Hello anon,
I don’t think it is necessary to commit to a legal contract to make the promise and commitment to stay together. This commitment must be actively willed from the people, and it can be willed without the legal contract. The commitment and promise doesn’t automatically appear once the couple consents to the clauses of the contract. What does come with the contract is a legal obstacle to breaking the promise and commitment.
I believe it follows from this that marriage is a product of the lack of trust in the other’s commitment and promise. Tradition aside, what else could motivate somebody to want to make it legally difficult for another to leave them?
It isn’t merely a legal contract, though. There is a lot of ritual associated with making the bonds permanent. The effects of this ritual extend to both the social sphere in which the now married couple finds themselves as well as between each other. That is an important distinction.
Sure, I can grant you this, even though I don’t think the ritual aspect is necessary for marriage. That is, one can be married with just a legal contract. Regardless, even if marriage is necessary all these other stuff atop of the legal contract, then does it ultimately serve any purpose other than to make it difficult for the couple to split up? Marriage is an external cohesive element, and because of this I view it as a product of a lack of trust.
If commitment is valued for whatever reason (for instance it can help simplify your life), then a public declaration of commitment, in theory, helps you actually commit. This might not work anymore in a culture like ours though, where divorce is so common that there is little social pressure not to.
If commitment is valued for whatever reason, then one needn’t be pushed by societal pressures to stay commited. I don’t know how it is with other people, but when I’m pushed towards something I have a tendency to not do it even if I wanted to do it in the first place.
If one values the happiness of the individual, then the higher divorce rate is not necessarily a bad thing, provided the divorced individuals are happier being single. Marriage should not be valued as it’s own end, even though it often times is.
That disagreement will become important, since I think that is absolutely crucial. The legal contract is an aside to marriage and while one can receive the benefits of marriage through a mere signing of a contract I don’t think that is sufficient to actually call a couple “married”. The ritual, whatever form it takes, is essential to the marriage itself.
I suppose that depends on what the purpose of marriage being discussed here is. That ties into the prearranged marriage thread in social sciences. But I’m not sure that an external cohesive element can be said to be a function of a lack of trust but rather merely a realistic affirmation of the world we live in. Any two individuals sharing that much of each other will inevitably be subjected to forces that drive them apart. There are all sorts of basic psychological urges to consider: familiarity breeding contempt, displacement, and so on! I don’t think it is a function of a lack of trust to balance the equation out a little!
I can understand that, but then one does something not because one wants to do it but because one doesn’t want to look bad in the eyes of others. I can’t enjoy the fruits of my labor if it was forced labor, but that’s just me.
Are you saying I don’t really want to commit to my new year’s resolutions if I’m helped out by peer pressure? If we want to accomplish something, don’t we use whatever tools are at our disposal to accomplish it?
Why don’t you think it’s sufficient to calling a couple “married”? I don’t see how the effect the ritual has on the social sphere is necessary to marriage. Must a couple be recognized by the community as married for them to be properly “married”? Suppose you have a couple that love eachother and want to be together and who get a marriage license but don’t have a ceremony or even tell people that they’re married. You would say they’re not married?
Marriage is, at least I think so, a means to the happiness of each individual. If the world we live in is not conductive to a happy life long marriage, then why should a couple be forced by external factors to stay together, be they societal or legal factors?
I also don’t think you’ve shown marriage as an external cohesive element is not a product of mistrust. If anything, the world we live in as you’ve described it implies that anyone who understands it as you describe it would be distrustful of the other’s promise and commitment to a life long relationship. It would be rational, given that they wanted a life long relationship, for them to employ external factors to make it difficult for the other person to leave.
I don’t think that marriage is a means to the happiness of each individual. It is a property arrangement.
I don’t think it is a matter of distrust. Wanting something isn’t sufficient to actualize it. Right? A person can want to lose weight all day long and not drop a pound. Other steps need to be taken to ensure that weight is lost. Likewise, merely wanting a life-long relationship is not sufficient to actualize it, on anybody’s part. Instead work needs to be applied to ensure that the relationship is maintained. Marriage provides a context in which to work.
If no-one’s said it already, marriage is similar to starting a small company - both parties invest, both share dividends, its framework allows task-specialisation (or used to) and its output is greater (in a successful partnership) than the sum of its parts.
The marriage contract has existed in some form or another for so long not so much because it is ‘romantic’ or ‘nice’ but because two people who are married do better than two who are not, and societies which support the condition of marriage are more stable [and dare I say it, more successful] than those which do not.
My advice, find a nice girl, and settle down, and stop with the hentai already, it’ll stunt your growth.
An ideal form, wouldn’t be bound by conditions associated with objects here in the world of phenomena.
The ideal form of some phenomena would be the best possible version of it given the boundaries imposed by it’s phenomena-ness.
“The Good” Or “The Just” might be ideal forms, because they start off wayyyy up high and we find places in the world where we try and fit them.
The ideal form of a marriage would be derived from an experience of marriage, or marriages and some consideration as to what, in theory, would be the best possible form of a marriage.