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Marriage has often been described as the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law. Another way of describing it would be a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found. Such a union may also be called matrimony, while the ceremony that marks its beginning is usually called a wedding.
Back in the mid-1990s, a lot of friends started asking me if the institution of marriage was falling apart. Many of their questions seemed to assume that there had been some sort of the “Golden Age of Marriage” in the past. But in nature, for thousands of years people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. History has proven that the ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned their high divorce rates, which they contrasted with an earlier era of family stability. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats. The truth is, the institution of marriage have been in crisis since the beginning of time or at least since it was founded.
The divorce rate has been on the rise here in Malaysia for the past ten years. The one thing that has often been associated with marriage is love. This led to a surprising finding. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage, and companionship its basic goal, was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people’s satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one.
To understand why the love-based marriage system was so unstable and how we ended up where we are today, we have to recognize that for most of history, marriage was not primarily about the individual needs and desires of a man and woman and the children they produced. Marriage had as much to do with getting good in-laws and increasing one’s family labour force as it did with finding a lifetime companion and raising a beloved child.
Traditionally, marriage also organized the division of labour and power by gender and age, confirming men’s authority over women and determining if a child had any claim on the property of the parents. Marriage was the most important marker of adulthood and respectability as well as the main source of social security and medical care.
Certainly, people fell in love during those hundreds of years, sometimes even with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love. For hundreds of years the theme song for most weddings could have been the Tina Turner’s classic ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’.
Because marriage was too important a contract to be left up to two individuals involved, kin, neighbours and other outsiders, such as judges, kadis, priests or government officials, were usually involved in negotiating a match. Even when individuals orchestrated their own transitions in and out of marriage, they frequently did so for economic and political advantage rather than for love.
As a result, many of the greatest love stories of the ages, such as the tale of Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet had more to do with political intrigue than romantic passion. The marriages of the rich and famous in the ancient and medieval worlds can be told as political thrillers, corporate mergers, military epics and, occasionally, even murder mysteries. But they were not the tales of undying love that a lot of teenage girls were imagining and they often make modern marriage scandals seem tame in comparison.
The BIG questions are, if marriage was about love and lifelong intimacy, why would people marry at all if they couldn’t find true love? What would hold a marriage together if love and intimacy disappeared? How could household order be maintained if marriages were based on affection rather than on male authority?
No sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce. No sooner did people agree that families should serve children’s needs than they began to find the legal penalties for illegitimacy inhumane. Some people demanded equal rights for women so they could survive economically without having to enter loveless marriages. Others even argued for the decriminalization of homosexual love, on the ground that people should be free to follow their hearts. All these were examples on how chaotic the institution of marriage can be if it were to be based on something as fragile as love.
I personally believe that love alone won’t be able to sustain a normal marriage. It is this kind of understanding that would secure the sacredness of the institution. Marriage is an official bind that surpassed any irrational idea such as love. Love maybe a part of it but it will never be the sole reason for a marriage to work. Related News
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