I believe you will find the advice in this post useful, even if you are happily married. It may help you strengthen your relationship. I want you to avoid the wrong expectations about marriage. Don't assume a wedding changes a relationship for the better. You are making a cost-benefit tradeoff. If you think you are just trading up a relationship status for a better one, you will be unprepared for the costs, and will be unhappy.
But first, you want to know why you should read advice about marriage from a man who refuses to get married. Why? Because I'm good at marriage. I could make a marriage last forever if I wanted to. I was good at it right up to the point, nearly a decade ago, that my wife and I agreed we would rather be single than married, for reasons I am about to outline. It wasn't about any problem with each other. Our relationship, while stable, was in the wrong form. To this day, we still go out to dinner every couple of months.
Yet another pair of my friends is headed for divorce, and I just can't help but wonder how marriage made their relationship worse instead of better. I don't know which fate I dread more for them-- that their marriage will end? Or that it will last forever?
What is different between marriage and committed co-habitation? These differences come in two major types:
1. Benefits, which come from other people.
2. Stresses, which apply to the actual partners involved.
The only thing it does to the bride and groom is add more potential for stress to the actual relationship itself. Do you let yourself go? Take each other for granted? Fight over money now that you're on the hook for each other? I hear you saying that all these obstacles are surmountable, with communication and trust. True. But why add stresses unless you have to?
I can see clear legal, financial and contractual reasons why so many indisputably smart people get married. But all those benefits are about other people:
* throwing a party to celebrate your love in front of others.
* reducing how much others tax you.
* making others allow you to visit your children.
* getting past others to your lover's hospital bed.
* getting the respect and acknowledgement of others.
To you, those benefits may be worth the damage to your relationships. To me, they are not.
Marriage awkwardly combines romantic entanglements with legal and financial entanglements. It feels like "The party of the first part may kiss the party of the second part. I now declare you liable for damages." These two areas of life are already complicated enough, without worrying that breaking up with someone would mean I'd need to find a new place to live, and a new bank account, and split up possessions, and so forth.
Don't say marriage is more commitment. Commitment is a decision, and you can simply make that decision and tell your partner. You either trust your partner when they tell you that, or you don't. If you don't, you have a problem that is not fixed by shackling them. The best married couples understand the wedding improved their standing with their other loved ones, but didn't change anything between them that wasn't already there. Brides and grooms who get married in order to change themselves and each other are at exponentially higher risk of divorce from disappointed expectations. With marriage you'll just have to go to extra trouble to disentangle when it's over. But don't kid yourself; If you want out, you'll get out. It'll just be worse.
I'm not down on marriage for everybody! I love married people. (Frequently!) It may not be something I desire for myself, but I understand marriage makes many people feel good. It's a tradeoff, just like polyamory, or monogamy, or celibacy, or any other relationship form. You have to walk uphill against the challenges that each form brings. You choose them based on whether they put enough wind in your sails to surmount the obstacles.
Finally, we come to the most important reason not to get married: do you have a personality that buckles under to social pressure? I would like to point out that a lot of married people-- perhaps even the vast majority-- have not thought about the tradeoffs at all. Too many couples get married because of its symbolic value; to feel a connection to a long-standing tradition. Well, those people are going to feel a connection to Prozac in about seven years. I would like to encourage you to completely remove this reason from your list of priorities, if you possess the emotional wherewithal.
The problem is the default cultural script, followed unthinkingly. For instance:
* An unspoken assumption that you are each other's property and therefore can run each other's lives.
* Unrealistic expectations that marriage will change your partner.
* Or that they won't change.
* The announcement of monogamy that you wear on your finger.
Do you assume that you both have the same ideas about that? Even if you do, the people sitting in the audience at your wedding probably don't. Are you sleeping with them? No? Best not to get them involved.
So, if I want to celebrate my love, I would throw a party to do so, and not call it a wedding. But I won't. Frankly, as much as I love you all, it doesn't involve you. This may be the point that I lose many of you, because I know a lot of people like to put a couple photo as their profile pic on Facebook, and kiss in public, and really get the community involved in seeing them as an all-or-nothing unit. Too clingy for me, but whatever floats your boat. I'm not condemning, I'm just trying to help you not faceplant.
I'll just say this. Marriage is a stamp of approval by the community, that separates approved relationships from unapproved relationships. I take issue with that entire concept. How is it anyone's business to approve your most intimate, private, personal relationships? We let lawyers, legislators, clergy, and nosy family members in our bedrooms, in exchange for access to the approved group. There should be no formal, official approval. The government should not be in the business of sanctioning our private lives. You can join a church if you want that.
So all the drawbacks go to you and your partner, and all the advantages go to other people by giving them control over the shape of your private life. What are the benefits? Access to your kids, a tax break, getting on your partner's health insurance, getting to visit them in the hospital. Do you think society is doing you a favor with this trade? I leave you with this thought: How whipped are you, that you think you shouldn't have that already?
