agree with you that it ought not.
The second is since the government is heavily involved, shouldn’t everyone have that right? They should.
I have to agree with this. Maggie’s right in principle. But as a point of law, married couples have hundreds of legal protections and benefits that would take decades to unwind, if they can be unwound at all.
Agreed- So long as the marriage institution exists, everyone should have the right to use it (regardless of sexual preference- be that heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or even poly-sexual.) Although, I’m fairly certain that marriages don’t have to be consummated to be legal these days, anymore than a bastard child is unable to inherit.
Personally, I think the whole thing really aught to be renamed as ‘domestic partnership’ and reworked to be not quite so ridiculous- and as Maggie said- ruled by contract law, not its own special breed of nonsensical laws. Unfortunately, until that magically happens, there really is no other option. except to get a pre-nup with the marriage agreement.
It’s ye olde (limited) contradiction between limiting the scope of the law and promoting equality under the law. Contemporary advocates of gay marriage rights focus (inconsistently!) on the latter to the detriment of the former.
I’m split. On the one hand, arguing equality under the law is probably the shortest route to victory for supporters of gay marriage. On the other, actually winning might be a detriment to the long-run freedom and equality garnered by abolishing marriage law, as this merely ads another group who view the law as ‘theirs’ through blood and sweat.
Exactly. We see the same phenomenon when legalized sex workers like porn actresses and strippers are ready to throw whores under the bus to protect their own arses.
Yep. Notice how the response to the rhetorical argument, “if gays can marry, then next it’ll be polygamy!!!” is always, “It won’t come to that”, and never “and what would be wrong with that?”.
I’ve never seen it in any kind of mainstream setting, anyways.
Don’t jump the gun, now; that’s tomorrow’s column. 😉
The problem with polygamy is that all the forms, laws, and software that we use doesn’t consider the possibility of more than one spouse.
So it’s a paperwork disaster.
Let’s make this clear: I definitely agree that under the current legal structure, same-sex couples should be able to make use of that arrangement. BUT so should two non-sexual friends who wish to join their fortunes together, or an older man who wants to pass his business to a young protege, that sort of thing. The idea that two people should have to claim that they’re habitually shoving their body parts into each others’ orifices (or even worse that their judgment is highly impaired by neurochemicals) to enter into a legal contract is not only asinine, but highly offensive. A public declaration of chemically-impaired judgment would be considered to invalidate any contract signed while under the influence; for marriage it’s considered de rigueur.
I don’t see anything in the legal portion of marriage – you know, the binding part – that requires love. I’m ready to be contradicted on this point on a state-by-state basis, but I don’t see it on my marriage certificate.
yes…. that sounds right . I always thought the gay marrage thing was kind of silly, too. It seem to me to be more about a kind of test of acceptance.
John Cage
“They Come” (1938)
they come
different and the same
with each it is different and the same
with each the absence of love is different
with each the absence of love is the same
================================
John Cage (from “Lecture on Commitment” (1961)
“We are as free as birds. Only the birds aren’t free. We are as committed as birds and identically.”
Maggie McNeill did a great job on this article, and my intent is to add to and not detract from what she has stated before. The problem is that too many people in this world don’t understand what “true love” is. They also don’t understand what “romantic love” is either. Romantic love is simply infatuation, and maybe that is what it should be called instead of romantic love because romantic love was eventually called love by too many people confusing it with true love. Infatuation or “romantic love” is about feeling while love or “true love” is about choosing(even when it is difficult and you don’t feel like choosing it), sacrifice and obligation.
This is why the use of the ancient Greek terms for love is so useful, eros is not agape, nor is it philia; and if a couple bases their union on the shifting sands of eros, they should not complain when it ends badly.
Amen. The Ancient Greeks had 5 types of love which were called agape, phillia, storge, xena and eros if I remember correctly. Certainly agape and maybe phillia were regarded as higher forms of love than eros.
Maggie McNeill is right that government has turned the institution of marriage into disaster. I really don’t see why anyone would do it especially if you are a man who plans to marry a woman. We’ll see how the government will deal with homosexual marriage. I suspect that government will ruin it like it did to heterosexual marriage especially for men. If you want to see a humorous take on marriage and government interfering too much then watch Adam Sandler, Kevin James and Jessica Biel in the comedic film, ” I Pronounce You Chuch and Larry”.
The word “marriage” is all intertwined with notions of religion, tribal law, and governmental control of order within a society.
I really don’t know why gays want to be associated with the word.
The problem is Maggie … lots of people DO get married because of “love” (you might be one of them 😉 ).
And the image of an old married couple smiling at each other as they sit on their rocking chairs on their front porch, is an image people like. Certainly, that’s an increasingly rare image and the reality is … most of those marriages end in divorce – but humans like to believe in the ideal.
