Thursday, December 23, 2010

Why Marriage Shouldn't Be a Legal Term

I wrote a post a few days ago questioning why marriage is a legal, and not personal, term.  I'd like to expand on that with a list of reasons why we would be better without (official) marriage.

First, it would end thorny questions of what, exactly, could constitute a marriage.  Right now, a marriage consists of a man and a woman.  This is clearly biased against homosexuals; legalizing gay marriage would solve this problem.  It doesn't, however, solve the more general problem of the government deciding what a marriage is.  Even with gay marriage, it would be defined as being between two people.  Why not more?  Whatever you think of polyamorous relationships, why should the government be deciding this for you?

Furthermore, why should the government be splitting all monogamous couples up into two binary categories: married and not married?  Why does there need to be a stark, legal distinction whereby half of all relationships are given no legal standing, and the other half are given a ton of it?  This encourages a number of potentially unhealthy decisions.  First, in encourages early marriage: there are legal benefits to being married that can't be gained from a non-marriage relationship--even a long term one--thus encouraging young people to lock themselves into a potentially life-long decision before they otherwise would.  Second, it causes people to divide up relationships into two categories in terms of longevity: marriage, which is permanent, and relationships, which aren't.  But what if a couple wanted something in between?  In the current society it's considered odd, and thus implicitly discouraged, to have a long term relationship that isn't bound by marriage, meaning that many couples are forced to either permanently tie themselves to a relationship that they're not sure they want to be in for the rest of their lives, or to end a relationship.  And while it's true that a couple could get married and then later divorce, the stigma associated with divorces makes this, too, an unattractive option.

Finally, making marriage legal causes a couple to be treated, in many ways--and particularly economically--as a single entity.  This, both directly and indirectly, is responsible for a huge part of the wage gap between women and men. It's legally reinforced that couples' income is treated together, meaning there is legal backing to the notion that women need not work as long as their husbands can make a living; this, possibly above all other reasons, is why women earn so much less than men, and work so much less frequently.

In short, marriage is an arbitrary distinction that divides all romantic relationships in this country into two categories, creates incentives for couples to choose one of the two categories--whether or not it's right for them--and comes with a whole host of repercussions, including discrimination, early marriages and divorces, and gender inequality.

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