The Nature of Marriage

Marriage, Love and the Division of Household Labor
Part 1
What does marriage mean in the U.S. today? For roughly half the people who marry it does not mean something permanent or “till death do us part”—for half of all marriages today end in divorce and as Pew Research Center points out, family sizes are getting smaller (marriage is no longer about having children) and family types are becoming more diverse: “Two-parent households are on the decline in the United States as divorce, remarriage and cohabitation are on the rise” (Pew Research Center, 2015). This is not much of a striking departure from where the status of marriage was in the 1990s—but if one goes back 50 years or 75 years, it is definitely a departure. The fact is that divorce has become more accepted as common place and marriage is now seen as something one tries—like trying on a new outfit for a while. There is very little sense of permanence or of commitment in the long-term, as in all the way to death.
Unless there is a serious cultural change and marriage and the purpose of marriage are reevaluated I do not see marriage as a social institution having much social significance in the coming years. The meaning of it has been hollowed out, particularly as the primary purpose of marriage—having children and starting families so that there is a future generation for society—has been discouraged by society. New couples are expected to delay having kids as they “live” life and enjoy time together. If they do have kids they are expected to have maybe one or two and definitely no more than three. Large families are uncommon whereas in the past they were the norm. A cultural change has occurred in society where Egoism and selfishness are promoted and Old World values are slighted. All this will do is further erode the concept of marriage as something that requires self-sacrifice—but ultimately I think the reality will come back and people will re-understand the concept better.
Part 2
To me love is putting others first and meeting their needs. It is not enough to wait for someone to ask for something. If you see that there is a need and you can help to satisfy it, you are already half-guilty of being uncharitable if you ignore it and go on about your business as if you did not see it in the first place. Love is about being charitable towards others. It can be in the way one speaks, one thinks, one acts. For me, love is not a feeling, really. I have fallen in love before. That is one of the most overwhelming experiences one can have and I think it really only happens once. Once it happens you realize that “falling in love” is almost like experiencing a powerful drug—and you really have to keep your wits about you or you can end up doing things that might ordinarily go against your better judgment. A lot of people do things because they are “in love” and they look back on them later and regret them and wish they had done things a little differently. I think with me when I fell in love I realized that I still needed to act in accordance with the principles of a higher love, a love that exists above us, if I truly wanted to love this other person.
It is easy to be in love and think only of yourself. It is a fault that people make and it actually means that you aren’t really in love with anyone but yourself. If you are in love with another person, making that person happy is all that matters to you. The problem of course is that we are all human beings and we are never going to be enough for one another. That’s just the way it is. No person can ever fully satisfy the desires of another person, and the reason for this is that we all have souls that yearn for communion with the other side—the source of all life—i.e., God. God is infinite. People are finite. People have an infinite soul, however. The soul knows it cannot find satisfaction outside of union with God—but people often think they don’t need this union, or they don’t want to pursue it because it requires certain things, namely self-sacrifice. There are demands that God has placed on people: He wants them to conform their lives to His will. People generally don’t like that, so they try to find happiness on their own and every way ends up being a dead-end. They think, oh, this person will love me and we will be happy together and then they marry and find out that committing to another is actually a lot of hard work and they suddenly feel they made a mistake and since they do not have children they end up trying to find ways to make their lives meaningful and nothing works so eventually they just divorce.
I believe that Love is God: I think the only reason we are all here is because the essence of God is such that it has to produce fruit. God created this world and all of us and gave us all free will that we might participate in that love and love Him back for having given us life. Yet we try to find fulfillment in ourselves and in things of the world—His creations and creatures—but nothing really fills that hole. The only happiness imaginable is in being united in love with God—i.e., with love. Have you ever heard someone say, “I am in love with love”? I have and it made so much sense to me. But how do you show that love? How do you demonstrate it? What does it ask of you? I think God has made this abundantly clear. One of my favorite films is To the Wonder and I have watched in numerous times just in awe of the message and art that it communicates. I think that love and wonder go together and we cannot forget to appreciate the beauty because that is where God is—but that way demands self-sacrifice, and so ultimately love hurts, as Meatloaf sang. But there is a happy ending to the story, as Daniel Johnston (RIP) reminds us.
