Marriage

[Cameron]

Yes..I said I was going to take a break for awhile but I feel this issue is important. Marriage. I have heard both sides of the argument lately the first that marriage is crap and destroys a man's freedom and makes life suck. The other that marriage is great..having kids etc..but is obviously work.

 

I have never been married and am not 100% on where I am with this issue right now but I think for a marriage to work long term it probably has to go something like this..

 

Joseph Campbell talks about marriage in The Power of Myth -

please pardon the cut and paste:

 

 

Moyers: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning.

 

Campbell: Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's the meaning of a flower? There's a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called "the one thus come." There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. That's it. And your own meaning is that you're there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.

 

Moyers: How do you get that experience?

 

Campbell: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It's the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It's different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It's another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we'll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that's what marriage is.

 

Moyers: The right person? How does one choose the right person?

 

Campbell: Your heart tells you. It ought to.

 

Moyers: your inner being.

 

Campbell: That's the mystery.

 

Moyers: You recognize your other self.

 

Campbell: Well, I don't know, but there's a flash that comes, and something in you knows that this is the one.

 

Moyers: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male or female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society?

 

Campbell: Because it's not regarded as a marriage. I would say that if the marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true -- the two really are one.

 

Moyers: One not only biologically but spiritually.

 

Campbell: Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction which may lead you to the wrong identification.

 

Moyers: Then the necessary function of marriage, perpetuating ourselves in children, is not the primary one.

 

Campbell: No, that's really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I've been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship with each other. Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting -- that's the

relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that's what you have become when you have married. You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's and ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

 

Moyers: So marriage is utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one's own thing.

 

Campbell: It's not simply one's own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one's own thing. but the one isn't just you, it's the two together as one. And that's a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave. Daddy will fall in love with some little nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with and empty house and

heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way.

 

Moyers: That's because we don't understand the two levels of marriage.

 

Campbell: You don't make a commitment.

 

Moyers: We presume to -- we make a commitment for better or for worse.

 

Campbell: That's the remnant of a ritual.

 

Moyers: And the ritual has lost its force. The ritual that once conveyed and inner reality is now merely form. And that's true in the rituals of society and in the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

 

Campbell: How many people before marriage receive spiritual instruction as to what the marriage means? You can stand up in front of a judge and in ten minutes get married. The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued.

 

Moyers: You're saying that marriage is not just a social arrangement, it's a spiritual exercise.

 

Campbell: It's primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

 

Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?

 

Campbell: What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

[sunshine]

Excuse me asking. Were you asking for something or...?

 

The problem with marriage is EXACTLY HOW TO HAVE found the proper partner first.

 

"your heart is meant to tell you"...

 

yeah. look just how many people believe that their heart has told them... and in the end...

 

the heart can probably tell you only if it is clean and if it is clean it probably won't even search for anything outside any longer...

 

I think the thing with marriage is that either both have the same aims, or one feels the aim of the other to be soooooo important that it becomes his/her own aim to help him fulfill it.

 

you can not base a marriage on emotion. It won't last. Emotions pass. They flare, they die.

 

How to decide if someone is right for you to marry:

 

well. Marriage has to be based on friendship. Marriage is meant to be partnership.

 

But why marry? It is only a social acitivity. People marry because they believe it has any real meaning. But: there is no meaning at all.

 

Why not have a proper working partnership without marriage???

 

As soon as people marry they have usually not only achieved what they originally wanted: "catching the partner only for themselves", but they have pretty much build there marriage'S grave as well, because they have now exchanged freedom for the feeling of sitting behind swedish curtains (prison, you know)...

 

Will I ever marry? I don't know. Have to find the proper partner who I simply like staying with because of her personality and first find out how we manage to work together... marriage might be an option but basically I do not see a need for it except social expectance...

 

ranted enough

 

Harry

[Cameron]

Well, that's the thing most guys fall into the marriage is garbage, why marry category or the marriage is great I love my kids and life category.

 

You sound like your more on the marriage is crap category.

 

That's fine I have heard alot of valid opnions about that. I have also heard alot of good, valid opnions about why marriage can be good.

 

I guess I would just like to here everyones feelings on this. except RJ because we already know he is his wifes pimp and I in no way shape or form support that kind of unhealthy realationship..

[sunshine]

Well, that's the thing most guys fall into the marriage is garbage, why marry category or the marriage is great I love my kids and life category.

 

You sound like your more on the marriage is crap category.

 

That's fine I have heard alot of valid opnions about that. I have also heard alot of good, valid opnions about why marriage can be good.

