speak out: What happened to marriage?
To me, marriage has always been grounded in the concept of true love. As a little girl I thought I would grow up, fall deeply in love with someone, get married and never look back. But today's generation, spawned from hippie, or at least post-'60s parents, grew up sneaking boyfriends and girlfriends into their bedrooms. Heck, some parents even took in their child's partner with open arms and parented both children.
The consequences of practising free love in our teens and early 20s do not compare with the consequences that our grandparents faced. We sure as hell don't need to get married to share a bed openly with someone. Perhaps this is the downfall of marriage. Even true love won't always prompt a ceremony, so long as the couple has the freedom to be free with one another. The 20th century has led us into temptation and we haven't looked back.
During my teenage years, pre-marital sex among my friends started between the ages of 14 and 17. Depending on with whom and how many, the most you would suffer was a little gossip and possibly a grounding. Marriage, a concept that helped build civilisations for time immemorial, is no longer necessary. Living in sin is hardly a threat to the social order of things.
However, for centuries, marriage was considered more important as a social construct than a true union between soulmates. Take the story of Romeo and Juliet; the pair committed suicide trying to re-write the laws of marriage - fighting for true love over social responsibility. Today, if we do marry, we are expected to marry because of true love, and not for the mere sake of a union between families or the security of future generations.
Soon marriage may be non-existent given the freedom we have to live in sin with our partners. Men and women do not even have the pressure to produce future generations. I have three sisters and numerous female cousins. We all agree that some of us may not want children, possibly wouldn't make good mothers, or are just too selfish to think about having full-fledged families. The pressure to find a home, a job, and a partner is hard enough; why add kids into the mix?
Will we be regretting our single or common law status sans children when we're 40 and are nearing the end of our childbearing days? Will there be a generation of singles who wish they had conformed to tradition when they had the chance? And if not this generation, then perhaps these will be, among others, the shortcomings of the generation that will lead us into the 22nd century - only a mere 95 years away.
Marriage has been reduced to the necessary pretenses of true love. But who are the romantics out there who believe true love can survive in the face of the new social construct of independence?
We look to television, where women have been accepted as single mothers since the days of Murphy Brown, and true love is a crap shoot. Take the shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, where a man or woman is faced with an onslaught of naughty, hard-bodied independent people, and the task of finding true love. Some are there for the sport of sexual competition, some for the idea of true love. And what a perfect setting, 20 singles vying for the attention of one individual - no holds barred.
Love, in the end, is a promise to marry, should the two survivors' love affair continue to heat up off-screen. Sometimes, their love is even tested with the option to choose money over the partner they have fought long and hard to be with. If true love exists, it will shine through the nasty, back-stabbing game-playing that is the marketing strategy of these shows. True love is truly put to the test. So far, no more than one couple resulting from these shows has lasted longer than a year. Isn't love supposed to be a whirlwind of emotion, something that you would put up a fight for to protect from the intrusion of back-stabbing and game-playing?
If true love is all we have to lead us to the altar, then marriage is surely a dying tradition. Is it not safe to say that marriage may not be around at all in the next century given the fact that it is no longer backed by the traditional order of society? Hasn't true love become a joke that is fed to us as we watch Nick and Jessica's reality show, Newlyweds, shot months before and is now simultaneously airing during their separation?
"Another one bites the dust," is the headline of so many entertainment weeklies displayed at the cashiers' stands as I stand in line at the supermarket with my common law boyfriend, who, at 25, I've been living with for the past six years.
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