A discussion on the ethics and content of Marriage

[DeletedUser]

As you all may already know, there are several debates on marriage at the moment; Same sex, divorce rates, child allocation, ect. But I want to bring up a debate on the evolving ethics and ever-changing concept of marriage. Sure, we once knew Marriage to be wedlock between man and a woman, but it's changing and there isn't anything anyone can do about it. But, what I want to talk about is Divorce and the sucess of marriages.

As we all know (looking at america), around 46% of marriages end in divorce, with 20% of those hurting one or both of the divorcees in some way. Now, from slight research, the divorce rate for families married in the earlier 20th century have ended in a lesser 20% range of divorces, if not less.

Now without further adue, here is what I am getting at: Our minds have been indoctrinated with the whole concept of "True Love" and a believed fact that Love and the way someone is will overcome money, financial security, and good health. Truth is, unless one or the other partner has enough to make 100,000 a year and are responsible, then the true love theory is utter bullcrap. I don't care who you are, friend of mine or foe, Love is equal to or less than an illusion. It's a mere offshoot of lulness and pride in posessing the heart and mind of another, a bond that can easilly be broken. IMO todays marriages end in divorce not because of who abuse their spouses, but because they are not good decisions. Men and women do not want to feel entrapped in a relationship if they lose their ability to care about the wellbeing, or atleast the emotions of their spouse. There are more important ideals to look at, such as the ability to maintain a stable economic climate for the family name, as well as the ability to keep calm and collect without inept idiocies and fablized fictions running the show; hince the conspiracy that true love is real. It's not. Again, GET OVER IT.

Now, in resolve to this, I'd like to open another chapter, arranged marriages. Arranged marriages are made by either the parents, or the couple at an early age, for the best financial benefit of the two to be wed. Why? Simple. Marriage would be a business agreement (and possibly a *love* coupling.) The point of it would be to marry off one with a bit of money to another who is financially stable and could support a family. Instead of having young "lovers" ending up marrying in Movie fiction fashion and making an attempt at a low wealth duet only to break apart in apathy towards one another and result in a catastrophe, there could be a family bondage and an arrangement to protect and prolong the togetherness of the couple, as a matter of fact, it is proven that arranged marriages are often more successful than their ordinary counterparts because of such reasons. There aren't any unnecessary datings and get-to-know yous before hand because you are brought up knowing the-who-you-will-be-with person the whole time, and you will be better off knowing what will be happening. Sure, if you are a party man then this ideal could be lame, but if you are looking to start a long-lasting and well-established family, and also love the person you will be with, arranged marriages do have their benefits.

Of course, that's just a few things about marriage, and they may be posted up already but they too are still up for debate.

 

[DeletedUser]

"Now without further adue, here is what I am getting at: Our minds have been indoctrinated with the whole concept of "True Love" and a believed fact that Love and the way someone is will overcome money, financial security, and good health. Truth is, unless one or the other partner has enough to make 100,000 a year and are responsible, then the true love theory is utter bullcrap. I don't care who you are, friend of mine or foe, Love is equal to or less than an illusion. It's a mere offshoot of lulness and pride in posessing the heart and mind of another, a bond that can easilly be broken". . . ."hince the conspiracy that true love is real. It's not. Again, GET OVER IT."

As much as I'd love to, I can't respond to your whole post since I'm working right now, but I'm unfortunately going to have to disagree with you on this part.

My mother and father met when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. They married after twelve weeks of knowing each other, and had me and my brother shortly after. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, she was diagnosed with the deadliest cancer in the world and given sixteen weeks to live. Fortunately, the doctors' predictions were false, but she lived her next twenty years in and out of hospitals having her brain cut open three times, her right leg operated on twice before they actually had to amputate it, her left leg operated on three times (the second time they had to insert a rod), her organs operated on, her arm and chest, etc. All through this my father was only making forty grand a year (try paying hospital bills and expensive medicine with that, while still paying for everything else a young father has to). I've never seen a stronger love than what was between my parents at that time. I'm sorry, but no one will ever be able to convince me that true love is not real.

 

[DeletedUser]

Since I've never been married, I'm definitely not an authority on the subject of why they do or don't last, but I do have my ideas about some things that affect it. I think there are a lot of reasons why fewer marriages are "until death do us part" these days. Some of them that I think are having the biggest influence are:

1. People live longer. Years ago, people got married and lived together until the children were grown (and sometimes the grandchildren were), but the majority of them didn't have to go through 20 years of retirement together.

2. Women no longer feel like they have to stay in an abusive marriage because they have no other options. Society has become more accepting of single parents, and single/divorced people in general. It no longer has the stigma attached to it that it did in the past.

3. Wives working has been both good and bad for marriages (again, just in my opinion). It takes some of the pressure of supporting the family off the husband, but it also makes marriage seem less necessary if either partner could be self-supportive if necessary.

