A few months ago, Alisa from Project Happily Ever After (a blog that I just adore) asked her readers how they would define marriage. I was struck by how tricky I found her question.
As Alisa explains, there’s the legal definition of marriage — the contracted cohabitation of two people within the same household for life (or at least until the couple decides to dissolve the contract). And then there’s the vague dictionary definition about being “united,” and the vague understanding that two people have sex and raise children together. But, as Alisa points out, all of these definitions fall a little flat. Most people would agree that marriage is more than a legal contract — there are emotional, spiritual, and traditional elements to it as well. But to make things even more complicated, not all couples who live together or consider themselves “united” are legally married; and not all people who are legally married feel united or even live together or have sex or raise children together.
As a response to these failed definitions, Alisa offered her own tentative definition:
Marriage is a promise. It’s a promise between two consenting adults to:
- Prop one another up when one of them is about to fall down
- Try their best to know and understand each other
- Face and solve problems together
- Support one another as they both grow into better people
I definitely felt Alisa was getting somewhere with this elegant definition. But I still felt like something was missing.
I’ve been mulling over the question casually for the last couple of months. And I’ve come up with a couple of additional thoughts.
Essentially, I feel that there’s something missing because cohabiting couples can make this promise, but that doesn’t make them married. Even family members or close friends who decide to live together could enter into this kind of promise and totally not be married. So there seems to be more to it.
Yes, marriage is a promise. But that promise has to have something added to it. I’ve decided that true marriage needs the added element of formality.
In other words, this promise which Alisa has so well described needs to take place within a context that makes it binding somehow – either through a legal contract or some kind of ceremonial covenant. In short, it needs to involve other people.
See, a promise merely made between two people doesn’t have much power. Without witnesses, who’s going to make sure both participants keep up their end of the deal? Without a formalized set of regulations, how are the participants going to be sure the deal still stands?
Ultimately, a simple promise between two people is difficult to maintain and easy to break. That’s probably why so many cohabitating couples break up. The rules are fuzzy and there’s no one there to support them and hold them accountable to their promises.
That’s where the formality comes in.
When you involved other people – a judge, a congregation, a collection of witnesses –your promise becomes a little harder to break. All of a sudden, you have a whole group of people to contend with if you want to break your promise. You can’t turn your back on your co-promiser without dealing with all the folks you’ve decided to involve.
You don’t have to sign a legal contract to be married. And you don’t have to have a wedding ceremony to be married. But in the end I’m pretty sure you need to do either one or the other (or at least something of the sort) to be truly married.
In either instance, you’ve voluntarily placed yourself in a position where it’s harder to break your promise. You’ve brought people in to hold you accountable, to make sure you do what you say you’re going to do. And you’ve laid it for all to see. And you do this thing because you love the person you’re marrying, and you want to show how seriously you take your commitment to him or her.
Marriage is indeed a promise, but it’s also a paradox: it’s a voluntary obligation. A freely-chosen constraint. And that makes marriage unique.
What do you think? How would you define marriage? What else is missing from my definition? Also, do you think sex needs to be mentioned in there somewhere? I kinda think it might.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
“Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is.
These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing…”
~~Wendell Berry (from Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays): He says it way better than I ever could. :^)
Awesome! Thanks, PepperReed, that’s really great!
The word I like most to describe marriage is “covenant.” A covenant is stronger than a promise, because it has implications before God and the community. The covenant is not just between the man and woman, but between the couple and God. It also implies a formal committment, with both legal and moral aspects, and inheritently includes accountability to the family and friends before whom the covenant is made.
And I love the Wendell Berry quote from PepperReed that compares the marriage union with our spiritual union to God. Very cool. Very true.
I think Scott is right with the use of the word “covenant.” It is much stronger than the work “promise.” The work promise has the connotation of something that can still be broken. Kathleen I think you are right about the sex part, I’m not sure how I would include it, but I do feel the need for it to be in there.
I personally do not thing that you can use ‘God’ or ‘Religion’ to define marriage. Not that it is not a big part of a marriage for some, but the fact is that in today’s world, people can be ‘married’ those components.
