What are the reasons to get married from an Integral Perspective?



Essentially, the wedding is a big party where people have particular costumes (the bride a big white dress) and the bride and groom sign a piece of paper, she has the option of changing her name. The party commonly cost half a house (or more) and everyone gets drunk. That is a common description, not the only way obviously, especially if spiritual traditions are apart of the ceremony.

But WHY get married?

A lot of answers I have been given are ‘cause that’s what you do next’ or ‘cause it’s the right thing to do’ which to me is Amber thinking.

An Orange marriage possibly is about achieving anything there is to achieve, like a happy, healthy marriage? That is a very over simplified example. If you’re a gold digger there’s other motifs and there could be some red line lurking in the mist.

I would think that Green reasons are free for all akin to Integral.

On a more positive slant, the Wedding is an excuse (if you needed one), to celebrate Life and in this case, celebrate a relationship. It’s a ritual and rituals can come in handy beyond Magenta.

Does a verbal vow or a commitment made mean anything? I suppose it’s the meaning you give it? Talk means nothing without the follow up action.

You don’t need to be married to create a happy, healthy family environment to raise children in and legally marriage doesn’t make much difference (in Australia). Marriage doesn’t mean the relationship can’t be open either if happily consented to by both parties.

I’ve come across so many people who said that nothing really changed after the marriage apart from the amount of debt they were in as they were already ‘living in sin’ together. Others have said that the depth of the relationship changed but having children did that more so.

As most could probably tell, I’m not married and I’m surrounded by marriage skeptics and children of divorced parents and would love some healthy Integral ideas.

Fig
:)

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A clever ironic quote is best here... instead I'll smile :)

Hi Fig,

 

Marriage as an institution is in a very sorry state; and from my view begs for reform.

 

But if consenting adults come to an understanding that they choose to share their life together based on love, and celebrate that notion through some form of ceremony, my counsel is not to include the state as a third party in the relationship. The state has only very crude tools (that often devolve into weapons) to deal with contractual relationships that go awry; sooner or later chief among these tools is the use of force.

 

No one yet has ever been able to successfully explain to me why inviting this ominous and imposing third-party with its threats of force into a love relationship is a good idea; especially as i cherish the notion that love itself knows no force or coercion.

 

How much better off society would be if this institution called marriage could be reformed and replaced with something akin to what might be called a Parenting Contract, where the state could assert a more proper role in protecting the rights of innocent minor offspring?

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

Well said, Charlesb.

I don't get the appeal of traditional marriage.  The "costumes"(never thought of it that way, but true eh?), large expense for one day only, and the stress that seems to go into all the planning, all seem...a littile absurd? It is a big industry, though.

A few people I have discussed this with go along with it mostly because the parents or family want it.

I have never had or wanted a traditional marriage so I would be interested in hearing opinions of those who have.

Good point about the kids. I think adults can overlook the impact of their actions on fragile, still forming minds,  as well as recognizing the inherent rights of their children.  Kids are not property and should not be treated as such. 

 

Hi Kaspan,

 

>>>I don't get the appeal of traditional marriage. <<<

 

From my view the best that can be said about the appeal of traditional marriage is that it is a form of human aspiration; alas it is a form of aspiration that has devolved into a sort of mesmerizing dream. It takes the marvelous notion that love is possible, a love that is centrally seen as a condition of interiority, and degrades it through superficiality and pretends that exteriors, now culturally inflated into an industry, are really what it's all about. There is an immense collective attachment to this dream, one so all-encompassing that folks give it up only with great reluctance.

 

Every once in awhile someone may come along who has not succumbed to the dream or who has transcended it.  I am reminded of a scene from one of my favorite films. It’s based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek. The central figure of which is a rough sort of character blessed with an immense authenticity usually only found in the enlightened; a counterpoint figure is played by Alan Bates who could be seen as representing the thinking or monkey mind, a well known barrier to enlightenment.

