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- Oct 9, 2012
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This is the "love marriage" trend that takes hold in societies as they become richer and safer.
In less developed countries, marriage is practical. You get married to unite two families, because the two partners are a good match, and so on. As you get more and more resources and leisure and it's less a struggle to survive, practical concerns move to the background and it becomes about feelings.
That trend started in the 1760s in the US. Before then, love was treated as a childish reason for marriage. Lovers would write each other these long letters about how they were such excellent matches for one another. Starting in the 1760s, newspaper advice columns began to offer advice that love could be part of the recipe for getting married. By the early 19th Century love was considered an equally valid reason to marry as practical concerns.
In the US nowadays it's basically the ONLY reason people think you should get married and anything else is cynical or heartless.
So everything is all about feelings. The problem with feelings is that feelings change.
If your marriage is based upon feelings, then the whole rest of your life is going to revolve around trying to maintain those feelings, lest the basis for your marriage erode away!
The problem in the West seems to be that practical reasons really aren't needed for marriage anymore, except in large families where it's too hard to manage the family without a partnership... otherwise, you don't need marriage for social standing, and people who are divorced do not struggle the way they once did.
On the other side, feelings also change too fast now too. Love marriages didn't use to be such fickle things... my maternal grandparents married "for love" but stayed together their whole lives, even through some real tumult (you could argue they also stayed together for practical reasons -- they had 4 kids and my grandmother did not work. She would've been in a bad spot on her own. My grandfather had war injuries that left him with terrible vision and limited mobility, so despite my grandmother's theatrics he'd have had trouble getting out there and replacing her... and I'm sure also knew his kids would be a lot worse off in a broken home. He was the consummate family man). Why love marriages used to work fine over the long-term but are on such flimsier ground today is a really good question. My guess is the lack of social pressure to remain married, largely due to how anonymous and ADD society has become.
I think there's also less and less practical need for marriage, especially as people have fewer children or none at all. Then you're basically getting into "two people who just like to hang out together" territory. Do you really need marriage for that?
Marriage can work, but if you're doing a practical marriage there need to really be some reasons there you'd NEED marriage... and if you're doing a love marriage, you'd better both be people with very stable emotions over the long-term who already have most of what you need to have figured out figured out.
Chase
