mawwiage
Thots on Marriage:
Most men naturally crave and need variety in their sexual provender. Thoroughly domesticated types like, e.g., Bob Granat, who apparently are content to stick with one woman for a lifetime, are rare. Others, the majority, do so not out of love or contentment but out of caution, sloth, cowardice, the fear of risk, the dread of effort and search.
All over America we see them, couples clinging together out of fear of isolation and loneliness - and because of it, expecting and demanding too much of each other, making their lives a mutual hell. It is precisely because they hope for so much and need so much from marriage that most Americans make a mess of it, seeking in romantic love and marriage the kind of spiritual fulfillment which actually can be found only within oneself and in interaction with a larger world than marriage.
Why this insane demand upon marriage - which is really only a conventional institution set up in European cultures for the rearing of children - and the constant, hysterical, sheep-like for love?
Because our industrial-military-commercial-urbanized culture has broken up society, destroyed community, scattered the family and atomized in fearful isolation the solitary man and woman. And nothing has yet appeared to take the place of what has been destroyed.
Thus naturally, men and women when they join, attach themselves to one another with desperate fervor and like cannibal leeches attempt to suck from each other the blood of emotional life, which neither has to offer. The inevitable results: disappointment, frustration, bitterness, anger, hatred - and a break-up in one out of four marriages. And in the rest, resigned, quiet desperation.
Love and marriage not only do not go together like a horse and carriage, they are usually - given our frantic and atomized way of life - antipathetic. Opposed. Love, romantic love, is usually found before, outside of or after marriage; when marriage begins, love begins to end. “Romantic love is an illness for which marriage is the perfect cure.” Quite so.
This is not a case against marriage; I am in fact in favor of marriage. But we must not demand too much from it, or expect too much - on pain of wreckage.