What Does Marriage Mean?

What Marriage Is

Marriage, based on etymology and historical context, is about sex. There really is no getting around it. Marriage is a social construct formulated from its earliest days to tie a male to a female and so stifle his desire to rootlessly impregnate many women without consequence. Females would probably have needed this just as much had they not been the ones stuck with the sprogs every year or so. Marriage created the concept of family and ingrained the concept of sex roles into our psyche. It has existed for thousands of years thus. That is what marriage means to humans on a socio-biological level.

As civilization became more complex and global, marriage changed somewhat. Empires used marriage for horse-trading, in order to play the political power game in an era when marriage was one of the few recognized forms of social contract. The advent of theistic religion saw marriage used to ensure a greater degree of social control by the religious authority vested with granting it. On the whole, the overwhelming majority of human cultures use the marriage contract as a social sanction on sexual activity, and consequent reproductive results.

Until the West granted human rights to women, marriage didn't do much from a legal standpoint. Women actually lost rights when marrying. Children born to a married couple weren't any better off, legally, than those born to an unmarried whore. The fact that their father was legally bound to their mother meant that sons were more likely to inherit their fortunes, and daughters were more likely to be abused, neglected and molested. But marriage still meant little more than the social convention under which heterosexual fornication and reproduction was socially condoned.

Only when women obtained (nearly) full legal status and (perhaps more importantly) with the advent of female contraception did the concept of marriage change. Women becoming empowered to choose their career and mate, and ultimately set their reproductive priorities, meant that marriage in its historical context no longer needed to exist. This is the way it should have been. Liberation from the necessity for social sanction of sexuality and the sex roles related to reproduction should have made the walls of socially-constructed sexuality as a whole come crumbling down. But they didn't.

Why Marriage Stuck Around

Why is it that the liberation of women from the prison of sex roles did not eliminate the social need for marriage?

The most important and immediate answer is that throughout much (most?) of the world, this liberation has not occurred. Most of humanity is still strongly religious, and moral dogma based on fundamental interperetation of religious scripture still codifies marriage for most governments and social groups. Thus, the revolution alluded to above has yet to completely run its course.

There is also the fact that the social construct of sexuality is as old as, if not older than, marriage itself. No matter what their other deviations, most transgendered individuals, queers and women still stick like glue to the concept of sex roles, or simply augment the traditional roles with a subcultural substandard, and feel totally miffed when accused of straying from such roles.

Additionally, there is that small fact that the tradition and convention of marriage is such a very, very old part of human social behavior. It is ingrained in our concept of life, love, goals and happiness. Humans have a hard time letting go of social constructs this strong. We would often rather try to adapt weaker social constructs to fit with the stronger ones. And that is what we're doing.

All over the world, people are trying to adapt their relationships to marriage, since their standards of relationship politics are a weaker social construct than their concept of marital relations. Rather than end marriage, those of us who would not have been prescribed it in the past, due to the type of relationship we've built, are changing the way we look at our relationships in order to better match our concept of marriage.

Why We Think We Need It

This is a pity. However, because the legal rights and protections which marriage extended to its participants in the modern context has not yet been given a suitable replacement, it was bound to happen. Our complex modern society has created complex modern relationships of many different flavours and meanings. But they have no legal framework, and that is because, like our relationships, our legal system has tried to change itself to fit marriage rather than change the much older construct of marriage. Rather than create new complex contractual traditions to protect all families and relationships and foster their growth and durability (and dissolution, where necessary), we have strengthened marriage here, weakened it there, formulated new obligations in some places, eliminated others.

We are very attached to this thing called marriage. Perhaps more attached to it than we are to our families and loved ones, for whom marriage was intended to build, foster and protect. We need it because it defines us as humans. Its social and moral implications make us feel a part of the human project. Without the possibility of identifying our particular relationship with this social construct we call marriage, we feel like our relationship means less, like it will not receive the social sanction we know marriage is, and that we feel we desperately need for the social accptance to which humans attribute their personal value, in many cases.

Living in this thing called society, certain accessories are mandatory. One such accessory is law. Law must exist for interpersonal relationships to work. Whether business relationships or personal relationships or the relationship of the individual to his government, a legal framework for all of them is necessary. A select few nations in the Western world invented this concept of social contract, whereby social relationships are invalid unless codified, and thus codifying a legal framework for interpersonal relationships is encouraged. Thus encouraging such legal documentation leads to interpersonal honestly, trust and the removal of coercion and force from relationships. It's one of the greatest innovations of all time.

Thus like all innovations, we tried to wrap it around our institution called marriage, which predated it and trumped it on a social, personal and emotional level. Marriage identified us. We identified with it. We needed it. More, perhaps, than we felt we needed law or relationships or anything else. That's how important marriage is to us...

The Problem with Marriage

Herein lies the problem.

We are on a road to nowhere letting marriage rule the roost. When it comes to marriage, we are no longer interested in the proper execution of social contract, of rights, or of love. We are interested in the symbology of this most old and primitive social construct. Like its only slightly older sibling sexuality, marriage constructs our identities, rather than the other way around.

If we intend to respect ourselves as humans, and respect our relationships for what they are, marriage needs to go away. True and honest contract law is needed to take its place. For too long, we have placed the importance in a relationship with its adherence to our identification of marriage, rather than in what that relationship meant for us and our goals and happiness. Marriage has always been an imperfect institution, built on faulty logic and dominated by religion and the mistakes of humanity. If we're to have a proper legal framework and a society that honestly operates within the rule of law and under the concept of contract, we need to remove marriage from the picture. It's not helping the cause.

Queers in particular need to understand these lessons. We have spent our lives feeling outside the privelaged class. Marriage means as much to us as it does to anyone else, and yet its social constructs alienate us by their very nature. We crave inclusion as much as we crave human rights in and of themselves.

Social contract should not discriminate. It especially should not discriminate when the protection of familial rights and relationships is what is at stake. Marriage, by its nature, will not bring equality, no matter how universal its application. If social "acceptance" finally gets extended to coupled queers and they start to marry and adopt and parrot the ideal of heterosexual relationships, equality will not have been achieved. There will still be polygamists, bigamists, and polyamourists out there whose relationships are clamouring for protection and recognition. There will still be domestically partnered heterosexuals and roommates of all flavours and persuasions for whom the institution of marriage is far too immaleable and weighted for them to utilize any rights it may promise. They will remain on the outside. They will not participate.

A quick note to the fear-mongers who see recognition of multi-partner, intersex and inter-partner relationships as abominable preambles to a paedophilic and interspecies future: please check your premises. The call for social contract recognition assumes that the participants understand and can logically defend the rights reserved by those contracts. Sycophants and phychos who believe that animals and children have defensible rights outside of their owners or guardians need therapy, not debate.

Religious authorities and the ruling gang of the day will never support marriage equality. If there is any reason for queers and other outsiders to participate in the budding marriage activism we see today (and in which I myself participated a year ago at San Francisco City Hall), it is to help dissolve the institution by tearing down its pretenses of equality or logic or rights. It is an institution which has created the favorable social standing for those given the opportunity for participation, and this power play is as old as marriage. Social contract threatens anyone whose power and influence is derived from force and legal ambiguity. Eliminating the help that marriage as an institution extends to these people and upholding the powers guaranteed by law, order and a free society under contract with its governing bodies are the only tools we need to guide us to a day when limiting the scope of a flawed privelage is no longer an issue.