Love and marriage

„Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go toghether like a horse and carriage ..“

Frank Sinatra

            This fragment of a well-known song serves us as a good example what love or love in connection to marriage can mean to us.

            First of all – in the song there is presented a clear stereotype: horse and carriage, two inseparable items in the old times. So if we take this comparison to our purposes, love and marriage is a full-time stereotype par excellence. But in spite of this inseparability it is better to analyze these two items separately first.

            Let’s talk about love.

          I will talk about love in its most common meaning (in old Greek we would call it eros). I share my opinion to love with my favourite sci-fi sitcom character Arnold Rimmer: love is a mental disease that was invented by bankers to make us go overdrawn. In fact it is a kind of mental disease .. and it attacks almost everyone at least once in a lifetime. But it doesn´t last very long as it is one of those short-time emotional distortion like e. g. happiness (about happiness I will make some points some time later). Since human kind is so emotional, we can hardly avoid it, but sometimes we just confuse ourselves with thinking about what love really is. Because it is nothing else that a sudden emotional rise-up caused by hormones. And that is the point – all is caused by hormones, so what we think is love, in fact is .. sex. Or better - calling for sexual intercourse that should happen in the near future. And of course, as we humans are so emotional, we don´t realize that all this is physical, and not sentimental, and this is the mayor confusion that we make about love. Of course unconsciously. So if we hear to sing “let´s get physical” and we scandalize ourselves about the lack of emotionality of some people, we have to admit that we are all equal.

                                                                                                        

            So what can we say now about marriage?

            Some want to get married to make their love eternal. But this intention results ridiculous according to what I mentioned above about love. Nevertheless, there is another extreme – some people who really believe in love think about marriage as an end of love. For instance, in one 105 years old short story by a Czech decadent writer Arthur Breisky the main character is doubting whether it is possible to live with a heart but not to love. He compares it to literally cutting off the heart and still continuing alive. But there is another man, The Knight of Death, who silence the pathetic romantic: “But it is possible to anaesthetize the heart. Some do that with alcohol, some with marriage, some with ambition, some with occupation and only the wisest ones with knowledge.” According to this opinion marriage is something that is in opposition to love.

            I think marriage is something that gives formality to a relationship in a way that both can have some advantages from it. Yes, it sounds a little bit violent saying “to profit from a relationship”, but isn´t it a point of marriage? To formalize a relationship has clear advantages and in certain way this is also the point when some can say the love is over, when you start to consider your partner rather a business partner. But many people get married to formalize first of all the status of children who are either already present, or on the way, or planned. So in fact, marriage is a prototype of prefabricated life. It is a status that is recommended, approved and supported by state. You become easily the part of state controlled system and this obviously brings the situation when you lose a part of your freedom. Some can say that on the other hand your liberty is strengthened by marriage, but I am talking about freedom which is different from liberty in its extension (maybe it should be good to write some time about freedom and liberty too).

           In conclusion, we have a reason not to acknowledge love, and we have a reason not to acknowledge marriage. And if we put these two items together – a mental disease with a pursuit of being a part of officially controlled system -  we get something a bit ill and self-destructive, I would say.

So if you believe in love and marriage, it doesn´t necessarily mean that you are absolutely socialized; maybe you are just conscious about social stereotypes and willing to live in them. And particularly the system tells us what is acceptable in a “healthy” society and this makes people uniform. When I say “socialize” I mean the ability to live with people who don´t want to be a part of the system and to accept the differences of choices how some people want to live. Socialization mustn´t mean uniformity. But as far as I know it is other way round (and it is because of the system which is saying so).

And this makes me say this statement: first we have to free ourselves from social stereotypes and then we realize that all we know about love and marriage is artificially invented stuff. We have to be able to think by ourselves, not by the patterns given by society or system.