 

Bates asks Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn, “Zorba are you married?’ Zorba replies, “Am I not a man? Am I not stupid? Of course I'm married, wife, house, children, the full catastrophe!”

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would like to come at this from the self line.

Who am I? Where do I end and others begin? When I think about "myself" or feel "myself" do I feel that I have constructed this entity alone?

Marriage is an opportunity to do the following:

1. Make an eternal commitment to join my identity with the identity of another. Not just for 3 years, or "until death do us part" but forever.

2. Begin instinctively and always taking the perspective of the mate into consideration.

3. Join your life with someone who knows you so well that they can read your mind and render yourself so naked that you cannot deceive this person.

4. Create a dyad that produces a child who feels that it is the beloved offspring of one person who exists in two bodies.

5. Make a leap of commitment that is so binding that there is literally nothing that can justify terminating this relationship. Do I mean that? Yes, I do. Before this commitment can be terminated, the state will step in and either incarcerate or institutionalize the other. Barring that, we have inconveniences that ask us to serve.

6. Arrive at a point where you can no longer distinguish where you end and the other begins.

The Western notion of self is orange to the core. We all instinctively agree with Dr. Phil who reinforces this strategic team concept of marriage.

I am proposing making a leap and devoting oneself to service of the spouse for eternity. Even if they commit the most heinous acts thou shalt love them and pray for them and do every single thing that helps them.

As for the mechanics and the ceremony, this plays an important part in demonstrating to the community that one can be counted on to uphold local traditions. Yes, they are partly arbitrary. But, just as a new pickup truck is more than a new pickup truck where I live, a wedding implies 1,000 things.

 

This is an interesting topic, one that I have been wrestling with for quite some time. I'm looking forward to hearing other opinions too.

Charles raises an important concern that I also share - is it not obscene for the government to intrude in our most intimate affairs and issue a license (like a driver's license? a fishing license?) to two individuals who wish to make a committment to each other? And for the culture to accept that license as indicating a superior kind of relationship, to the point of pronouncing children of unlicensed parents "illegitimate"? Does one need a license to be fully human? Of course this bears directly on the issue of gay marriage as well, and there might be a justification to boycott marriage solely on these grounds.

Some thinkers bemoan the loss of ritual in our cultural lives, pointing out that these things are what bind the community together. But as post-modern people, the grand narratives that made them compelling in the first place no longer have any meaning, or at least, not the same meaning. We can only engage with those traditions with a kind of self-consciousness, fully aware of the basic inauthenticity of what we are doing. Today, people aren't so much experiencing a wedding as they are producing a wedding: just like a movie, you have make-up, wardrobe, set design, location scouting, a team of photographers and cameras to capture carefully-storyboarded scenes.

This makes perfect sense once you realize that these are social performances that work by having the audience collectively project their individual experiences on to the drama that unfolds before them, in much the same way that we collectively experience movies, so it's natural that the audience would come to expect the same high production values that they are used to getting in the theatre. One can even choose from an increasing diversity of "genres" of the wedding beyond the traditional, from modern, eclectic, new age, travel, elopement, etc. Traditionally, the "plot" of your wedding was decided by your religion, culture and family, but today the bride and groom take on that role, and in doing that, by becoming the self-conscious directors and actors in a movie, lose touch with the committment that the production is supposed to be celebrating. So in a way, modern media-tuned weddings are to romantic love what watching pornography by yourself is to real, in-the-flesh sex - a second-hand representation that hollows out what it attempts to symbolize.

After all that, I realize that you are actually asking for a positive case for marriage, but I don't think that's actually possible. A wedding has to be meaningful to the individuals getting married and the audience, but an integral wedding would be deeply meaningful to the couple, but incomprehensible to the families and audience (probably safe to assume that). But making it comprehensible would seem to take away from it's authenticity and relevance to the couple.