4. Partially because of the lack of a full time parent in the home, I don't believe that children grow up with the strong bonds with family they did in the past. They also don't see as much of the interaction between parents as those in the past did, which makes it harder to know what their roles in their own marriages should be.

5. We live in a throw away society. If your car is a couple years old, you trade it in for a new one; if your house isn't big enough, you buy a different one rather than adding on to the existing one; if styles change, you get rid of your old clothes and buy the latest fashions; the same thing is true for electronics, appliances, jobs, and most other things (including relationships). If something doesn't fit your current needs, you replace it rather than try to adapt it to make it work for you.

 

[DeletedUser]

As much as I'd love to, I can't respond to your whole post since I'm working right now, but I'm unfortunately going to have to disagree with you on this part.

My mother and father met when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one. They married after twelve weeks of knowing each other, and had me and my brother shortly after. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, she was diagnosed with the deadliest cancer in the world and given sixteen weeks to live. Fortunately, the doctors' predictions were false, but she lived her next twenty years in and out of hospitals having her brain cut open three times, her right leg operated on twice before they actually had to amputate it, her left leg operated on three times (the second time they had to insert a rod), her organs operated on, her arm and chest, etc. All through this my father was only making forty grand a year (try paying hospital bills and expensive medicine with that, while still paying for everything else a young father has to). I've never seen a stronger love than what was between my parents at that time. I'm sorry, but no one will ever be able to convince me that true love is not real.

I have experienced this myself, tragically in very similar circumstances. I met the lady who became my wife in January of 1998 when she was 27 and I was 22. Its a bit of a Jerry Springer-worthy story, but she came to town for someone else, but she wound up falling for me. I was grieving from the death of my h.s. sweetheart just a few months prior (killed by a hit and run driver in love with his hawt rhedd sports car that became even redder splattered with my lover's blood who had just been walking along the side of the road >_<) and couldn't make sense of my feelings. It wasn't until about a year later when I left to try and clear my head for a bit that it became clear to me how much I loved her. When I got back, we had a small private ceremony.

We struggled and struggled but financially we just couldn't keep living together. I'd get laid off, than she, we mooched off one friend, then another and couldn't get our stuff together, so we decided to live apart, she with her family and I with mine until one or the other or hopefully both of us had it together enough that we could have a place of our own together. We struggled, managed to get back together only for the rug to get pulled out from under us again when I was laid off from another job, and a third time. It was hard and we cried a lot to each other through letters and on the phone when we had to live apart.

In November of 2005, when we were again living apart, she had been having increasing problems of very low energy and when they couldn't rouse her out of bed, her family finally took her to the E.R. She was diagnosed with late stage lymphoma. It was too late for them to do much ... and neither she nor I had any insurance. She passed away in January 2006, less than two months after getting diagnosed.

When I first met her, she barely talked. She had been through harrowing sexual abuse when she was a little girl from her father, he even got her pregnant. (She and I played around a lot but did not want kids and never did). I spent time with her, going for walks or just hanging around ... nothing serious ... but she started opening up and within a few months she was laughing and smiling. She let me know I was the reason. I had not been through any sort of abuse like that, but I had suffered from depression all of my life, and events like the death of my previous lover I simply wasn't able to get over ... for the very first time in my life, though, from her I got a sense of value in myself, that whatever else, I could make a person happy and feel good, and it is very hard to describe how powerful and necessary that was for me to continue living.

I miss her terribly. I think about the dreams she and I had, just finding a place our own to live a quiet life somewhere ... and it will never be.

I've been through some bad relationships. I know what enfatuation is, what lust is, what getting carried away with the moment is. That happens a lot more often than true love because of how crazy and noisy society is. That does not mean true love does not exist. What Raven (my wife) and I shared was the real deal.

... oh, Virginia, terrible terrible of me! I forgot to mention thank you for sharing that story with me. If I didn't make it clear, it reminded me of the trials and tribulations my wife and I went through.

 

[DeletedUser]

The divorce rates are skewed by the sell of so many divorces that they don't point at the reality, which is that there is a large percentage of those divorces occurring with the same persons. Of the divorcees I know, most have had 4 or more divorces in their life. It is these people, the ones that treat marriage like, "god's permission to have sex" or some sort of false security, that throws off the actual divorce rates.

Moving to your arguments, David, I disagree with just about every part of it, starting with arranged marriages.

Arranged marriages are horrible. Not a little horrible, but a lot horrible. In most societies that have arranged marriages, women are treated as bargaining chips, a means to ante' up the family's social status or to gain a degree of political leverage. I.e., women are not treated as human beings, but as items of trade. In such circumstances, the woman is not respected, nor is she happy. Even with the best of men, arranged marriages are not good relationships. A relationship built on necessity is not a healthy one, nor is it likely to be a happy one, and resentment will stir up in many destructive, even deadly ways.

