wedding

COMPENDIUM OF MARRIAGE

Posted on by vlaw759

Say “They are married” and your listener/reader makes a whole host of assumptions. But are they correct?

Arranged Marriages in Assam
Maison Vie New Orleans

An article at Maison Vie New Orleans cites Psychology Today for a list of 7 types of marriage possibilities.  I’ve supplied definitions not given in the article.

Perhaps the most famous “Starter Marriage” participants
  • Starter Marriage: First marriage, five years or less, no children.
  • Companionship Marriage: Based on companionship, both partners have mutual consent and equality.
  • Parenting Marriage: Non-romantic, spouses come together to raise happy, healthy children.
    • This can also be the case of parents who would otherwise divorce but stay together for the sake of the children.
  • Safety Marriage: Marrying a “safety” partner, such as a long-time friend or old flame.
  • Living Alone Together Marriage: No standard definition found.
    • Each member of a marriage maintaining a separate household, sometimes far apart. (Jezebel)
    • Unmarried people living in communal (or roommate) arrangements, for financial and social benefits. (Psychology Today)
    • Married people who live together but maintain separate financial and social arrangements. (Center for Growth)
    • People who wish to divorce but cannot for social, religious, financial, etc. reasons. (Marriage.com)
  • Open Marriage: Spouses in a dyadic marriage agree that each may have extramarital sexual relationships, which are not considered infidelity.
  • Covenant Marriage: A legally distinct kind of marriage in three states (Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana) requiring pre-marital counseling and accepting more limited grounds for later seeking a divorce.
Psychology Today

On the other hand, an article on Marriage.com lists 25 types of marriages, including the following. In addition to those listed above, the author provides the following variations. This list includes both “legal” and emotional/motivational aspects.

“The Arranged Marriage” by Vasili Vladimirovitz Pukirev
  • Love Marriage: The ideal of romance movies and wedding magazines, though love is not necessary to marriage, as delineated throughout this blog.
  • Civil and Religious Marriage: when the marriage is recognized by the state, or the recognition is received from a religious body, such as the church, respectively.
  • Interfaith Marriage: When people from two different religions decide to get married, it is called an interfaith marriage.
  • Common-Law Marriage: when two people have declare they are married and live together but do not have a certificate of registry.
    • Cohabitation is not sufficient to be a common-law marriage but it is usually necessary.
    • The laws regarding common-law marriages vary not only from country to country but also between states in the US.
  • Monogamous Marriage: When the married couple “forsakes all others” and doesn’t get emotionally or sexually involved with anyone else outside the marriage.
  • Polyamorous Marriage: When the marriage involves more than two people
    • Polygyny, when a man has more than one wife
    • Polyandry, when a woman has more than one husband.
  • Group Marriage: one or more men are married to one or more women.
    • Differs from polygamous or polyandrous marriage primarily in that all members consider themselves in a relationship with all others rather than being “divided” along gender lines.
Morganatic Marriage: King Frederik VII of Denmark and Countess Danner
  • Left-Handed Marriage: (Not a term I was familiar with) when two people from unequal social rankings marry.
    • It’s also called a Morganatic Marriage, most often in reference to inheritance or succession.
  • Secret Marriage: When the marriage is hidden from society, friends, and family.
  • Shotgun Marriage: When a couple decides to get married because of an unplanned pregnancy or threat of pregnancy. Sometimes, they marry to save their reputations or embarrassment to their families.
  • Inter-Racial Marriage: Also called a mixed marriage, when people from different races marry.
  • Same-Sex Marriage: Legal in many parts of the world, though still not as universally socially acceptable as other types of marriage.
  • Arranged Marriage: When the family finds a suitable match for an eligible person, based on factors such as race, religion, caste, and other specific criteria they might have.
  • Convenience Marriage: When two people get married for reasons that bring convenience to their lives, such as financial security or childcare.
Um… Perhaps not this kind of zombie marriage…
  • Zombie Marriage: Both parties are docile and nice to each other in public but behind closed doors, they do not share any sort of a relationship.
  • Safety Marriage: When a marriage occurs because something tangible, mostly materialistic, is decided to be given in return. These terms are decided before marriage.
  • Open Marriage: When two people who are officially married agree that it’s okay to see others outside the marriage.
  • Partnership: Both spouses are equals, probably both work full-time and share household and child-rearing responsibilities equally.
  • Independents: Spouses live separate lives alongside each other; they may spend their free time apart; around the house, they tend to work separately in their areas of interest and on their own timetables.
    • (See “Living Alone Together”)
  • “Traditional” Marriage: One wife who does not work outside the home but takes care of the house and children; one husband who is the breadwinner and has few if any household duties; works only when/as long as both spouses like it that way.
  • Companionship: Both spouses want a life-long friend and their relationship is familiar and loving.
“The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife” by Daniel Maclise
Non-Romantic Reasons for Marriage