I got married for love and because, that’s pretty much the way a guy expresses the notion that “Hey I’m in this totally”. Both parties put a bet on the table. And, society rewards you for doing so – with tax breaks and the like. No skin on the table – no reward from society.
I refer to my wife as … “my wife”. But … I don’t like to think of her as a wife. I like to think of her as a girlfriend I’ve been with for a very long time. I think the downfall of marriage is because of what rides underneath it – a concept akin to imprisonment. It’s funny to me, how we make it the goal of our lives to find someone who will voluntarily “love” us for who we are – and then, once found – we immediately throw the shakles on them so they can never change their minds or get away from us!
That’s why I think of my wife as my “girlfriend”. It gets me away from that concept of imprisonment and it also staves off the complacency that is inherent in marriage – namely taking the other shackled individual for granted. Girlfriends – you have to WORK to keep. You have to constantly impress them. This kind of thinking tends to bring out a better side of me when I deal with my “wife”.
If there had been any other way for me to keep this woman and raise a family with her – I’d have found it … but there wasn’t. This is why I’m surprised that gays seem to want to jump headlong into that millenia old mess when they don’t have to. Were I one of them – I wouldn’t, but I would come up with something a bit better in the way of “unions”.
I never felt “romantic love” for either husband. I love my husband very much, but it’s a closer kin to the love one feels for a best friend than that silly, giddy, judgment-destroying madness people call “romantic love”. Marriages in which the former is a major component are strong; marriages based solely on the latter inevitably fail. Yet it’s the latter which is held up as the ideal.
I think you’re wrong about that. I don’t think anyone holds “judgement destroying madness” as the “ideal”.
As an example … I got married by a military chaplain. Before he agreed to perform the ceremony he insisted on several appointments with my wife and I – and the only object he had was to ensure that both she and I were beyond the “biochemical love fog”.
So I don’t know who it is that is insisting that “blinding” love be the ideal for a marriage. It’s not the religious types – that’s for sure … because when they council their young marriage “hopefuls” – they’re specifically looking to ensure both individuals are thinking clearly.
It seems to me that you approach this from a psychological … biochemical … hormonal … brain neuron firing standpoint – and that’s fine for intellectuals like yourself I guess. Me? I find most of those notions take too much of the mystery and free choice out of life. Like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator … I was forced to take that test repeatedly in the military and the results explained to me. They were always the same results so that’s a plus for the testing method – but they never did me a lick of good in practical application except to cause me to second guess decisions I made when I had no need to. I pounded all that shit out of my head.
So it makes me feel a bit “icky” when you break down “love” into a psychological equation. I’m sure it can be – but do we really want to do it?
Last, I think a lot of “love” starts out as silly and giddy … but evolves over time to a more practical form of love. When you see an old married couple that’s happy … you’re seeing the back end of the process – not the front end. The front end you can bet looked pretty giddy and silly.
krulac wrote:
– a concept akin to imprisonment
From Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary:”
A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves – in all two persons.
It’s a smart move to think of your wife like you would a girlfriend then proceed to constantly and successfully seduce her in today’s modern USA because of no fault divorce which she can unilaterly end at any time.
The Cahn song isn’t about romantic love. The lyrics use the word love as a euphemism for sex. “Dad was told by Mother, you can’t have one without the other.” This observation doesn’t invalidate Maggie’s core argument but I’m a singer among other things and I felt compelled to share this niggling clarification.
It’s a damned important clarification! I honestly hadn’t considered that, despite the fact that I often rail about male songwriters using “love” as a euphemism for sex.
It’s also worth noting that in Cahn’s analogy, the horse is shackled into its role; and likely can’t see the shackles for its blinders. I find the whole thing a very apt metaphor for marriage.
Whether or not the government should be in the business of regulating marriages, it has been for a very long time, and I doubt it’s going to give up that power anytime soon. With that said, the government’s chief role in such contracts (as in all contracts) is to act as a mediator and judge in disputes about contractual obligations. Since gays can buy cars, take out loans, become partners in a corporation, sign mortgages, and the hundred and one other matters which involve contracts, there’s no rational basis for a prohibition against a particular type of contract.
Technically, the marriage contract says nothing about ‘love’; the government does not (legally) speculate as to why people enter into a contract, unless a dispute suggests some form of coercion was used.
If the point of government regulation is to encourage reproduction of the mating couple it is not rational not to extend it to gays since two individuals of the same sex cannot reproduce. Gay marriage is only reproductive in the sense it is polygamous, as you can see in cases when lesbians split up and the sperm donor is treated as financially responsible for his “wife”, but polygamy is socially destabilizing and not something the government can reasonably support. The only rational solution is for government to get out of the mating business, including subsidies for single mothers.
