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I know quite a few people who support children who aren't
their own. i know some people who support children who don't
even belong to their spouses or mates. Why they would do so
goes unanswered by both economics and sociobiology, and is
explained only by invoking love or the common good.
If marriage or partnership is for anything in this day and
age, it is this: learning by experience how to express love.
Compassion, tenderness, patience, responsibility, kindness,
and honesty all elicit similar responses from others. They are
not bargaining chips; when they are used that way they lose
their essence as well as their ability to elicit from others
anything but suspicion. Moreover, they increase the happiness
of compassionate, tender, patient, responsible, kind, and
honest men and women, no matter what the response of others
is, because they remind them of their own agency. To live in
accordance with these qualities is to live by choice and
awareness rather than by reaction and obliviousness. Who
better to practice them with than someone you already love and
who loves you, someone with whom you have agreed to seek
happiness?
The social redemption of marriage in our time is precisely in
intimacy as a countervailing force against the chaotic
isolation promoted by free-market capitalism. If we can share
with our spouses and understand that we both benefit, then we
can share with our children and understand the same thing, and
after that we can share with other children, and with our
friends, with our communities, and with the larger community
that is all around us, now rendered less fearsome by our own
choice to approach it with a sense of connection. We can build
up a network that reminds us over and over that connection is
the very stuff of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-- Jane Smiley, "Why Do We Marry?," Harper's
Magazine
It continues to
mystify me that Death Row prisoners can get married, as a
civil right, but gay people cannot.
-- Stephen Merritt
To marry means
to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to
each other.
*
"That convenience and passionate love should go hand in
hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune," observed
Schopenhauer. The lover who saves our child from having an
enormous chin or a prickly temperament is seldom the person
who will make us happy over a lifetime. The pursuit of
personal happiness and the production of healthy children are
two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously
confuses us into thinking of as one and the same for a
requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by
marriages between people who would have never been friends.
Love "casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual
relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to
the lover. But the will of the species is so much more
powerful than that of the individual that the lover shuts his
eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks
everything, misjudges everything and binds himself forever to
the object of his passion. he is so completely infatuated by
that delusion, which vanishes as soon as the will of the
species is satisfied, and leaves behind a detested partner for
life. Only from this is it possible to explain why we often
see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants
and matrimonial fiends, and cannot conceive how they could
have made such a choice."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), as interpreted by Alain de
Botton
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