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Marriage is forever??

Cosmic Mist

Cosmic Mist

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Dec 24, 2002
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This question has been spawned from the thread: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92498&r=12

What i want to know is what marriage means to you personally.

I have been discussing this concept with my boy-o recently, and we have very contrasting views about what marriage means in this day and age. Obviously this is a very personal and contextual idea, but to some degree there must be some sort of common concensus...

Personally i don't believe that marriage is a life-time commitment anymore. I see it as the highest form of commitment, but i do not see the point in sticking by someone who no longer loves you, or whom you no longer love. I do not see the point in staying in a situatioin that makes you desperately unhappy either.

But by the same token, i do not believe that divorce is something to be entered into lightly. I believe that a lot f people see divorce as an easy option - it's easier to sever oneself completely from a situation than it is to deal with it and work through a pertinant issue.

I also think that some people enter into marriage too readily, sometimes bowing to family/peer/societal pressure rather than following what is right for them as individuals.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to disagree. :)
 
I’d like to believe in the fairytale that marriage is forever, and I know that the decision to divorce would not be an easy one for me.

Ultimately though, we need to take into account human failing, the fact that not everybody holds the same values as ourselves and the truth that it’s often all too easy to take the quick way out rather than stay and fight for what you have.

I’m sure that when I get married I will enter into the partnership with my full heart committed to making it work forever, but also with the understanding that I respect myself enough as a person to let go of the dream when faced with a harsh reality (loss of love, cheating etc).

As much as during marriage you should work together, I understand that when your ways separate you should not stay together just for the sake of staying together. At the end of the day you come first and you should not need to sacrifice your dignity, self respect or self esteem just because you have made a commitment to another person. Being miserably unhappy is not the way to spend your life.

As for entering into marriage too lightly, I think that our generation is actually more likely to take the commitment seriously. Many of us saw first had the devastation of divorce and would not like to repeat the same mistakes as our parents/grandparents/other family/friends parents/other influences and the decision to make that hopefully life-long commitment is actually taken with a lot more thought.
 
People in this day and age are pussies.

People give up too easily, and don't work through issues - if somethings too hard its not worth doing to a lot of people. Always wanting easily solutions, well newsflash --- life is full of hurdles, anyone can run away.

Couples living together before marriage is normal now, short engagements, and people jump straight in to the deepend without any real thought or preparation.

The media doesn't help, with all the celebrities regularly showing off the fact that they are now marrying for the fifth time.

The effects that divorce can have on families, mental state of mind, children (voice of simpsons woman 'Oh won't somebody please think of the children!'), your future relationships, your finances, etc.

Think before you get into marriage, think what marriage means, and by all means have a 3 year + engagement period so you don't fuck things up royally!.

I really think our society is fucked and is going downhill at an incredible rate.
 
i believe that marriage should be forever and most people seem to have forgotten that. instead they jump into it for the wrong reasons. i think people r getting married now more for the actual occasion, a chance to spend a heap of money, go on a holiday and get shitloads of attention.

personally, i dont intend to get married until i know its going to be forever. and if that means having my partner as just a "boyfriend" for ten years then so be it. i'd rather be certain, than having to deal with the legal crap thats involved with a divorce, not to mention all the emotional traumas.

to me marriage in the legal sense of the word is just a piece of paper and a liability. the bond u have with someone u love shouldnt need such things to prove its worth.
 
Nice topic cosmic mist and I tend to agree with you dimmo, people are quick to take the easy option out…

I got married in December last year having been with my now husband for 5½ years (4 of which we had lived together).

We got married with the intent that this is it (and yes, I agree things might change). Yes, we will have good and bad times, but the thing is too work through the bad times and to hold on to the good. My husband was chronically ill (better now) for most of our relationship so we are pretty sure that we can take the bad with the good.

Neither of us have parents who are divorced or much track record with divorce in our lives and we certainly didn’t enter our marriage thinking that divorce was an option.

So why did we get married (lots of people ask me this). The answer is easy – we loved each other and wanted to commit to one another on a higher lever. More than that though, it was about us becoming our own little family unit. I took my hubby’s surname (why get married if you don’t – food for thought?) and now when we have kids they will have the same name as both of us and grow up in the kind of environment we both grew up in – a loving family with a mum and a dad.

