My cousin had a lovely wedding in Cape Cod last weekend. The ceremony was in the same church where I saw her play an angel years ago in several Christmas pageants. She and her groom exchanged traditional biblical vows; one of the groomsmen read that passage from Corinthians about the meaning of love and her brother read an Irish prayer that often appears on T-shirts and plaques. When the Methodist minister said, “one completes the other,” I felt like vomiting in the pew—not physically, but symbolically. Is not an individual complete in his/her self? What is this myth about one person completing another? I respect people who choose to marry—marriage can be a beautiful thing—but I have always questioned the idea. And I find that the older I get, the more people I meet who have an aversion—or at least a healthy skepticism—to the institution.
At the reception, my brother’s girlfriend and I bonded over our questioning of marriage. “Why do people do it?” she asked. “It’s not about love. It’s about partnership…practical decisions…it’s more about choosing the right partner based on your personal needs in an attempt to form a successful team than it is about being wildly in love with someone, which to me, is so unromantic.” If marriage is not about love, then why do so many people claim to “marry for love?” The romance of marriage is undeniably linked to love, but any realistic person knows that love alone does not make a marriage. And yet we buy into the kind of everlasting passionate love immortalized in fairy tales. We listen to the lyrics of the song “Love and Marriage” and believe old Frankie must be right: you can’t have one without the other (when, in fact, the two have existed on their own for centuries!). In the film Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise professes to Renée Zellweger, “You complete me!” Similarly, in real life, many of us spend most of our lives looking and/or waiting for our so-called missing half.
On the other side of the spectrum, movies and literature romanticize adulterous affairs, and often make them sexy (think Unfaithful with Richard Gere and Diane Lane). We see half the married couples we know get divorced and marry again, perhaps, two or more times. Sitcoms mock spousal foibles and Hollywood has turned a once sacred lifelong union into a serial celebrity hobby. Marital euphemisms have negative, imprisoning connotations: wedlock, ball and chain, hitched, tying the knot. “It’s my last night to be free” is the line spoken at many bachelor and bachelorette parties.
There’s no question that marriage is a cultural contradiction caught between the reality of impermanence and the myth that life is incomplete without that “one special person.” If one half of a happily married couple dies, the widow is (more often than not) happily married to someone else a couple of years later. The idea about that individual is incomplete before marriage is absurd. Many people who choose not to marry lead fulfilling, productive lives. A 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that people were no more satisfied after marriage than they were prior to marriage. In other words, if you are unhappy, a ring and certificate are not going to magically make you happy. Another cousin of mine got married recently. When I saw her at the Cape Cod wedding, I asked, “How’s married life?” “It’s no different,” she said. If married life is no different than unmarried life, why bother?
Many claim tradition and security are reasons to marry. Emotional security is irrelevant when societal acceptance of divorce makes it easy to break the bond. I suppose financial security is a valid reason, although women tend to benefit more than men, especially when children are involved. As for tradition, it seems that many couples cry their way through a cookie-cutter ceremony without really thinking about what it means. What are they saying to each other? During the rise of feminism, women started realizing that the traditional scripted vow “love, honor, and obey” was demeaning and passé, and so the phrase has since been edited to “love, honor, and cherish.” Then the divorce rate skyrocketed to 50 percent. Now the trend is to replace the phrase “till death do us part” with something more realistic like, “for as long as our love shall last.”
Certainly the trend toward personalized vows shows that couples are redefining marriage to suit their unique needs and tastes. I’ve often thought that I would be more open to marriage if I had a simpler life, if I wasn’t so ambitious and didn’t live in a city with so many options. The variety of New York is a blessing and a curse. I don’t know if I’ll ever get married, but I do know this: if a guy or girl should tell me, “You complete me!” I shall say, “I don’t date incomplete people. Go complete yourself, and then, maybe, I’ll reconsider.” And then I’ll turn away and puke.