Happy Friday TC,

 

>>>So in a way, modern media-tuned weddings are to romantic love what watching pornography by yourself is to real, in-the-flesh sex - a second-hand representation that hollows out what it attempts to symbolize.<<<

 

This quote of yours is devastatingly insightful; and goes well beyond a simple pointing out that the emperor of modern weddings wears no clothes. Sad to say it represents a point of view that is unlikely to find much of a welcome outside of rarified quarters; nonetheless i am happy to salute it. Thank you.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"    

Happy Friday Schalk,

 

>>> Make a leap of commitment that is so binding that there is literally nothing that can justify terminating this relationship. Do I mean that? Yes, I do. Before this commitment can be terminated, the state will step in and either incarcerate or institutionalize the other. <<<

 

Yikes! Does this mean that after the state steps in with these draconian or Taliban-like procedures that the commitment can then be terminated?

 

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

Let me make myself more clear. I wasn't talking about Taliban-like procedures.

What I was trying to point out is this: we have 10,000 reasons of inconvenience why marriages need to be terminated.

And they are predicated on what is good for me.

And "me" is the self that is not "conjoined" in a union.

I am suggesting a radical commitment to a marriage such that there is no turning back.

So, if a spouse is abusive, the state will step in with police arrest and a trial and incarceration to solve the abuse issue, but ... the radical union will continue. One has devoted oneself to a union.

I know this sounds great on paper and I know that it is hard to ask anyone to make this level of commitment.

But, ask a child whose parents have pissed and moaned and bickered and ratted each other out and fought and accused each other and ... ask the child how they feel.

At what point do adults have a duty to commit to something absolutely that is a shining example of devotion that serves a child?

I can testify to how this works in a sense - my spouse has 4 siblings. Not a single one of them married out of love. Each of them married per an arrangement made by parents.

And each of them probably would not have chosen that particular mate.

Each of them has at least 2 children. And each of them has remained married because ... the community they belong to does not tolerate divorce for personal reasons. And now that each of them has accepted the inevitability of the union, there is a warmth and friendliness and acceptance and a union that is very beneficial to the children and the local community.

Letting people marry and divorce for "incompatibility" is like letting children decide what is for dinner.

We are selflish and experts at coming up with reasons why want we want and need prevail over what is good for our children, and our community.

Absolute miracles happen when we accept the inevitability of something and work with it.

I am proposing a radical commitment such that the marital union is the absolute bedrock facet of a life. It should not be a convenient partnership or a merger of interests or a strategic alliance. These are all based on the separate self. When do we make the leap?

Hi Schalk,

 

Thanks for your clarification.

 

Although i’m more than a little leery about making such an absolutist commitment to a human social cultural institution, based on the notion that absolutist commitments are best reserved for the Absolute.

 

If for example one's commitment is to Love, which for shorthand purposes could be described as a devotion to the long-term best interests of all involved, then a certain amount of adaptability to changing conditions -or the form that Love takes from moment to moment- seems much more wise than adhering to some lesser more constrictive notion; none of which would necessarily interfere with the core of that commitment.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

Charles:

Devotion to the long-term best interests of all involved?

Who are these "all involved" and what are their "best interests?" Each one of them has a perfectly logical and compelling tale to tell - you'll find them on the courthouse steps awaiting their final divorce decrees.

Yes, ask each of these heroic little separate selves what is in their long-term best interests - they will happily tell you. Every spouse with a grievance can make a perfectly compelling case that the other is a monster!

"Love" is fucked up! Let's slay the word love. Let's not bring "love" whatever that may mean into the marital equation.

We do not know love. Men know their dicks and women know the bank and their standing in the community. We are little children with little child needs and we marry and divorce and screw up kids and lie to our spouses and hold out on everyone.

I am suggesting that we take ownership of our lives and make the marital union the centerpiece of human evolution. This "me" is a massively deceptive little con artist - and all of its games are revealed in a union.

Let's bring in devotion. Caring. Perspective-taking. Duty. Self-transcendance as a gesture of universal devotion. Sacrifice. Service to children.

When did this "shopping channel" mentality invade marriage and life?

 

Hi Schalk,

 

The perspective on things that considers “Love” to be all fucked up is understandable enough; but i'm happy not to live there anymore.

