Marriage -Sham, Shame, Stale?

1. The Illusion of Marriage today

If you’ve wanted to improve your marriage you may want to read this carefully.

How a marriage takes place is almost universal at the moment: - two people join together with an exchange of vows and it is registered/witnessed by the relevant government authorities, and if they are religious then also the religion they belong to. Friends and family join in the celebrations. Too much money is spent, too quickly, and after the ceremonies the couple generally go away for an extended honeymoon at some exotic location and have a grand time together.

As society developed, marriage as an institution also changed. Somethings for the better,... others not so much.

The mindset of the male and his family contribute as much as the mindset of the female and her family as to what the marriage is. No one consciously articulates it, but the institution totters between the extremes of being someone’s property, to being each other’s soulmate.

Sadly, it is not the male alone who sees the female as an “object” to be owned and commanded. Too many females buy into the notion that being nice, sweet, and a “good girl” means allowing oneself to be treated as an object, a slave, or a person whose mind, perceptions, desires and will have no or little value.

In the world that taught and demanded ‘children be seen not heard’, the female was generally seduced into thinking she remained a perennial child, and that all the “big serious” things could be managed only by the male...even if she was commercially employed, it was the male always who knew better.

I’ve witnessed this even today in the most so-called sophisticated families where money, status, and formal education are all of the highest degree.  The girl was raised to consider herself an object, and any signs of independent thinking and free speech is considered poor upbringing, too modern and unfit for a good decent family. To be considered good and useful, the female must project a servile, subservient self, while the male (and his preying family) must be made to feel important... strong with control that is unchallenged.

This is nowhere next to what a marriage actually means or intends.

2. Contract Love versus Covenant Love

In an increasingly material world, marriages are increasingly becoming of the nature of a contract “ I will IF you will” whereas from the beginning of time marriage is meant to have been covenantal “I will EVEN when you won’t”

There is simply no love in “I will if you will” and/or “You MUST even when I don’t”

3. Objects, Slaves, Brutes - Not Persons

For love to exist, a PERSON is first required. An object, or a slave cannot love. These can only be commanded and in turn be obedient. The object and the slave is scared to be herself. She cannot speak up because of the wrath that she will encounter from her spouse, or her siblings, or her parents. Oddly enough, it is these same people she is scared of, who she misguidedly believes love her!!

Her own weak self , further weakened by years of training during her upbringing, further reinforced by the pain of negative consequences whenever she first attempted to be her own person, and vehemently reinforced by seeing female after female exactly like her in almost identical circumstances, cause her to believe that what she is and how she is, IS safe, practical, good, and nice. 

She can no longer bring herself to believe, that another person lives inside her, whom she is responsible to give life to. The very thought of it is scary.

Also, the male, that weak, frustrated animal seeking to validate himself by an external show of power, and control is no person either! Therefore there is no love in his being either.

Seeking the good of the other is the most basic necessity of love. Everything else about love exists or is built only on this firm foundation.

So, no male who attempts at brow-beating his wife into coerced submission, forcing his will upon her, or happy that she willingly conducts herself as a slave or an object is either a person or loving.

Too many wives objectify the male too as an ATM (Any time money). The males who allow themselves to be objectified and forcefully objectify the female are brutes...Wild animals who prey and satiate their senses.

Such male and female participate and enter the institution of marriage through the processes of their culture, but they, nor their children, ever experience marriage. What they experience after a heady honeymoon, and expensive weddings, and initial joys of having children is a lifeless, dead agreement/partnership between two creatures who need to APPEAR happy.

Appearances are important to them. No, not important but appearances are paramount. Whatever the reality and truth, appearances must deceive and make him/her look good and happy in the eyes of interested or uninterested onlooker.

You commit hara kiri at your own peril if you dare to touch the appearances and unveil the reality! So objects and slaves, animals and brutes, cosigned partners and actors in a sham slowly drown deeper and deeper into a quagmire of lifelessness where fantasy and reels, imagination and boasts, produce small bubbles of comfort and fulfilment just enough to survive and live out the masquerade for another day.