5119[/snapback]

 

 

No. I don't specifically say marriage is crap. I just wonder what marriage is necessary for? What excatly makes people believe that marriage is more than the working partnership they had before? What more is marriage than following some social rules of what we socially were trained to believe is right?

 

I'd be interested what people told you about why marriage can be good... no. Not right. Sure marriage can be good, but I would like to hear one statement that might be able to convince me why marriage is higher than what one has before one gets married. Is there anything that anybody feels that could convince me why I SHOULD get married one day, except probably to save on taxes (as one can in Germany)???

 

Harry

[Cameron]

Well, I meet alot of older people and it seems nice to grow older with someone you love. It makes planning things easy and you doe verything together. Alot of people really do well together in a marriage..BUT..as one comedian says you love your woman so much and you never want to be apart from her so the logical think is get the Government involved in the realationship so that in case things go sour you have to divide all your assets. A legally binding document is clearly the next stage of love

 

then..there is the anti marriage stuff like this http://nomarriage.com/

[sunshine]

http://nomarriage.com/

5123[/snapback]

 

Thankx very much for the url... !!!

[BobD]

I come from a background of broken marriages. My parents split when I was 11, and I stayed with my father. My mother remarried many years later, and that too ended in divorce. There are some marriage difficulties within my siblings (trying not to be too specific here!).

 

I am in a long term relationship, but have no plans to marry my partner (nor does she have plans to marry me, thank God). I can't see the need to get married in our case. My mother's last relationship, the one after her second divorce, was her deepest and most loving, and that was completely outside of the context of marriage. She and her then fella lived apart (as do I and my partner now), and never felt the need to get married.

 

I think that marriage just adds too much expectation. I have heard of many cases of friends or friends of friends who split up when going through the organisation stage of getting married, who would (probably) have stayed together if they hadn't gone down that road. Now you could say that that just means that they were never suited, and it took marriage to show that, but it also could be that the unrealistic pressures and expectations of marriage blew it apart.

 

Marriage makes the statement that you are together for life, that you are dedicated to each other etc but does so in a way that seems imposed (to me). You can still feel these things without marriage, without the pressure it creates. I think that it creates an ideal relationship, a perfect pairing, that your actual relationship then gets compared (usually infavourably) with, and that creates the tension that causes problems.

 

I think marriage works for some people obviously, but much less in this day and age than before. Society has changed so that long term partner means (almost) as much as wife or husband, so I (personally) think that it is not for me, and should be considered more in earnest and realistically (and not idealistically) before getting married than it often seems to be (by those people that I know)

 

(But then I do know lots of very happily married people of my own age, and older and younger. So this is of course just about my own feelings of marriage in my own case and not a general rant against the institution of marriage!)

[TwoTrees]

Not in my lifetime(s).

[farooq]

Hi Sheiky,

 

"The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued."

 

My grandparents were married for over 65 years

 

my parents 47 years

 

my wife and i 16 years - and still counting

 

culture probably has a lot to do with it.

 

Good role models as well.

 

above all else - Love

 

hope you find your way

[RON JEREMY]

THERE BE 3 TYPES O MARIEGE, VIZ.,

1) LOVE MARIEGE

2)CUM-VENIENCE MARIEGE

3)ALCHEMMICAL MARIEGE

 

THESE LAST DAYS O DA KALI-YUGA MOST PEOPLE KNOW ONLY #2

 

BASICALLY, # 1 BE HOPELESS N TRAGIC SINCE IT ALL GONNA END.

# 2 BE LOWLY N FILTHY

# 3 BE DIVIDED INTO 2 PHASES, VIZ.,

i) TO BECOME ONE FROM TWO

ii) TO BECOME ONE IMMORTAL FROM ONE MORTAL

 

BUT BECAUSE O DA DEGENNERATED SPIRRITUAL CUM-DITIONS NOW-A-DAYS # 3 MARIEGE BE ALMOST UNHEARD OF.

 

IT BE DA FUSION O TWO (2) EGOS INTO ONE (1) EGO N THERREEAFTER DA CULTIVATION O IMMORTALITY O DA SINGLE FUSED EGO, SO IT BE MORE CUM-PLICATED THAT DA CULTIVATION O IMMORTALITY BY A SINGLE PERSON.

 

BUT STIL,IT BE A POSIBLE WAY.

 

BYE NOW

 

 

 

RJ

PS: BTW, FUK DA MODDERATOR WHOS BEEN DELLETIN ALL O MINE COOL EROTIC LINKS, MAY DA THOUGHT POLICE FROM HELL IN DA CUMMIN AMERICAN DICTETOR-SHIP BE LIKE-WISE DELLETIN YA L WHILE LEAVIM ME IN PEACE MUTHAFUKA!!!