Marriage has reached its sell by date

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By Roland Michel Tremblay (about the author) Page 1 of 5 page(s)

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Let's start a real debate about marriage, not just a question of if gay marriage is acceptable or not. Marriage is certainly an interesting concept, mostly a religious one. Religions, great at making official for the record these unions, a task eventually also espoused by the State, and can now be given legally, almost administratively. In this millennium, after so much liberation in the Western World, is marriage not becoming a past date concept, obsolete? And what about baptism? They are religious concepts we desperately need to free ourselves from.

I will get straight to the point, I am gay, I have been in a stable relationship with another man for 15 years. We are in love and are faithful to each other. I didn't say free from arguments and problems plaguing our existence, I said faithful. Not because we hold dear to this concept, but because not being faithful brings more troubles than it is worth. And I guess there comes a time when, well, you don't see the point anymore of going to clubs and meeting people.

My sister has been in a relationship for perhaps ten years now, she had two children with her boyfriend, with a third one from his first marriage which failed spectacularly. The Court, the irrationality, the nightmare. After that he does not want to marry again, and she, never saw what marriage was good for, she never believed in this sort of institution. I'm proud of my sister.

And you should have seen the crisis when they decided that their kids would not be baptized, you would have thought they had simply declared that the Third World War was on. It is possible to get un-baptized these days, I would seriously be considering it, if it were not acknowledging this institution in the process. I do not believe in any of these institutions, neither should you.

What is marriage exactly? The union of a man and a woman together, supposedly for life, unless somehow you can find a way to cancel it or terminate it. We are getting expert at that, and there is nothing wrong with this state of affair. It is in fact significant, you can only wonder if marriage is truly necessary nowadays.

At the moment, the challenge is to extend this marriage to gay couples, and perhaps also eventually to people living together in some sort of interdependence without any sexual interaction. These unions are now acknowledged in Common Law by any government for legal purposes, making marriage obsolete. Still worried? You don't need to get married to sign a contract similar to a pre-nuptial agreement.

Most people only wish to get married because they have this romantic religious idea that this is what we have always done, tradition, and so, let's do it, let's make it big, let's spend 100,000 on it and cherish the memory forever. Until the divorce comes at least, when finally the horror and mistake of getting married will hit you full blast, disgust you for life, of what it really meant to get married. Before, divorce was not an option, but now it is.

Also, we are pushed into marriage not only by everyone around us, but by the government (preferential treatments if you are married) and religions as well (fear of going to hell if you do not get married). It is contrary to any idea of freedom to get married. And freedom is important, more than marriage, is it not?

As soon as gay marriage is official everywhere, you will see, we will have to marry, it will be like an obligation. I would never have been able to remain in the UK without first getting married. At the moment, it suffices to prove that we are a couple. I don't like this idea of marriage, you are forced into it, and then forced into divorce eventually. Now, whenever a gay couple breaks up, it is not bloody, but throw a marriage and a divorce in there, and let's see how bloody it will become, just like with heterosexual couples.

More exactly, to whom does marriage profit? Perhaps you can help me answer that question. It does bring security I suppose. With marriage comes a whole branch of the law, to insure some sort of fairness and security to both parties, very much like a contract between two business partners. And remember, contracts are usually drawn between people who do not trust each other. You do agree to it all in theory, even though most people fail to see the extent of that contract. They finally understand when the divorce comes.

Marriage was a good idea before, when women were not working and there were children in that union. Marriage ensured stability, it was harder for anyone to just bin the family and leave for the other side of the planet. If someone else came to break that marriage, in theory the other person and the children would be catered to.

It is different now in this modern world, rare are the marriages that will last a decade. Women do work, often earning more than their husband. And the children, well, not only the nuclear family has finally exploded, the law has taken over to ensure both parties will cater to these children one way or another, marriage or not. So, why would you wish to get married now, apart from "this is tradition", or a romantic idea of what it once meant?

Who came up with this idea of marriage? I am trying to imagine here how it came to be, why it was felt it was important to have marriages at the time, when it burst out upon this world and became an absolute necessity embraced by everyone.

Is it purely a religious concept, or was it incorporated within those Bibles and religions from a tradition that already existed? Perhaps some pure people thought that having sex with more than one partner was disgusting, even, enjoying sex was unthinkable. Might as well separate the sexes for life, have your babies in a test tube in a laboratory, and bypass marriage and sex altogether. Men in America, Women in Europe, gay people... might as well kill them all.

If I was at the beginning, and could decide how this world would be organized, I do not believe I would have wanted to impose any kind of marriage concept. I don't think I would have thought it wise to ensure that a man and a woman had to decide early on that they would need to make their union official and that they would need to die together.

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Roland Michel Tremblay is an author. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Michel_Tremblay

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