We aren’t planning to have kiddies in a great hurry and so that wasn’t any part of the reason behind our decision. I guess we felt that the time was right and that it was something we wanted to do. We had a really small wedding so it wasn’t a “look at us- see we are happy and in-love” showing off kinda affair. It was just family and it was very special and very nice. I love being the mrs

Well there are my late Tuesday arvo ramblings – I would be interested to hear from others on this topic…


xoxox
pt
 
I don't think anyone (or not many ) people get married with the intention of getting a divorce so i think it's safe to say (for me at lesst) that when i get married it will be "forever"

i am in no rush what so ever to get married though and when i do it will be a certain thing with someone i have spent a few years with

saying this however...

marrige is an institution...and i'm far too young to go to an institution ;)
 
Hmmm....

It's probably a bad idea for me to start writing my thoughts on this drunk, but what the heck... ;)

Like Cosmic Mist, I have very conflicting feelings about marriage.

On one hand, I'm totally in love with the idea of being a bride, a wife, and everything that entails. I can be the complete "little woman" and would love nothing more than introducing someone as my husband, cooking roasts on Sunday and raising a traditional family. I guess I want to give my kids what I never had.

On the other hand, my mum's been divorced twice and I've seen and witnessed the fallout from that - her emotional stress, uncertainty about who's the parent figure in your life, financial strain and many other awful things resulting from the earthquake that is divorce.

And yet.... I still want to be married. I want it with all my heart. I actually think that witnessing divorce so much in my life (it's rampant in my extended family too), has had the effect - not of discouraging me, but desensitising me. In other words, I dont' see divorce as this "BIG SCARY BAD THING". It's just something that happens, which sucks, and I've seen people I love get over it and move on.

Thus, I'm not scared. If I get married and then divorced; so be it. If I have seven husbands like Elizabeth Taylor, so be it. I can see how people think it's sad that we are far too flippant about divorce these days, but I see it as a blessing. What a wonderful choice to be able to make - to control your own destiny. Not every fairytale has a happy ending, why wait around until you are dead with the wrong person? And I don't think anyone who's been through a divorce will tell you they took the decision 'lightly'. I know I won't, if it ever happens to me. I'm a fighter and I believe in therapy and I'll stick it out as much as I can.

But ultimately, your happiness and that of your loved ones is the most important thing - and that's not always achieved by staying together.

So in a word... marriage is terrific. Divorce is a fact, and an option, nothing more. Let's not demonise it.
 
the highest form of commitment IS a lifetime commitment. marriage is the highest form of commitment. ergo, marriage is a lifetime commitment.

if you don't want to make the commitment for you're lifetime then don't get married. marriage wasn't designed for the weak of heart.
go buy you're spouse one of those "commitment rings" instead... :)
 
post script to my above message

sorry SLM, but i have to respectfully disagree with you in regards to the divorce issue. if you're entering a marriage with the thought "if it doesn't work out i can always get a divorce" in the back of your mind, then you're not really making a lifetime commitment are you? don't get me wrong, i'm all for trying out as many different partners as i possibly can while i'm young, but once that commitment is made, its made for life. thats why i cannot understand why people need to get married after going out for like 6 months? whats the fucking rush? why do people feel the need to go for the ceremony and the certificate so early? its like they feel they need to justify something that shouldn't ever need to be justified. if i want to make a commitment to someone, i'll do it, irrespective of some stupid ceremony and a legal document.

marriage is a state of mind, not a piece of paper...

i'm sure i could add more, but i'm too tired and can't be assed at the moment... :)
 
Cosmic Mist said:
What i want to know is what marriage means to you personally.
Click to expand...


Getting married is not something i've ever wanted to do and i probably wont ever do. But i do approach my current long term relationship with the same committment as required for a marriage. Meaning that if a problem arises i don't just give up and walk away. I try and work on it with my partner. If it ever got to the stage where we couldn't resolve an issue and one or both of us were very unhappy, there would be no point persisting and we'd call it quits. As happy as we are now, i'm under no illusion that it will definatelylast for life. I'd like to think it would but often the statistics prove otherwise.

I agree with Strawberry Lovemuffin, divorce is a blessing sometimes when people are very unhappy and i would say it's more or less inevitable thesedays. According to the Australian Bureau of Stats, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce so i think anyone who thinks they are getting married 'for life' could be deluding themselves. In fact by the time you're in your 60's it's possible you would've had 3, 4 or 5 marriages or defacto relationships.

oh god...that's a shit load of baggage to deal with :\
 
I have been married for 4 years now, and we have been together for 8. When we talked about marriage, there was no way I considered it as being possibly a temporary situation. The longer we have been together, *nausea warning* the more we love each other. Sometimes people ask me how I knew my husband was the right person and I usually say "I feel compelled to tell my husband how much I love him at least 5 times a day (minimum), and he does the same". And that surprises them, because they don't do the same with their partner. Sometimes I just sit there smiling wistfully at my husband...I also can't imagine life without him, because he his part of who I am now. I would suggest that if you don't recognise some of these, maybe marriage isn't quite right for you?

