Marriage is a construct

"By the power vested in me...I hereby pronounce you husband and wife."

Marriage is a construct. Friends say I'm a skeptic and maybe I am. But the facts are damning and I cannot simply ignore them.

Skeptic? Perhaps. Realist? Definitely.

With all due respect, if one has not been in a long-term relationship, he/she can only speak of love and marriage with a third-person view. (Coupled with the Western cultural diet of Hollywood)
Long-term relationships are educational on so many different fronts and I'm thankful enough for a three-and-a-half year stint.

Whatever preconceptions I had about love was blown out of the water and I was given new perspectives on both love and marriage. These new notions allowed me to appreciate what I had with my then-significant other and at the same time, guide both of us along in working at being better partners.

Yes, work. Love is work. And sometimes it feels like the most thankless job.
Flowers, poetry, smiles and holding hands are reserved for honeymoon periods, which can range from ten days to five years. The hardest part of relationships is perhaps the moments in time when you ask yourself if it's still worth trying for the relationship.

With that said, love is pretty much a hot topic nowadays. Scientists, sociologists, economists and even politicians are investing time and effort into investigations about love.

Love can be broken down any way you want it:
#1 Scientifically
#2 Emotionally
#3 Hollywood-style
#4 Psychologically
#5 Financially etc

You can measure how much her pupils dilate when you pick her up, or how endorphins trigger happiness and make you smile like retarded stoned slacker, or even how much she just hates your beard but puts up with it anyway. Or how much you are willing to spend because you know it would mean that much to the other.

The above are just a few examples off the top of my head but you get the gist of it. But at the end of the day, love is all about tolerance.

Happiness isn't a fish you can catch, it is an inanimate that a couple has to work at creating. And that is only the tip of the iceberg, what lies beneath the dark ocean is inevitable and unpredictable.

Fig. 1 illustrates my point.



Yes, love is as sketchy as my graph. And I was being kind.

Marriage is simply a certificate that states you are legally married, which is essentially proof of tying one down. If love were actually real, would we need phoney certificates to prove it?
Perhaps you might argue that it's an assurance to other party, and likewise I say to you, why would you need assurance if both were sure about their love?

It doesn't help that divorce rates are so phenomenally high. USA sees almost half of all marriages fail, with similar figures in countries such as Australia, Sweden and Belgium.

One saving grace of marriages is the passe form of arranged marriages. True. It is passe. How many countries still actively practise that?
But it comes as no surprise to me that arranged marriages generally last longer than normal marriages because in arranged marriages, couples learn to live and love one another.

I'm not saying they are perfect unions, far from that, but I'm sure we have a lot to learn from them.

Marriage and love are constructs, constructs of our Western cultural diets, our tradition and essentialist ideals espoused by society. They are derived from all these factors and every little bit of information we receive on the topic of love and marriages.

Love and marriage come with a lot of baggage, both good and bad. At the end of the day, it's about work, acceptance, and being with someone who is tolerable in the long run.





Hey who knows? Might get married someday.
...When I'm 45 and all my friends are married and I'm lonely as hell.

References::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/DYB2004/Table25.pdf

Appendix A
To avoid inaccurate descriptions of love, shelf all:
1. Backstreet Boys
2. Air Supply
3. Colin Raye
4. 50 Cent
5. Any mandarin pop song
6. Hollywood movies

To obtain an apt description, see:
1. Ne-Yo, Make It Work
2. Alanis Morissette