This quote holds so much weight even in today’s world:
Too true. Here’s another example.
It’s funny. I’ve never met a woman who was offended by that line; most thought it was funny/appropriate. And yet you could never get away with it today because someone would be OFFENDED!
I would suggest that government became involved in marriage because someone wanted religious law to have secular enforcement.
Religion, in all its forms, was originally governments’ attempt at mind control, as Hobbes advocated in Leviathan. Where religion is no longer compulsory, it only continues to exist out of habit.
Government became involved in marriage due to a type of nanny-statism that used to be easier for the state to impose through religious intermediaries than directly.
Buddy Cole (Kids in the Hall) on Marriage:
[youtube http://youtu.be/Vb12O2JVID4%5D
Yeah, I got annoyed at the “marriage is about love” rhetoric for gay marriage in . . . 1993, I think.
Anyway, then-teenage CrazyGuy concluded there were exactly two coherent rationales for state-recognized marriage. The first was as a registered “household” economic partnership, which logically should be open to non-romatic pairs and to small groups, et cetera, recognized by the state only in the same sense that corporations and business partnerships have legal forms. The second was specifically as an arrangement for the raising of children, where the government interest would begin and end as a protector of the interests of the children (which would logically involve lots of other consequences, like divorce no longer being treated as a two-party no-fault matter).
It’s why I have a bit of sympathy for (for example) Orson Scott Card on the issue. He starts from the assumption that marriage should be for reason #2, and though he extends that in ways I don’t quite agree with, he’s at least arguing for a vision that has a basic logical coherency at the root.
You might be interested in this post of mine, particularly the second half. I focus on the notion of respectability in the same-sex marriage campaign rather than on the notion of romantic love, but we reach many of the same conclusions: http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/05/13/marriage-same-sex-and-other/
There could be something worthwhile at the end of this … how about the ‘clan’ and ‘line’ marriages of Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or something like the Long Family on Tertius in Time Enough For Love?
I realize I’m talking through my hat, with this one. I’ve never been married, I have no children, and my last ‘romance’ ended with a whimper, not a bang, in 1986. Heck, I was raised by a single mom, living with her sister and their mother; I don’t think I have any previous baggage about marriage or the right environment to raise a child. I was screwed up, but I’ve been pulling my own weight in the boat and a little more.
If we assert that the prime purpose of a marriage is to have children and raise them straight and strong – to make sure they’re provided for and raised in a stable, loving, good-example environment – would it really be appropriate to rule out something where you have multiple co-wives and co-husbands to share the work and share the devotion and share happiness and share the love?
I think you may have touched on this before, but one of the side effects of people seeing marriage as this sappy romantic Hollywood thing is the hysteria people have over spouses who look at other women (or men), look at porn, hire sex workers or cheat. Putting aside moral judgements, a person with realistic expectations about marriage will realize the fundamental truth of relationships: that you will never be the only person they want to have sex with.
In a real marriage, both have agreed to sacrifice some degree of sexual liberty — ranging from “all” to “some” — in exchange for an economically and emotionally beneficial relationship. As long as your spouse’s actions are not endangering that relationship (i.e, leaving you, getting a disease, etc.), you accept a certain amount waywardness as the price of admission and a basic realization that monogamy or even monogamishy is difficult for us horny monkey folk.
(Wow. Those are two of the most belabored paragraphs I’ve ever written).
Belabored, perhaps, but right on. 😉
Agreed that marriage laws should be reconstructed so that the individuals involved can decide whether or not their love, their economic needs, their sexual urges, or whatever motive they have for getting married is legitimate.
Your scare quotes around the word love and you derisive tone about being under the influence of chemicals, in short your general poo-pooing of love in general, has me chewing my blinky binky.
I think REAL love is one of the greatest things in the world, and I’m a big fan. But that absurd and puerile lust-masquerading-as-something-deep crap ain’t real love, no matter how much people are fond of calling it so.
There’s something Bill Mahr said about why Hollywood relationships frequently fail which echoes what Maggie said about how marriages need more than just romantic love as a foundation. I don’t remember Mahr’s exact words but they go roughly like this: “They got tired of f****ing each other. If that’s the only fuel in the tank keeping the airplane aloft, then that plane is going to crash.”
[…] I also happen to think, though, we haven’t reached the marriage equality goal just yet — there are some steps to be taken: […]
[…] Maggie McNeil (escrito en 2012, pero sigue siendo […]
Perhaps I can save myself a long post with this : when I quickly read the tagline for this article, my brain registered this message:
“Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carnage” 💘💂👰💘