 

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"     

Schalk, you say:

It should not be a convenient partnership or a merger of interests or a strategic alliance. These are all based on the separate self.
This "me" is a massively deceptive little con artist - and all of its games are revealed in a union.

You seem to be equating the Western moral concept of unselfishness with the Buddhist concept of anatta, and I think this is a mistake. To me, there is an egotism of the self where the Other is denied, and there is an egotism of the Other where the self is rejected; the first is agency without communion, and the latter is communion without agency, and both of these extreme positions come into greater harmony in an integral view. But again, I think you are misunderstanding the concept of anatta if you are saying that it is simply the rejection of agency in favor of communion, and that we become more enlightened by having the government enforce that.

Arrive at a point where you can no longer distinguish where you end and the other begins.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by this, but this seems to be a description of what is called fusion - the denial and repression of agency that leads to a pathological state where one projects one's agency on to the Other. Here the individual avoids reifying the ego, but instead reifies the Other. For Buddhists, it is not just the self which is empty, but all phenomenal reality including the Other.

One thing about the modern government coming into the picture is that it gave women some power. Before that, the men and the patriarchical church were in charge. Now, perhaps, it has swung the other way, and men are at a disadvantage in the court system, but it's good to remember how things were before the government was getting involved. There was recently the case of the fundamentalist, polygamist sect in Texas, for example, where girls were forced into marriage at very young ages, raped, beaten, etc., and women around the world are in similar situations where modern values enforced by the goverment haven't yet emerged.

 

mm

In reference to me asking for a positive case for marriage, I was instead asking for a healthy Integral case for and against.

There is space for Weddings in an Integral community as there is room for everything in one way or another.

I find it really easy to write off weddings. Many of the weddings I’ve seen of or been to have felt really inauthentic to me as most are of the Amber or Orange variety. Also, what good is a piece of paper?

I feel ‘the state’s’ way of enforcing commitments and making them an inconvenience to break would have to be designed also to serve the majority of the population: Red, Amber, Orange etc and people who don’t believe/perceive that the crap with their partner is actually their crap. So the state must make it as inconvenient as possible in order to encourage a greater level of responsibility taken on the part of the participants. I’m pretty sure the state didn’t have that in mind when making it an inconvenience but either way it works.

There is a parallel with getting a “piece of paper” from an educational institution. What does it mean? It apparently means I know something relevant to the title of the degree. I wrestled with ‘the unfairness’ of the state to set up a course that I felt was so irrelevant to what I was going to use it for and have me jump through all the hoops and endure the crap in the meantime for this piece of paper. At the end of the day, I learnt a lot, (about the course and me), I did conclude through hindsight that the study material wasn’t as irrelevant as I believed whilst studying and I have just found a way to do what I do without hitting up against any ‘state’ boards. Dealing with the state is a game, just like anything else in life. You can blame the state for how crappy it is or see that like anything else in life, it’s just stirring up your crap and spirit will find a way for you to deal with it and Spirit can chose the state to be the catalyst.

In regard to marriage, my focus has very little to do with legalities as there is a bigger picture here. One can have a ceremony and not get a piece of paper if that felt right. The government’s participation in a marriage in my understanding is only one quadrant of four. The commitment is all about what meaning you add to it. I’m more curious about what is that commitment a couple is making?

As marriage isn’t only for parenting purposes, a “parenting contract” isn’t in replacement of marriage. I’m only saying that as I’m still undecided on the parenting debate too ☺

On the flip side, I do feel I that absolutist commitments are best reserved for the absolute. Anything is possible with spirit’s unfolding. If there was a mutual agreement that a separation should occur keeping the bigger picture in mind then I’m for it. However that separation can’t be charged with resentment or blaming or fault-finding of the other person if one is up for keeping check of their shadow. I keep thinking of how God laughs at our plans… the plans of the absolutist.

:) Fig

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A clever ironic quote is best here... instead I'll smile :)