To those contemplating the nature of marriage and its place in modern society,

The Current State of Marriage Conversations

This topic has been brewing in my brain for some time. I’m noticing a lot of discussion online today about dating, relationships, that sort of thing. Occasionally, these conversations tend to steer towards marriage – a seemingly waning institution, sometimes considered low-brow by the modern intellectual. In this letter, I want to delve into the heart of these discussions. I find myself listening to these conversations, frustrated, because rarely is marriage discussed properly through the lens it ought to be evaluated. Whether debating its merits, arguing for or against it as a personal right, or discussing potential restrictions, the lens through which these conversations are conducted is skewed and often leads to what I deem to be insufficient conclusions.

Let’s start with an extreme example to establish a common starting point for my reasoning in this letter. Most would agree that I, a human man, cannot marry a dog (regardless of sex); similarly, I cannot marry my father, no matter how much I wanted to. I use these absurd examples to demonstrate that we generally accept there are boundaries to how we can apply the concept of marriage, despite those boundaries differing between different individuals. Now, those limits will be based on different arguments and rationales, hence why I’m writing about this topic. I believe the original framework – the core objective – has been obscured, forgotten, distorted. For example, most people would say that marriage between direct family members should not be allowed by law. But why? “Incest is bad of course because of the high risk of birth defects in the resultant children”, one might argue. However, such defects typically arise over many generations, not from a single marriage. Moreover, in the case of a son and father marriage this birth defect scenario is not possible. So why make criminalize or stigmatize that union? Let me be clear: I am not advocating for any of these scenarios; I’m just using them to illustrate the disconnection between a fundamental truth we all acknowledge (incestual marriages should not be allowed) and the rationale we might employ to justify that position (incestual relations lead to children with health defects).

The Prime Objective of Society

What is the purpose of society, of civilization? Why do we go to such lengths to organize, to plan? Why do nations safeguard their borders, their resources, their interests? Although some may boil it all down to power and control, this is a shallow answer. Even those individuals seeking power, influence, and money know that they cannot escape death, and yet, they don’t structure their assets to be donated back to the state or random people upon their inevitable demise. Instead, usually, they pass on their wealth to their descendants; for there is a mechanism by which one can beat death, if not directly, then perhaps in roundabout way.

In nature, the primary driver for all living organisms is clear: every living specimen aims to continue its bloodline; it is the base operating principle to which all others are subservient. We humans are different, but also the same. Those who see no difference between us and animals reject both the external observational data as well as the acknowledgement of that internal truth, deep-seated in the gut. Consider for a moment the difference the differences in delivery and focal points in a documentary on animals in the Amazon to one on tribal life of Bedouins in the Sahara desert; this may be due to human bias in how we observe ourselves, but you couldn’t imagine a dog describing other dogs in a similar way to how we describe other humans, or even an octopus, one of the most intelligent animals we know of (let’s not get into intelligence here because that’s a deep well that we might not be able to climb out of, so we’ll save it for another day). Many religions and philosophies have sought to capture the meaning of being human, to resolve the big “why’s” of existence. And many of those explanations go beyond our physical daily lives, of finding a mate to procreate and pass on genetic material as animals do. So I do acknowledge that human existence points to a higher purpose than that of animals, but we are physical beings at the end of the day, and so have that same driver to continue our physical existence through creating children. In fact, I am about to argue that this is the foundation required upon which all other pursuits of human curiosity and creation are built.

A World Without Children, A World Without A Future

In the movie “Children of Men” based on the book of the same name, humans have stopped having children due to some unknown reason leading to societal collapse. The movie poignantly captures the hopeless despair that engulf society if its future was essentially wiped out. It made me really think. Everything that we do, from energy generation to optimizing agriculture, innovating healthcare technologies to theorizing better methods of political and economic governance, investigating the nature of the world we inhabit: these things only matter if there is a future to humanity to experience it all. Humans may eventually become extinct, we may kill each other off or an asteroid might slam into the planet, ending all life; but this is an unknown. And even if humanity does have an ultimate end, not knowing the details of how that end will materialize essentially makes it obscure enough to be considered a non-real scenario in our day-to-day considerations. In these scenarios, most of us take it for granted that humanity will most likely continue, with some edge cases on the periphery that spike periodically in the collective human conscience (e.g. nuclear wars, superviruses, asteroid showers). Now imagine, as depicted in “Children of Men”, knowing with certainty that within a few generations humanity would cease to exist, and the cause was the sudden inability to create children.