Part 3
Abstract
This paper discusses the pressures that women face by having basically two jobs: the career in the workforce and then the housework in the home. They are juggling two roles, one modern and one traditional. Men meanwhile struggle to find their place as well. They are more inclined to want to fix things in the garage than keep up with the washing and cleaning and dishes and grocery shopping. Most men would rather be building something or working on the house than mopping or dusting. This paper discusses the conflicts that arise as a result of these orientations.
Women face a lot of pressure on all sides today. First, they are expected to make their way in the world by getting a career. If they do not get a career, how will they support themselves? They are taught not to rely on a man or think of marriage and motherhood as options. Those are not options for women today. Women are taught to think they must have a career because this is the only validating course for women and, besides, Feminism demands and if a woman is not a good Feminist then she is betraying her sex and gender—that is the pressure put on them from one side. On the other side, what happens when they do marry? They have domestic pressures. They have a husband, who, no matter how much Feminists want him to conform to their way of thinking, simply will not stop harboring notions of conventional and traditional gender roles, where the man makes the decisions in the household and the woman tends to the domestic chores. If children enter into the picture, it complicates the matter even more and adds a third pressure on the woman.
Navigating all these pressures is difficult. On the one hand, the woman does not want to betray her sisters and not act like a good Feminist. On the other hand, she does not want to upset her husband and will try to tend to domestic matters if he is going to make an issue of it. On the third hand (already one sees it is a problem since one is out of hands by this point), the children (if they come) will need tending to. Something must give.
Women who work and then come home for second shift essentially feel like they never get a break. Yet a man would feel the same way if he had to work all day and then come home and tend house. So who gets the job? As Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie and Robinson (2012), it is not an easy question to answer, and attempting to solve the problem is one that causes a lot of conflict for men and women.
For one thing, men are impacted with the changing expectations of shared household responsibilities because they are tasked with doing jobs that they’ve never done before and that typically are of no interest or concern to them. As Ehrenreich (2000) points out, most men would prefer to be working on the car, the lawnmower, the ladder, the roof, the plumbing, the fence, the yard or whatever it is that needs maintenance and mending than spend time in the house dusting, mopping, and cleaning or doing the grocery shopping. They are just wired differently and they are expected in the new age of equality to re-wire themselves and tend to domestic chores since the woman also has a career.
Gerson (2010) shows that what happens next is that men stop being interested in marriage. They can fulfill their sexual needs by sleeping around or by having a girl on the side who is open to satisfying those needs without sharing a home together and having children. Here is where the problem comes in.
Men and women who have sexual intercourse are likely at some point to have a child. Women are naturally made for bearing children. Men are naturally made to impregnate women. Nature finds a way, as Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm states in the original Jurassic Park. That is the reality.
So when nature finds a way, as it invariably does, it puts certain demands on people. How will the mother and father respond to the demands of a child? Will one stay at home and nurse and raise it while the other works? Will they pass that responsibility off to a caretaker? But then one is working solely to pay for someone else to raise the child. Does this make sense or satisfy anyone?
When it comes to love, marriage and keeping the home, there are going to be roles that people have to embrace. Does it make sense for men, who generally speaking, common sense tells us, simply lack the emotional balance and skill to nurture and raise children? Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but the exception also proves the rule. Men can be great fathers, but they are mainly going to want to provide for the family—not nurture the child. The mother is generally going to be better suited for that role. Women have great emotional instincts. They themselves know this better than anyone. That is why they have traditionally been tasked with the role of tending to the domestic duties. Feminists argue that it is because of patriarchal injustices—but just because that is what Feminists argue does not mean the whole world has to agree with them.
References
Bianchi, S.M., Sayer, L. C., Milkie, M.A., & Robinson, J. P. (2012). Housework: Who Did, Does or Will Do It, and How Much Does it Matter? Social Forces; a Scientific Medium of Social Study and Interpretation, 91(1), 55-63. http://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sos120
Ehrenreich, B. (2000). Maid to order. Retrieved from https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/sites/core/files/pages/Ehrenreich_Maid_To_Order.pdf
Gerson, K. (2010). The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Pew Research Center. (2015). Parenting in America. Retrieved from https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/