I DO OR I DON'T?
Apparently Americans have changed their view of marriage over the decades. No surprise there really; It does, as an institution, need a better PR company. According to a survey from Pew Research Center and Time Magazine, only half of Americans are getting married, which is down from 72 percent in 1960. And 40 percent of US adults think marriage is obsolete. On the flip side, cohabitation has doubled since 1990. Pretty ironic considering there are those out there battling hard to be allowed the right to marry, whilst those allowed are losing interest in the concept as a whole.
Over the years, marriage has definitely become something much less sacrosanct than it used to be. It could be due to the odds that over sixty percent of marriages end in divorce. I’m thinking that if over 60 percent of people died when they went into surgery, a lot of people would start avoiding their local hospitals. The problem is human beings have changed dramatically over the years (and not necessarily for the better), especially women and their place in the world, but marriage as an institution has not changed. It’s man and woman joined together, by god, or the government – your choice you lucky people - forever and ever. Good luck to you, cause the return policy sucks.
So this got me thinking, as marriage isn’t doing so hot as a concept, maybe it is time to customize marriage, like one’s own website or homepage. For each couple, marriage could become a bespoke arrangement, as we know by now it is not one size fits all. One could propose time-share husbands as a concept? Or the weekend off marriage…or the four day a week marriage like Carrie and Big (god was that movie awful). Or how about the separate living spaces marriage with communal areas? I’m just brainstorming here – I’m not even married, so you see how far I've gotten - but there must be something to bring about the evolution of an institution that does not seem to be working anymore.
Then again, maybe it comes down to how we approach the institution as it stands; maybe it’s not you, marriage, it’s us, and we’re the ones failing, not the institution. If you think about it, we work harder now at everything – our careers, on ourselves – inside and out – on the community around us; but the thing we seem to put by the wayside and expect to always be there is our relationship, and hence, the union of marriage. Maybe we just have to work harder and the odds will slowly but surely reflect this. Sadly as we are the transient generation seemingly married to our electronic devices, maybe the notion of forever with other human beings just doesn’t compute anymore in our fleeting, over-stimulated, need to change every second brains.
Hmmm. Perhaps there’s an app for this?