It’s been a while since my last potentially controversial blog post, so today I’m going to cover my thoughts on the topic of marriage.

To be clear I’m not discussing the notion of a monogamous relationship. There are certainly people who will argue that the optimal way to live is to bang as many cocktail waitresses as you can as often as you can till you die (they may or may not have a case), but I’m writing this with the assumption that we’re all cool on the idea of monogamy as a means to a potentially happy existence. It’s just that once you’ve made that choice to start a family and live with the same person forever, marriage is deeply unnecessary. Or rather marriage, outside of religious or legal/tax reasons, should be deeply unnecessary.


There’s not much I can add about the religious reasons. I’m an atheist, and I’ve made my feelings on that subject very clear. Within the context of a lot of other rules that don’t make any sense, marriage to a religious person makes perfect sense. In fact in certain branches of religion you need to get married in order to be ‘allowed’ to have sex, and if you’re never going to question the validity of that rule then clearly it’s the right decision for you.

Legal/tax reasons may well constitute a genuine reason in 2011. I’m not exceptionally well educated on what benefits a couple may get in various countries for simply being married, but if it’s significant at all then the ‘why not?’ school of thought becomes very sensible. A better rate of mortgage, a tax break, social security benefits, a VISA to stay in a foreign country, being allowed to visit your loved one in an emergency situation in hospital: these can all be worth going to the local registry. The main point here is that any legal/tax benefits derived from marriage and not from a mere partnership should certainly not exist. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

And if we can agree that someone getting married purely to obtain legal or tax benefits seems to be missing the 'spirit’ of the concept, then why are we getting married?

To use a poker analogy, marriage is a self-exclusion option on the drop down menu of your favourite site. In poker, you know you don’t want to play for 48 hours, but don’t trust yourself around drugs and alcohol, so you trust ‘today’s you’ over ‘tomorrow’s you’ and make a final decision. In marriage, you know you have met the person you want to be with forever, but don’t trust yourself around annoying conversations and constant unhappiness, so you trust ‘today’s you’ over ’15 years from now’s you’ and make a not very final but likely extremely frustrating decision.

But why would we ever want a self-exclusion option for our relationships? It’s not as if people end 15 year relationships after their first ever argument. You don’t spend 15 years in unerring blissful happiness, then one day your girlfriend invites over that particularly unbearable pair for a couple's night without asking you so you just leave forever then spend the rest of your life regretting it. It’s not even that successful a self-exclusion, if you’ve really changed your mind then you’ll still get a divorce. All it does is makes it a lot tougher for you to break up, and it does this by necessarily extending your period of unhappiness in order to give you more time to change your mind.

Happy marriages don’t end in divorce, just as happy long term relationships don’t end in breaking up. There may be some very rare exceptions where both members of a happy couple are offered their respective dream jobs on different sides of the world and decide that they simply have to end their relationship, but in such a case I don’t see how being married would change a thing. Divorces only occur after an extended period of unhappiness for one or probably both members of a couple. Regardless of how you felt when you got married, if you have both been unhappy for a long time then it’s time to move on.

But what about raising a family? Again, being officially married shouldn’t affect anything. You can still have kids, you can still spend the rest of your life with your dream partner, you can have everything the married couple down the street have. I would even argue that the couple who stay together for 30 years without marriage, due to the lack of obligation to stay together, is statistically more (probably a lot more) likely to be happy than the married couple of the same duration.

And if you’re in an unhappy relationship but feel it’s important to stay together for the sake of your kids, you can still do that as an unmarried couple. It’s just that if the time ever comes where you clearly don’t want to be with each other anymore, the break up (while still painful) will come without the very real and very unnecessary stress of a divorce. If you have children together it will still be an ordeal dealing with custody/child support, but surely less complicated. If you don’t have children, it should be vastly less complicated.

I’ll also add here (slightly off topic) that the banning of gay marriage is vastly more ridiculous than the idea of wanting to get married. I don’t think gay people should get married, for exactly the same reasons as everyone else, but the idea that they aren’t allowed to is unbelievably absurd. Clearly this is entirely down to Judaeo-Christian influences on society, and surely in even the near future we will look back on this law as very silly indeed.


But now we’ll come to the actual reason most non-religious heterosexual men get married: because women want to. Almost every girl wants that dream wedding, to call herself a wife and you her husband, and if you’ve been in a relationship long enough the idea will inevitably come up. The longer you go on ignoring it, the more she’ll want and (in certain cases) expect it. As Adam Carolla says, every time you plan a special trip or a romantic evening, she’ll be searching for that engagement ring. And every time it’s not there, she’ll punish you for a long time afterwards.

So is that really a good enough reason to get married? Purely to get your girlfriend off your back? It probably is. But in a societal sense, we need to advance to the point where this isn’t the dream of every girl. They can still dream of a massive party to celebrate your relationship. Invite everyone you know, buy the best cake in the world, get a cheesy band. Even call it a wedding if you like. Just don’t sign any actual legal documents.

Trust me, and your future selves.

Till next time.