I have had "true love" once, and "strong love" once. Either of which I would once again love to experience. I have had hints of it over the years, but not since then have I had the great feelings, the overwhelming emotional completeness, that comes with such empowering relationships. And they truly are empowering. They give you the strength and the will to achieve things you didn't think were possible in you, but they can also sometimes blind you to the reality that society, and your own mortality, does not pave the way to that grandiose life you envisioned. Indeed, when it ends, for whatever reason, it is heart rending, almost unbearable.

Nonetheless, as demonstrated by the powerful stories above, love in adversity is far more valuable than friends with benefits and infinitely more valuable than alone in adversity. May we all live to die in love.

 

[DeletedUser]

The divorce rates are skewed by the sell of so many divorces that they don't point at the reality, which is that there is a large percentage of those divorces occurring with the same persons. Of the divorcees I know, most have had 4 or more divorces in their life. It is these people, the ones that treat marriage like, "god's permission to have sex" or some sort of false security, that throws off the actual divorce rates.

Again, with the divorces I do agree with stormm that is it the few apples that ruin the bunch (if thats how the phrase goes).

Arranged marriages are horrible

I second this because I believe that people should choose who to be with and not let others choose for themselves. And yes in some cultures women are used as assets(if you permit) being as which you must buy them. Stuff like that.

I have had "true love" once, and "strong love" once.

Just curious like always would would the difference be if any.

Nonetheless, as demonstrated by the powerful stories above, love in adversity is far more valuable than friends with benefits and infinitely more valuable than alone in adversity. May we all live to die in love.

I have to totally agree with you on this and add that in adversity you can truly see whose is your true friend or friends.

 

[DeletedUser1121]

Sadly arranged marriages are still very common. not only in countries like India but even in the some states of the USA it is legal to marry a girl up to the age of 13.. You need "parental" approval which in my eyes just is another word for arranged.

I am married for 5 years now. I have been with my wife for over 10 years.
The feeling Hellstromm describes was there for sure when we met, but this feeling will fade. In return you get a deeper connection. This connection however is not the key for a good marriage. You will need to work on your relationship everyday. Nothing in this world is for free (except the sunlight, but i am sure they will tax us for it eventually) and neither is a relationship. You will need to keep investing in it. This is the only way you will get something back. To give and to take. Respect eachother and always keep talking. That is what will make a marriage succeed. Not money. I will be just as happy with my wife if we only had a cardboardbox as a table.

 

[DeletedUser]

In the end, divorce usually because of either lack of compatibility, (which should have been figured out before they got married) and/or selfishness, particularly when the couple have children. If a man and woman with no children get divorced because they can't get along, so be it. But when they have a child and won't suck it up until the child is grown up and moved out. Then i have no respect left for them. It has been proven that children with their parents together grow up in much better condition than those whose parents divorced when they were young. It shows kids that divorce is commonplace, when in truth, it isn't the best way of living, but just in my opinion. To have marriage mate brings great rewards, to have someone to make it through life, to have some backup when you need it, and a shoulder to lean on at times.

I find it very saddening that so many marriages end in divorce.

"What God has yoked together let no man put apart."

 

[DeletedUser]

I find it very saddening that so many marriages end in divorce.

I totally agree with you one this. Also, research somewhat proves this about single parent homes and the effect on the children. Of coarse there are always the ones that get over the single parent issue and do better than the rest.

 

[DeletedUser]

Of coarse there are always the ones that get over the single parent issue and do better than the rest.

Well of course, but for the most part kids hold a resentment towards the parent that deserted them, or they feel resentful toward both parents and have no respect for authority and end up being a criminal. The latter being somewhat more rare than most cases, but you get my point.

 

[DeletedUser]

Well of course, but for the most part kids hold a resentment towards the parent that deserted them, or they feel resentful toward both parents and have no respect for authority and end up being a criminal. The latter being somewhat more rare than most cases, but you get my point.

Yup, and they end up not even valuing marriage and divorce and other problems they underwent as they were growing up because of the disrespect or the example they saw about their parents.

 

[DeletedUser]

As much as I hate putting personal information on here, I will anyway this time. My parents were divorced when I was 4 years old, and I have no doubt that my siblings and I were all much better off being raised by a single mother for several years and a very supportive stepfather after that than we would have been being raised by parents who fought all the time - at times getting to the point where my mother was hardly recognizable to her own parents because of the bruises. If there is no love and/or respect between the parents, leaving for the sake of the children makes much more sense than staying for their sake.

 

[DeletedUser]

That is indeed one of the times where divorce would be perfectly acceptable, and more especially, needed! Im glad such a thing worked out for you. I just wish other couples would only get divorced over serious issues.