I am not convinced that by having a promise made more ‘formal’ makes it harder to break. That entirely depends on the persons being married. There are no laws, or rules, today that stop you from divorcing. As long as one person in the marriage wants out, they can get out period — if their specific beliefs in some way stop them from divorcing, or friends take it upon themselves to try to keep them together, then I would suggest they don’t want out or make a decision to try and work it out. Regardless, the decision is 100% their call at the end of the day.
I guess I wonder why there is a need to somehow define ‘marriage’ as different in society today? As an example, I have two sets of really good friends. Both are in committed relationships, have children and have been together for years now. They are both strong and loving family units. Anyone suggesting that there relationship is somehow not as strong as a ‘married’ couples would be very wrong. If you know them you would quickly realize that their relationship is stronger than many married couples and they would be the last relationships to split. Why? It is their personality, their values, the way they communicate and handle problems that makes and keeps them strong. It has nothing to do with external people or entities. They are great listeners and are open to suggestions from others, but they assign an appropriate weight to that information and then make decisions together for their family because at the end of the day, the decision rests in their hands.
-mike.
Thanks for your thoughts, Mike. Insightful as usual.
I agree with you in terms of the religious aspect. I personally define my own marriage with God in mind, but I know that many don’t, so that’s why I left any discussion of God out of this particular discussion.
I don’t mean to imply that marriage relationships are necessarily better or stronger than non-marriage relationships; I am only trying to identify what distinguishes the two. I’m not trying to say that couples like the ones you’ve described aren’t superb couples, only that they aren’t “married” because they haven’t formalized their commitment to one another.
And I agree that marriage these days is not hard to dissolve. I only mean to say that the purpose of marriage is to make it harder to get out of the relationship. I personally think that marriage today is generally kind of a sham, in that most people who make the vows don’t really intend to keep the promise if things actually get hard. However, I still think that the original purpose of marriage was to make commitments more binding by involving the community.
I completely agree with you especially on the vows!!! It is one of my biggest issues. I have been to a few weddings where the couples are exchanging vows and I think to myself do you two actually understand what you are saying? Have you honestly thought about what you are saying and committing to each other and in front of your families, peers and God (if you believe in that)?
So many either make vows or repeat vows that they don’t actually believe or have the ability to honour. They do it because “it is the thing to do”, or they ‘sound good’ or are part of some ‘story’ in their head of what they think marriage should be.
If it was up to me, the laws for marriage would be simple. You can commit or say anything you wish, but it will be recorded and you will be held to it. So if you are silly enough to say something like “I will love you and stay with you till death do us part”, that is okay, but you will be held to that.
If I was counseling a engaged couple with respect to vows I would explain that you can have whatever vows you wish. For example, if you wish to say “I will love you and stay with you till death do us part”. That is fine. Understand that, twenty years from now, if you discover that your partner is a drunk, convicted criminal and cheats on you, the law will hold you to the vows. So with that in mind, off you go and create your vows.
Hence why I am not a marriage counselor or a law maker.
I think I’m with you here, Mike. Folks shouldn’t bother making vows they don’t intend to keep. I’d much rather see couples just live together than make promises they don’t plan to honor. And I agree that individual couples ought to decide for themselves what they want to promise, but then the law or faith community should hold them to it. Well-said.
A marriage has less to do with being in love than it does with building a small empire.
That’s all I can think of.
I love the secret wedding in the movie Braveheart. For safety and to avoid persecution, they meet in secret to be married, it is a deep felt promise that seems even more indelible since they need only their word to one another, and I think a pastor meets them in the forest to marry them?
It is not just utterly romantic, but serious and so heart felt. I know I know the ceremonies and carry-ing on is fun too, but there is just something so precious about not NEEDING all of that. Were Adam and Eve married by God?
I think that marriage, aside from being a spiritual and/or legal bind between two individuals, is a means to organize society or establish order within society. While this answers what the function(and I’m not suggesting it’s the sole function) of marriage is rather than what marriage is, I think what it serves is part of what it is. (Hmm, maybe that’s too narrow of an answer. I’ll have to think more about it.)
I love the idea of adding “community” to the promise. I believe that was the original intent of legal marriages–to have a community of people support the couple’s union. I think if we all had this important element–if it became more prominent than the legal document–it might save a lot of marriages.
I believe marriage is a promise of fidelity, in its dictionary meaning. Robert Solomon has a really good definition of fidelity in his book “About Love” (which I just finished reading–excellent read!)