Why you should get married
... yes, you!
It’s Whitsun in a couple of weeks and wedding season is getting into full swing. This year it is going to be especially busy, due to a backlog of weddings delayed by the pandemic. In Scotland, there are even fears that hire firms might run out of kilts.
This is all to the good: I love a wedding. Weddings are capital-e Events, occasions that crystallise a moment in time: from who you know to fashions that you’ve unconsciously adopted.
Memory is a fallible, fragile thing. Days drift by in habit and routine like sand in an egg timer—each one barely distinguishable from another. We need markers across time, dates that allow us to perceive before and after. Weddings are one of the rare times that allow you to integrate all aspects of your life: partner, family, friends, and society. Weddings are all-encompassing, heroic moments that stand out in the memory and add structure to a life.
Most weddings are, nowadays, big parties with ceremonies attached. But, while people won't necessarily travel halfway across the country if you say you're having a party, they will make an extra effort for a wedding. This is because weddings have a deep symbolic charge: they announce the exclusive union of two people, a lifelong commitment, and the beginning of a shared story.
Not everyone agrees with me.
Some people think they can deduce how to act in life from first principles. Tradition, they say, is the source of all prejudice and irrational behaviour. For them, marriage is the ultimate example of unthinking ritual that wouldn't exist in an intelligent society. They point out that it is historically part of the patriarchy, a source of misery, and, ackshually unnecessary in the modern age where people live, quite happily, in monogamous relationships, sharing mortgages and children. Marriage has been made redundant by the death of god and their disdain for state approval. Why bother signing a piece of paper to prove that you love someone?
You’ll notice that I’ve switched from talking about weddings to talking about marriage.
Weddings, for them, are the spoonful of sugar that makes palatable the medicine of marriage; a day of fun for a lifetime of monotony. Maybe I’m a lucky one, but I disagree. Furthermore, I don’t think it is possible to have the fun of the wedding unless you have the commitment that marriage brings.
You can get many of the benefits of being married from just being in a common-law relationship with someone, but a marriage is a declaration that comes with promises and duties. If you take those duties seriously, if you have integrity, then marriage is a lifelong project to grow and share a life with another person.
Divorce is no longer frowned upon (the UK divorce rate is estimated at 42%), but you are making an extra commitment in the eyes of your friends, your family, your government, and your god (delete as appropriate) that makes it slightly less likely that you’ll give up at the first sign of trouble.
Marriage is confirmation that meaning is found not in the individual or even in the couple, but in the world at large. We live in symbolic universes constructed from our interactions with others. By getting married, we embrace society and escape the individualism of the era.
Of course, you need to actually have a partner you love in order to get married. I understand that lots of people are fearful of reducing their opportunities by settling down, but if you have found someone then why not celebrate that love with others in an institution that helps bring people together?
I wonder if part of the resistence to marriage is something to do with the extended friendship networks that people have built up on sites like Facebook. If you have 1,000 friends on Facebook and you can only invite 50 of them to your wedding then how do you decide who to invite?
It can be expensive, especially if you feel obliged to buy an extravagent outfit, hire a fancy venue, and put on a feast. However, I have had good times at weddings where we all just went to the pub afterwards. You can do it on a budget and still have a great day. I dread to think how much my wedding cost and we were lucky in that our parents were very generous, but while I could have spent the money on other things, it was definitely worth it for the memories.
Some people don’t want to get married because they don’t like being centre of attention. I wouldn’t worry. I don't remember anything of my own wedding, except few flashes of it in the third person. But I have made extra effort to be present at other people’s weddings. There is a chaotic energy to these days. These are the days that make a life.