Who Needs Marriage?

[talon]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2031962,00.html

Not that I need an article to spur this topic. I've long felt marriage was an outdated institution and should be eliminated. People who are gay usually stop reading me at this point and get all angry and "unfriend" me and write nasty screeds about me and scream that they don't feel safe around me anymore and so on. The few who read further may not agree with me, but at least they aren't all antagonistic or paranoid about it.

To quote the article: " We're just more flexible about how family gets defined." That pretty much sums up my feelings about marriage. Marriage is no longer essential to creating a family, not with the unreasonable expectations that come with it. People get all starry-eyed about marriage and think getting married will fix all their problems. It won't. It simply creates a new set of problems, mostly because marriage as it is now doesn't address modern fears and issues.

The wealthy keep marrying because the current institution favors them, favors the disposition of property, of heirship, of status. The issues of property, prosperity, progeny, protection, and power are better understood and manipulated by the wealthy and it benefits them more.

For the middle class, not so much. They still realize benefits, but often those are balanced by the burdens and expectations. When the penalties for marriage tip the balance, the marriage ends because there doesn't seem to be a way forward and divorce happens. When adversity strikes a middle class couple, often the easiest way out of the adversity is end the marriage. If these things happen before marriage, the marriage may never happen. A lot of middle class people are looking at the costs vs benefits of marriage and never even contemplating it - or delay it until they reach a point where the benefits begin to outweigh the costs and penalties.

For the lower class, the working poor, and the destitute, marriage can be more of a burden than a blessing, the way it's currently set up. The penalties for being married outweigh, in many cases, the benefits of marriage. If they seek welfare assistance, they are often denied it if they are married. Welfare is structured to support the single parent, not the struggling couple. The poor learned the lesson well - marriage meant hardship, struggling, greater poverty, few opportunities. I notice the article talked about the poor delaying or avoiding marriage, but didn't seem to address any of the reasons for it.

The reasons the wealthy marry and the poor don't mingles in the middle class. As long as they can stay out of the welfare trap that ensnares their poorer neighbors, marriage can work for them, but they see the pitfalls of marriage as clearly as they dream of the happily ever after.

Something I don't think anyone has pointed out is the correlation between stable neighborhoods and stable marriages. For the wealthy, there's a smaller pool of people, they all know one another or of one another and are wealthy enough to maintain those ties. Their marriages are part of those ties - alliances of families and businesses, alliances of families and politics. Divorce isn't about survival, it's often about profit and personal empowerment.

The middle class neighborhoods have destabilized - part of it is due to corporate policy to relocate employees frequently - often because of promotions. In fact, promotions and higher pay are the lure to get employees - and their families - to leave the stability of their homes and communities to start over again among relative strangers. One spouse has to sacrifice their career for the other. Of course marriages will suffer, and even end. A lot of middle class people I know wait to marry until they are at a point in their careers where they are sent careening all over the country.

For the poor, it's even worse - they have no guarantee their job will be there the next day, they can be fired for any reason or no reason at all no matter how good they are at their job. They may be working 2 or 3 jobs because they know how ephemeral a job is. The companies have zero loyalty to their employees. Waiting until they are financially stable to marry can be a lifetime proposition. They want families and stability, all the things marriage promises, but then they need food stamps or welfare assistance because their jobs melted away or they got sick and were replaced by someone healthier, and you can't easily get welfare if you're married. Toss children into the mix and you might as well tell the poor they can never marry because they'll never be rich enough, well enough, stable enough, or deserving enough to marry.

I think we need to entirely scrap marriage as it is and revamp it. We might keep the name, since so many people are so deeply vested in the concept of "marriage", but it would be entirely new, treated differently by welfare agencies, charities, employers, and politicians - the very groups that have, in my opinion, destroyed marriage.

What we did in Numenism was separate "marriage" from sex. We created contracts for relationships that were separate from contracts for sex. A couple who contracted for sex may also be contracted for a partnership, and they may also hold contracts for partnerships with other people outside their coupledom, and for sex with entirely different people. There may be people in the partnership who hold no sex contracts at all, with anyone, and yet they are still in a committed partnership. There may be partnerships where no one in the partnership has a sex contract with anyone else in the partnership, but may have sex contracts with people outside of it. There may even be people who only have sex contracts and no partnership contracts at all (we don't currently have any of those, but it's possible).

A relationship or partnership contract spells out the things taken for granted in a marriage - who owns what property, who pays for what portion support and care of the other people in the partnership, who lives where and with whom and who is responsible for rent and food and utilities, all the material aspects of caring for one another including powers of attorney and attorneys-in-fact and advance directive POAs or proxies (sometimes called a "durable" or "springing" POA), guardianships, and anything related to inheritance, property, personal care and protection, progeny, insurance coverage and beneficiaries, and profits. Most of our partnerships are created to take care of one another and our children. It has everything to do with love and family and nothing to do with sex.

Sex is considered separately. It has its own contract and rules. People in partnership contracts may or may not have one or more sex contracts. Most people tend to be serially monogamous and so have only one operant sex contract at a time.

For the most part, all the other stuff of a partnership - nursing one another, providing housing for one another, loving and understanding one another, being best friends, taking care of one another, supporting one another, pooling resources to increase their combined wealth, or to reduce combined expenses - is separate from sex. It made sense to use to separate them out with different contracts. Just because you cease to be physically attracted to someone doesn't mean you stop loving or caring for them, nor is loving or caring for someone predicated entirely upon physical, sexual attraction. And ceasing to be sexually attracted to a partner doesn 't negate the fruits of that attraction - children. A partnership contract provides ongoing, stable care for any children in the partnership regardless of sexual partners.

That's where I think modern marriage fails - it shoves everything into one rigid yet nebulous contract, sex, and kids, and money, and property, and inheritance, and love, and care. And then our society takes away the our ability to fulfill those rigidly nebulous terms easily as a married couple.

So yeah, I'm down on marriage, and think it needs revamping to fit our society and give people the flexibility we need to build lasting families of any combination of consenting adults.

We don't need marriage so much as we need stable, long-lasting families.