Marriage as result – instead of becoming that haloed topic of purpose and fulfilment, becomes the butt of sordid jokes. Something most will laugh about caustically. Want to spice up any whatsapp group – share a bawdy joke about marriage, and to make it better paint the wife as the villain!

It’s a shame...and shocking that it isn’t stale.

The fundamental design principle of marriage is the union between two different things.

The purpose of marriage is the union of two into one, so that neither the one nor the other exist as before, but that something new culminates from the union.

A necessity of marriage is that it is between two equals… understood not as “identical,” but as two beings whose very essence is malleable and compatible with each other. Unlike oil and water - two different things but unequal in too many ways  - and therefore incompatible, unmalleable, and unable to merge into one.

A useful analogy of marriage would be that of salt and water where both salt and water lose their original characteristics but unite to form a new entity we call saltwater...which is no longer only the male or only the female but a union of both into a new being.

Which is why marriage is likened into the search for a “soul mate” so that two souls may mate, unite and become a new being.

Before understanding marriage spiritually, it helps to see its structure naturally.

In Christianity, man is unequal to God, and very different from God, yet humankind is called the BRIDE of Christ because God firstly makes us equal to Him, and now possessing a new malleability from our old natural self, we can marry or unite with Christ, and become a new being free of our frailty, finity, and mortality. This is the basic tenet of Christ belief. Becoming a new person in Christ, shedding of this mortal self and donning our immortal, holy selves forever.

5. How We Broke Ourselves - and How We Can Restore Marriage

The world wants to objectify us. In the name of love, they seek to tie us down to our lesser, more fearful and dependent selves.

Yet marriage is a place of both liberation and fulfilment. A refuge and a launching pad. It is an act that only two PERSONS who are equal but different can enter into.

A person is defined as a being with independent, desires, choices, resources, abilities and will.

A newborn baby thus born to loving parents is a person. Its resources and abilities are what it possesses via the parents who freely of their own will with zero coercion and zero contractual notion of I-will-only-if-you-will. Everything the parents have also belongs to the baby without obstacle.

The difficulties begin as the baby becomes an adult person. Here the selfishness, fear, greed, arrogance, of the parenting commences, and the child is cornered, sometimes even beaten, coerced, to follow the “correct” ideals of appearing good, and conforming even when the child himself or herself has no desire. The person is broken and made into an object or a brute or both who learns only how to negotiate, contract, and barter.

Love is no longer seeking the good of the other. Love is corrupted to mean  ‘I get what I like’. The more I like it, and get it,  the more I thus love it.

Love, in this corrupted fashion no longer satisfies the other (as it was first when the newborn baby was born) but now satisfies the self as almost every teenager has learnt.

First the baby was more important than the parent. Then mysteriously the instinct of love dies, and the parent becomes more important than the child. And to date, even in the most self-styled progressive societies, the husband is more important than the wife.

Where this lopsided importance is true, it is a marriage between unequals and thus a failed attempt at marriage which is between equals.

From time immemorial, the female is equal to the male. It is only corrupted human nature that has coerced the female into something lesser, and enabled the female to believe a delusion that she was somehow lesser.

If salt gets married to salt nothing new occurs or is even visible. It was salt before and has just become more salt.

If water gets married to water, nothing has changed. It was water before and remains water now.

It is only when salt and water marry each other that a union takes place of different things and producing something new and previously nonexistent. This is marriage.

Where two persons, one male the other female, equal in dignity, desires, choices, and will, different in resources, abilities, form, and actions unite and become one.

Truly, it’s not marriage that’s the problem.

It’s the fact that we have learnt to live contentedly as things lesser than a person...like a caged panther in a zoo eventually learns to be. A poor imitation of it’s original potent self, an object for appearances, and a toy for our amusement.

Your marriage can change today if only YOU will. Find that person inside you and love that person inside your spouse at all costs.