And so we get to the core of this letter. Why do we care about building stable societies? For our children, the future of our species. That’s been the driver for the large part of recorded history, the humanist approach. And so, when I see discussions revolving around marriage or partner selection without any mention of children, I find myself shaking my head. Marriage, as a protected institution, exists to protect the family unit, the smallest required building block of the future of humanity (similar to amino acids and proteins). Therefore, in my estimation, any discourse around the sanctity of marriage, or who should and should not be married, without the lens of child-rearing, is a futile conversation that misses the mark entirely. Does that mean that married couples discovering they cannot have children are “less-married”? Certainly not. But I will go as far as to say that if two people are actively choosing to not have children, that marriage is the wrong path for them (I’m talking about vanilla John and Jane here, nothing fancy or exquisite). This doesn’t mean they can’t live together, that’s a completely separate argument. But concerning marriage, there is no point in my opinion if they do not wish to pursue children – that’s just not what it was designed for.

Breaking Down The Reasons For Marriage

We live in a society in the West where the barriers to sexual activity have been removed and there is no prerequisite for marriage required to cohabitate with whomever one chooses. So, for those intentionally childless marriages, what additional benefit is gained from marriage? Hard benefits like tax advantages? Those are in place not for the couple themselves, but to incentivize the union and benefit the children. So, if you want to get married for that reason and take advantage of the system, absolutely, go for it; ultimately, it’s akin to marrying for citizenship or future inheritance. What about soft benefits, like hospital visitation “rights”? In my opinion, this is a weak argument for marriage because those “rights” are unrelated to marriage. For instance, if I was dying in a hospital bed, had no close family, and only a close friend living nearby, it would be outrageous that the hospital would arbitrarily only allow my spouse to visit. I understand maybe limited visitors in some cases, where the choice should be mine to decide who from my entire life I would rather see as I lay dying – my choice, not anyone else’s. And so, if we separate these soft benefits, that are mainly culture and should be divorced from the idea of marriage entirely, then we are left with the original intent (raising children) and the auxiliary economic benefits (incentivizing and benefitting those children).

Reframing Marriage On Building The Family Unit

Now, some will argue that if marriage is seen primarily through the lens of raising children, then that excludes a portion of the population that cannot/choose not to partake in this endeavor. To that I would say two things. First, yes, it does exclude some people. But “exceptions define the rule”.  As we already agreed on at the start of this letter with the extreme examples, there are common exclusions that most of society agrees on, so marriage must, at a certain level, be exclusionary to some unions; how we arrive at those exclusions is what I’m trying to reframe here. Again, my thesis is that marriage is created and should be seen through the perspective of creating a family, the building block of civilization. Any other approach, I argue, is trivial in comparison (and sometimes contradictory) to that primary intent. Second, I am not delving into policy details here because that’s a whole separate discussion. Let’s say the law stipulated that only couples intending to have children could be married by the state; what would a couple who doesn’t want children do? Well, they could simply lie on their marriage “application” to get married and later choose not have the children. It would not be an effectively enforceable law. Even with having children as the focus, I have not discussed here novel methods of creating children (IVF, surrogates) nor how adoption might fit into this whole thing. All of these can influence specific policies and laws around how the state views, legalizes, and incentivizes marriage. However, the essence of this letter is to reframe conversations on marriage through the correct framing of building the family unit, required for the future of the human race, and to avoid being distracted by frivolous tangents that too often dominate contemporary discourse on the subject.

The impacts of losing this focus may appear insignificant at first glance, but I will demonstrate in a follow-up letter how a seemingly minor deviation at the foundation of a philosophical argument can heavily impact the actions of a society.

Sincerely,

One seeking to see the underlying gears that drive the world we live in.