Marriage 1

Why do we marry?

Why would one human join themselves with another human?

“To reproduce”, is not an adequate answer.

Why would two people select each other, and align themselves with each other, to the exclusion of all other people?

Is it due to a natural instinct, to love? But shouldn’t we love and care for everyone in our community?

Or is it a learned custom?  A habit we have got into? Perhaps an inherited tradition, passed down through our western culture?

Is marriage a purely Christian/Judaism teaching, that the entire western world/northern hemisphere have adopted?

What do other nations and cultures do?

How did the Native Americans view this subject?

The Inuit?  The Indigenous Australian?

The South American Tribes?

The Chinese?   Africa?   India?

I read that many cultures live together, in large communities

and families,  sharing, supporting, babysitting, hunting,

the old advising the young, the skilled teaching the newbie.

Sounds ideal,

but then there is the issue of no privacy or personal space,

maybe jealousy and possibly personality clashes.

At the other extreme, it seems unusual to me, that our custom in the west/north, is to marry ourselves to another person, then run away and cut ourselves off from all community, contacts, family and friends, and try and flesh out this whole relationship thing alone, suffer alone,  eventually divorcing alone.

No support, no encouragement, no advice, no good example.

I hear a statistic branded around, that nearly one half of marriages end in divorce. Yet people still spend thousands on weddings, celebrating a union for days, knowing the odds that it might end

a few years later.  Yes, I too thought, this will never happen to me.

Divorce and Marriage – what if we abolished them both?

Some nations (Scandinavia) have begun to phase out the wedding ceremony, and are simply moving into, and out of, each others lives. There is no divorce or rejection, because nobody gets married in the first place.  No stigma attached.

Is this better?  Are couples freer?  Are children happier?

I can see this is a massive subject that deserves deeper attention and study before any judgments or decisions can be made.

At least I’m being open minded,  and entertaining differing viewpoints. What I find unbearable, is the mindset of people who are deliberately fixed in tradition, and who refuse to take a fresh look at

the way we do things and, more importantly, the reason we do them.

“This is the way we’ve always done it”, people admonish me,

“just accept it Serge and stop questioning”.

These are the types of people I have distanced myself from;

they are not good for me.