MARRIAGE

  
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.
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"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