Many people get married without thinking of the consequences. While I agree that people can change, and therefore may fall out of love, making divorce appropriate, I also think many divorces are due to people getting married who didn't really love each other in the first place. Or that they didn't realise that marriage can be hard work sometimes, and they throw in the towel when problems occur. You have to be prepared to compromise regularly.

I completely agree with pig tails too...:D making your own family unit rocks=D
 
I agree with nearly all of what babydoc_vic says there.

My wife and I (SLM - that's got a nice ring to it doesn't it?) have been married for nearly 10 years. I've got a few observations to make about our experience.

Why did I do it? Well, firstly I was very much in love with her. Then I remember that one day I thought to myself, "I feel like I want to marry this girl!" I didn't say anything to her for a while, because I wanted to see if I kept feeling that way. After a few weeks, I still felt like that so I proposed. She accepted. So, I guess I got married because I felt like it. It felt right for me. I wanted it to be forever, but knowing the divorce statistics in Australia, I didn't kid myself that divorce couldn't happen to us, because we're just two average Aussies.

We're still very happy, and still love each other very much. Like babydoc_vic we tell each other every day that we love each other. And we mean it. And it does surprise some other couples.

How come we're still married??? I try to analyse the reasons now and then. The closest answer I can come up with is that we have a high tolerance for change in the other person. We're both very different people from the one we married, and we're both happy with that. We've talked about this, and my wife agrees that this is one of the reasons for our happy marriage.

For a bit of further insight, I recall reading a book called The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. It's not really a fashionable book these days.
He proposed a theory that the act of falling into romantic love is a biological/psychological device to perpetuate our species. Without that deliriously delicious feeling of falling in love, how many relationships would get off the ground anyway? And then having children often follows. So what is that feeling, "falling in love"? Peck says that it's when you feel that the other person is the one true person for you to be with, you think alike, that person is the one who understands you best in the whole wide world, etcetera. And there's the element of sexual lust thrown in there too. You can't see their faults and differences from you, and your philosophy of life. He also says that when people fall out of love, as they inevitably do, that they are then tested to see if they have real love for each other. He says that real love is what really tests people. You start to see their faults, and their fundamental differences from the way you see the world. This is make or break time for the relationship. Can you still keep on loving that person? Can you measure the positives and the negatives in the cold hard light of day and decide, yes, you really want to be with that person, and overcome difficulties and rocky patches?

On the whole, I agree with what Peck says.
 
^^^ ah you're married to SLM eh?

Did she give you a hard time too about making fun of Chrissie in Big Brother? :p
 
dimmo said:
People in this day and age are pussies.

People give up too easily, and don't work through issues - if somethings too hard its not worth doing to a lot of people. Always wanting easily solutions, well newsflash --- life is full of hurdles, anyone can run away.
Click to expand...

i agree. i have always and always will be willing to work through most problems (things like cheating and stuff like that tho i don't know). their usualy is a solution to all problems in a relationship but alot of people think. well if i just end it i can start fresh. but usualy the same things come back around.

life is fucked and then you die :\
 
You fuckup your life and then you die.
 
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I think some of you are very naiive. :\ Faith and determination are wonderful things, but love doesn't always conquer all. "Working through" things doesn't always solve them. And divorce is not just for those who are weak.
 
I think people get married with far too little forethought.

I think a couple should have to get a license (by going through counseling and panel of judges) before being allowed to marry -- of course, I do not trust the govt to handle something like this in a fair and proper manner, but that would be the ideal scenario IMO.

Too many people are in love with the IDEA of marriage, and not enough people are actually in love with their PARTNER. There are many social and often financial pressures to marry. In short, many people marry for the wrong reasons.

Another issue is that because divorce is *relatively* easy, people are more likely to give up on a marriage instead of working through an issue. I think that divorce should be made MUCH more difficult, and really only allowed in cases of abuse. Otherwise, I think that you made your bed and you should lie in it. If you want, you can separate. But marriage is not sacred when it is so easily violated.

I will not seek a divorce from a future husband unless he is absusive and cannot be rehabilitated. I do not break my promises, and marriage is the ultimate promise.
 
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