Marriage Is Shapeless

We are waiting to find out which set of five Justices on the Supreme Court will have their way on what "marriage" should mean. But words that mean whatever we want them to mean end up not meaning anything after a while.

When I listened to the arguments of the pro-gay-marriage side, I got the impression that one of their main arguments was: A couple should be able to get a marriage license when their level of commitment to each other is high enough. After all, the divorce rate shows that society has already decided that a couple can get a divorce when their level of commitment to each other gets low enough.

That's a subjective definition of marriage because it's based only on what two people say about their feelings.

One of the main arguments of the more traditional side is: The definition of marriage was given to us as being between a man and a woman.

That definition actually leaves something out, though. The definition of marriage the human race started out with was: marriage is between one man and one woman for life.

It hurts me to say that because about half my friends — my good friends, too — are divorced.

For a long time we could work around the "for life" part by understanding it to mean that marriage is between a man and a woman until one of them starts acting like the other one is dead or starts playing dead themselves. (I'm speaking broadly. That's always been a messy problem.)

My point is that defining marriage subjectively doesn't work very well because I don't think it ever was the case that most people who had enough commitment to get married had enough commitment to stay married. It used to be that once a couple got married, many didn't stay married because they felt so wonderfully committed; rather, they stayed together for the kids' sake, or for the sake of economics, or they were afraid of what people would think of them (a.k.a. societal pressure), or just out of habit. Marriage had a sort of predefined "shape," and couples conformed.

But the time came when society no longer exerted that pressure. Society no longer expected two people who vowed "till death do us part" to mean that. Society decided marriage was no longer an institution that started with vows before a god and supported by the community, but marriage was just a contract to be kept as long as reasonably possible. (And I gather that a lot of my now-divorced friends kept trying to save their marriages way past the "reasonably possible" line. Let's all remember that whatever we think about whether and how "being married" is a right, it's not a right we can ever exercise on our own.)

So now, in mainstream American society, I wonder if "marriage" is meaningless because it's only subjective. I do think it's gotten very — "shapeless" might be a good word — on a level that's deeper than what the roles of the husband and the wife are. I mean it's shapeless in a way that resembles how all organisms that have no skeleton to hold them up are just blobs.

I'm single. I really don't want this to end here, with cynicism. I don't want to deny the good that several married couples have brought to my life because they were married, starting with my parents, who celebrate their 44th anniversary this month.

So I will look for some other ending to this story.