Proposal for an alternative marriage setup

Finally! It’s here. This is the first draft, but I’m sure it will be revised/ratified over time.

Um, before I go into this, I’d like to give a small disclaimer/follow-up to what I said before. I said that things are “tolerable” when you know they will end. Mmm…that sounds a bit negative. The positive side would be that you appreciate things more when you know they will end. Well, I guess I did say that at the end.

But even so, with that said, it’s not to say that I don’t wish some things would last forever. I do wish some things would last and I wish there were someone that would stay in spite of all that changes.

And it’s because of this desire that I’ve come up with this marriage setup. The intent is to help ensure that a marriage will last. The way marriages are set up now are flawed and run counter to the human condition, even though they are meant to be something solid.

Before I explain my proposal, I’ll list the pitfalls of marriage and/or life.

- Everything gets old, no matter how wonderful it was at the beginning.
- Once things get old, you don’t appreciate them anymore, and you take things for granted.
- After a while, the grass starts looking greener elsewhere.
- You want what you don’t have and when you have it, you don’t want it anymore.
- The same can be said with people. You spend enough time with a person, you’re gonna get tired of them. Once you get tired of them, you’re not going to appreciate them and you’re going to take them for granted. Finally, you start looking at other people.
- In a regular relationship, this is where the couple will likely (and perhaps should) break up. But in a marriage, you no longer have that option, which is strange because in spite of the fact you’ve arbitrarily volunteered yourself to a life sentence, the human condition doesn’t change.
- But here’s another weird thing. At least, in a regular relationship (as in, non-marital), you do feel the sense that you could lose the person you’re with to someone else if you stop caring for the person you’re with or take them for granted.
- But in a marriage, people lose that sense that they could lose what they have simply because they’ve signed a contract. And they get lazy and stop trying once they’ve bagged someone. So the stability that a life-time contract was supposed to give ends up becoming a weak foundation.
- Another problem is that there is too much expectation from marriage. People are looking for that one person who is right for them and will meet all their needs. Well, people need a lot of things, which often contradict each other if you’re expecting all of them to come from one person.
- The last thing is, and I mentioned this before, forever is too long. It’s not even comprehensible. And well, I guess the rest of your life is technically a finite amount of time, but whatever.
- Anyway, so what do most people say to these problems? They’ll say, “That’s life”, or “That’s just the way it is.” As if marriage was something that came out of the natural world. It was invented! And with most things that are invented, we look for ways to improve it, make it better, especially if there are problems with the current model.

This is the way I would set up a marriage.

First of all, dealing with this problem of everything getting old or getting tired of being around someone all the time.

You get tired of someone when you’re around them all the time. Well, how can you not be around someone all the time when you live with them? When I was in university, I had roommates for the first few years. They were good friends of mine. And what do most people say about rooming with your friends? “Don’t room with your friends if you want them to stay your friends.” And sure enough, I ran into problems and in one case almost lost a good friend as a result. So what ended up helping? When I lived on my own, I got along better with all my friends.

So why don’t we apply this to marriage? If spouses didn’t live together, they’d likely get along better. They’d have their own space, and because they didn’t live together, they would not get tired of each other and they’d want to be together. Basically, you’d be maintaining a state of never having what you want, and therefore, continuing to want it.

You’d also avoid stupid little disputes about how to load a dishwasher or how to hang towels. And your little annoying habits wouldn’t be much of an issue, either.

An issue that does come up, however, is when you have children. Well, there are a number of ways to solve this. Having separate dwellings could work but it might be a pain. I propose to purchase a duplex…one that is side-by-side. One side belongs to one spouse, the other side belongs to the other spouse. Since you both own the duplex, you can do whatever you want with it. So I would take out a wall (in my mind, I picture a two-story side-by-side…doesn’t even have to be that big). Then you have a big family room, but in principal you still have your side, and your spouse has the other. You still arrange things in your half the way you want. After all, it’s still your space.

So that takes care of a number of problems right there. But there’s still the problem with becoming overly comfortable in a lifelong contract.

Again, a lifelong contract has the problem of making you lazy. You no longer have the fear (or as much fear) that you could lose the one you’re with. So you take the one you’re with for granted. And you start to take less care of your body as well. Granted, merely being physically attractive is not important. I don’t mean this in a superficial way. But not taking care of your body is definitely an adverse response to the comfort of having someone for life.

A lifelong contract also poses a problem going into marriage, making it one the most stressful things you can do in life. That just doesn’t seem right to me. Who can possibly know who they want to be with for the rest of their life? Why should anyone be forced to make such an unrealistic decision? We are always growing and changing. Just like when you date someone, you eventually change, grow apart, etc. like I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

And there is, again, the problem with not appreciating what you have when you know you’re going to have it forever.

I propose shorter, renewable contracts. Broken into more manageable lengths of time. This will accomplish three things. 1.) It will make marriage less frightening to get into, 2.) It will bring back the fear that you could lose the one you’re with, causing you not to get lazy and take them for granted, and 3.) You don’t have to make the unreasonable choice of choosing who you’ll be with for the rest of your life.

(Note: I would propose the length of the contracts be lengthened effective immediately when children come into the picture, but only until a certain age, like, 18 or something.)

Finally, the expectation of marriage. To be honest, I’m really unclear on this matter. I’ve asked married couples why they decided to get married, but I get all kinds of answers. My thinking is that it would be to start a family. Other than that, I just can’t understand why anyone would want to get married and I suspect most people don’t really consider what they’re getting themselves into.

But I think the main problem is the expectation that you’ll be happy with one person for the rest of your life and that they will be everything you need. If it didn’t happen with other relationships you were in, there’s no reason things will be any different with your spouse.

As far as how to resolve issues of other people coming into your life while you are married…mmm, I think this part of my proposal could get controversial. So I may leave it alone for now. But at any rate, all you’d have to do is make it to the end of your current contract whereupon you could make changes.

I think this is all I’ll put down for now. I’ll post this again over time as I make changes to it. For example, I’ll start to consider the lengths of the contracts.

I’ll add this as a final thought. Many people would suggest to me that learning to live together and getting past differences helps you learn to compromise and grow. But I think compromising and learning to get along causes people to become tired and apathetic.