I AM against gay marriage. I’m against straight marriage. I’m against marriage full stop. Why are we hanging on to this relic of an anachronistic system (which still reeks of misogyny and bigotry), established so men could own women to ensure their estates and titles were passed on to their kids – sorry, their sons? Time to ditch it.
Marriage doesn’t work. For evidence, see the divorce rate climbing closer to 50 per cent with every click on the rsvp.com.au website. The waving of the magic wedding wand is no guarantee of a successful marriage or a happy family. No amount of confetti, profiteroles and $10,000 photo shoots will counteract the dismantling of religious oppression, social taboo and financial constraint that is making far more options acceptable, despite the beige majority’s fixation on fairytale endings that don’t exist and never have.
Weddings and marriage are spin-doctoring propaganda to maintain social order. Which is code for ”making sure the blokes are running the joint while women are oppressed and conned into doing the majority of the unpaid domestic and emotional heavy lifting” (and a hefty whack of the income earning as well). Married men live longer than single ones. Unmarried women live longer than wives. Girls, read the fine print and ask yourself: ”What’s in it for me?”
I’m all for love, intimacy, sex, companionship and growing into wiser, more beautiful and compassionate human beings through sharing parts of your journey with others. And I quite like going to weddings. I just prefer funerals – the chat’s more earthy, you hear more secrets, you don’t have to buy a present and there’s no group on the balcony muttering: ”I give it three months, tops.”
Funerals mark something that actually happened.
Celebrating 20 years of being together and not killing each other makes far more sense than a ceremony that celebrates something that hasn’t even started. Love needs no public statement, no witnesses. The stage-managed perfection of a wedding is the antithesis of the hard yakka of surviving a long-term relationship. Weddings are an advertisement for something that only exists in the imaginations of seven-year-old girls. . . .
As for ”it’s just a piece of paper”, it’s so much more than that. It’s the reinforcement of unrealistic expectations, outdated gender stereotypes and proof we’re still being sucked in to happily-ever-after endings. It’s also a scathing indictment of our lack of cultural maturity and spiritual imagination. And proof we’re emotionally medieval.
I guess without the “medieval” worldview and “conservative” values that she derides with such uncomprehending hostility, there isn’t much of a basis for marriage anymore. Having babies is also medieval and conservative. By this reasoning, we ought to just let ourselves die out. This, though, I daresay, is where our culture is headed.
HT: Adam Hensley
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