Here Comes the Bride
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| Photo credit: Tina Fey and Steve Carrel in Date Night, courtesy of houstonpress.com |
I was discussing marriage with my girlfriend the other week, and was wondering she wanted to really be engaged.
No one has really given me a good reason why I should get married, except to have kids. I did a little research with from other girls my age, and here are some reasons why they want/wanted to get married:
- It's a status symbol. I don't quite understand this, but there was a comment thrown around about how “girlfriend sounds so high school.” Mind you, this isn't from someone who is married, but I never thought about the connotation of the title “girlfriend” as being so negative. There is also the classic “Look at the ring he gave me!” crap that is so stereotypical 80s it makes me want to puke.
- “I want to move in with him.” I'm not sure how getting a ring will allow you to move in with a guy. Most girls I know lived with the guy before they married him – usually because it is too damn expensive to live around here in the first place. I suppose it's kind of like a driver's license, which allows you to drive a vehicle, but you can clearly drive the car if you don't have one. It surprises me that it's 2008 and some people have such a conservative point of view still. Personally, I am an adult and can live where (and with whom) I want, but I feel twinges whenever I think about telling mom that I want to live with Stew (we're not married if you can tell).
- Loneliness.
- Probably the biggest reason that people (women especially) want to get engaged/married is so they can establish themselves as separate from their parents. I think this reason ties into the first couple that I mentioned. As a status symbol, a married woman seems older and more mature. As people are living with their parents until they are 25 these days, women might see it as a way out of that situation by getting married. I also think that women might not want to come home for all of the holidays and use in-laws as an excuse for only seeing their parents once a year.
The second to last reason really bothers me, because although parents can be overbearing or heartless, this isn't a good reason to get married. MARRIAGE IS NOT ESCAPE. I never thought bringing someone else into a complicated situation would make it better.
Then there is this article from Psychology Today that states that getting married doesn't make you happier. I would argue that for a while it makes you more unhappy. There is a lot of expectation for a wedding to be a huge party (with a huge price tag), which also includes a huge amount of planning. No thank you, I have a social life.
Anyway, I will be waiting for a while.
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A while = more than six years. I shouldn't get cocky though.
May 2011.
-L
There's also a certain stability that fosters an offspring friendly environment, ifyaknowwhatimean...
ReplyDeleteHere's a long winded and pretentious sounding reply: I think that the foundation of wanting to marry is that the expectation of marriage is woven into the fabric of society in more ways than we can count. The reason it's woven in is because it benefits *society* for couples to have a more permanent relationship that "just dating". Ultimately it comes down to the finding the best way to organize society to raise children. It seems that for while other species might work well raising their young in hives or by simply laying eggs on the seafloor and abandoning them, for humans it's best when a pair of parents stick around throughout childhood.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting question isn't, "why do you want to get engaged?", it's, "why would we even question why someone would want to get engaged?". Developing the human way of doing things has taken thousands of years and in only the last few decades has the underlying equation of sex=babies really been altered, and that has, is, and will continue to cause a lot changes in society. If you're not ready to have children and you have reliable birth control then the *logical* reasons for marriage become a matter of taxes and insurance benefits and hospital visitation rights.