 

[DeletedUser]

Well Blondie, I'm sure the vast majority of divorces aren't for trivial issues. Arty presents what I was thinking of posting earlier in regards to your ridiculous argument about how parents should stay together "for the children."

For the children is exactly not the reason to stay together. Yes, a child could be emotionally harmed by the splitting of parents, but it is not the split that does the greater damage, it is the parents themselves. And whether they are together or apart, the damage they do to their child would have resulted. That's because it's the parents' and how they manage not only their own relationship, but the relationship they have with their children that imposes upon the child's well-being.

So, if you have a solution to dealing with people having children that simply should not have had children, then by all means bring it, but it's a blatant scapegoat to blame child issues on divorce, when it is in fact poor parenting on the part of one or both parents.

Look, if your dad doesn't participate in your life, a divorce isn't going to change that. A husband who is focused on paying the bills and staying out of the crosshairs of his wife is not going to be any better a parent than a divorce' who is off doing his own thing. The child will still be neglected. A mother who resorts to violence and hysteria to manage her kids is not going to do any better with a husband at work than an ex-husband at work. To claim that divorces are undermining the development of children is to deny the more important, far more detrimental issue, which is that there are no prerequisites to be a parent, no obligatory training, no mandatory studies.

Contracts between two people, for a monogamous relationship, is a grand notion, but it's just a notion. What matters is if both of them actually mean it, and are willing to invest in it. But even with the best intentions, things do go wrong. Couples simply don't know everything about their significant other. And even if they do, things change, people change. But to think that a child is somehow the glue that should hold together a relationship is exactly the mistake so many young parents make.

Simply put, unhappy people make lousy parents.

 

[DeletedUser]

Alright let rephrase everything that ive already said into terms you'll understand, when parents divorce for trivial reasons, it is out of selfishness against the child/children. But no, unhappy people who actually love thier children can still make good parents.

 

[DeletedUser]

Alright let rephrase everything that ive already said into terms you'll understand, when parents divorce for trivial reasons, it is out of selfishness against the child/children. But no, unhappy people who actually love their children can still make good parents.

"can" make good parents, but they don't... precisely because they are unhappy. As to the "when parents divorce for trivial reasons," yeah that's narrowing it down to a minuscule percentage of actual divorces, and thus you're not arguing the topic, you're arguing a rare exception and attempting to make it the basis for your soapbox:

"Divorces are the Devil, just look at that person over there who divorced his wife because she don't iron his pants every mornin'. There's a sinner fer ya! Hang him for the sins of triviality, and hang all divorcees' for thinkin' ta divorce against the sacrament o' Jeeezus! Shame on ya fer hatin' God! Shame on ya fer callin' ta God fer your hand in marriage, only ta cast it aside! Think o' yer children! Think o' the world! Think o' God and all that he's done fer ya! All ya Divorcees' should be hanged, castrated, burned at the stake! How dare ya spit in the eye o' God! How dare ya deny yer misery! Don' ya know yer supposed ta suffer?! Well o' course ya do, so get all married up agin'. .... but remember ta get her ta sign a prenup this time."
​

 

[DeletedUser]

Okay, aside from you going on and exagerating the point. What other reason would there be for the larger number of divorces since the last century besides dumb reasons and that they wouldn't suck it up and keep moving?

Now you're on your soapbox.

 

[DeletedUser]

lol, well you're likely to gawk at this one, but one of the big factors in divorce happens to be differing faiths. I don't know about you, but I think that's a rather dumb reason to get divorced.

Anyway, race, ethnicity, age, education, income, communication, timing of first birth, cohabitation prior to marriage, forced sex, proximity to origin, etc and so on. There are many factors and once again you're looking for a cookie cutter answer. Simple is as simple does and I'm not willing to go all simple on you just because you want a simple answer. There are literally thousands of studies on this issue, so here, take this one and read up -- http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf

 

[DeletedUser]

I understand how it can seem unreasonable for two people to divorced because of differing faiths. But if one person has one goal that is taught by thier faith and the other spouse has a goal taught by his/her faith, the two can rarely meet each other halfway with one having one main focus, and the other having another focus. But even so, if one or both spouses are proclaimed, "Christian", then they shouldn't get divorced at all except on the grounds of adultery, as taught in the scriptures,


By no means am I bringing the Bible in this discussion to get off topic, but people who claim to believe in the Bible and to be a "Christian" but don't follow what the Bible says, irritate just as much as someone who doesn't believe in God at all. Im just pointing out the hypocrisy in some people when they get divorced.

 

[DeletedUser]

Meh, you were harping about "trivial" reasons to get divorced, I presented a clearly trivial reason (differing faiths) and you're now going on about how it's not trivial? See how that works?