Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Sara Butler has interesting thoughts on trying to change the meaning of marriage:

"Okay, as refreshing as that is, I'm not sure it's entirely right. Sure, there are a lot of things about marriage that can be good for you, being allowed to "drop pretense and seductions, expose your weaknesses, be yourself," whatever. But fundamentally, I think marriage is about submitting yourself to something larger than yourself, something to which you will remain committed even when it doesn't seem to do anything for you, just because it's the right thing to do. Oh well, I suppose it's a better strategy to tell people that they should stay with their husband or wife because they'll benefit from it than they should stay with their husband or wife because they promised to on their wedding day (of course, with the proliferation of "for as long as love lasts" vows, they may not even have done that).

But these are the two different possible approaches to strengthening marriage present in this article. One is that you leave people's already existing values and ethical frameworks in place and you just try to change the location in which they act out those values. So, for example, it's not wrong of you to expect to get something from marriage, you're just expecting the wrong things - a soulmate rather than someone to whom you can "expose your weaknesses" or emotional fulfillment rather than economic benefit or whatever. The other is to try to change the way people think about marriage, so that they think of it as union to which they submit rather than a temporary and conditional partnership which they contract into for the purpose of getting certain things out of it. You can guess which strategy I prefer. But of course, I also tend to think that, say, keeping promises is both the good thing to do and good for you, so there's going to be some overlap there."