And there are still other marriages not covered above.

Polyandri: Draupadi married the five Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharta
  • Advancement: Enhancing social and/or financial standing; the classic/stereotypical case is a man marrying the boss’s daughter.
  • Age: It’s “time” to get married; varies by class and culture and time period.
  • Alcohol: In Reno or Vegas, it might literally be an inebriated service; more likely an inebriated engagement that turns out to be binding.
  • Duty or Obligation: Feeling duty-bound to marry to carry on the family name (more often males) or to provide some sort of support for children or others.
  • Escape: Leaving an unsafe, unpleasant, or otherwise intolerable living situation.
  • Family Pressure: Could be any want or need that the marriage is expected to fulfill.
  • Financial Security: Assuring the basics of food, shelter, health care, etc.
  • Lust: Less common than formerly, marriage as a way to get sex.
  • Politics: Reinforcing a political or financial arrangement by creating a familial tie through marriage.
  • Religious Orders: In the Catholic Church, nuns are referred to as “Brides of Christ.”
  • Social Pressure: “All my friends are married!”

Bottom line: Just something to think about. Marriage is many things to many people, not a single entity.

VERY MARRIED – OR NOT SO MUCH

Posted on by vlaw759

Decades ago, the title of this book first brought that phrase to my awareness. Legally, of course, very married is nonsense—as are a little bit or sort of married. Legally, either you are or you aren’t. Is being married for a long time the equivalent of being very married? Many seem to think so. Marie Hartwell-Walker wrote “How To Beat the Odds: Tips from the Very Married” and featured a single photo of an elderly couple. Her article lists 13 tips from “long-married couples.”

I’ve paraphrased these tips below.

  • Commit to the commitment, and don’t even consider divorce
  • Give it all you’ve got, 100% from both partners
  • Bring a whole person to the marriage, not someone who expects the partner to make him/her whole
  • Make time for each other
  • Be a team (in duties, responsibilities, and decisions)
  • Learn to engage in friendly fighting: stick to the issues, be respectful, no name-calling, etc.
  • Don’t sweat the small stuff
  • Do sweat the small stuff if it’s going to fester and grow big
  • Follow the golden rule
  • Be each other’s greatest fan, especially in public
  • Make yourself appealing
  • Respect each other’s families
  • Make special days special

Becky Whetstone (15 Things the Very Married Have That You Probably Don’t) makes many of the same points. But she also estimates that 12% or fewer of married couples are truly happy. Although neither of these lists specifically mention politics or religion, the Pew Research Center has data indicating that the former is more important than the latter:

  • Among those married since 2010, 39% have a spouse who belongs to a different religious group.
  • However, a 2016 survey found that 77% of both Republicas and Democrats who were married or cohabiting say their partner was in the same party.

Many of these tips, in one form or another, are included in Katherine Willis Pershey’s Very Married: Field Notes on Love and Fidelity. As the title indicates, she highlights another factor often presumed to characterize the very married: sexual fidelity. Many presume—and common sense would tell us—that sexual infidelity will harm a marriage.

Sean Illing’s article “A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together” is an interview with James J. Sexton, author of If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late. Sexton says couples come to his office for “big reasons like infidelity or financial improprieties.” But he also says that people fall in love quickly but fall out of love slowly, so there are lots of little things that precede the big reasons.

At one point, Sexton says Facebook is an infidelity-generating machine.  “It’s a huge factor now, and it’s getting worse every day. I can’t remember the last time I had a case where social media was not either a root cause or implicated in some way.” He says, further, that “…Facebook creates these very plausibly deniable reasons for you to be connecting with people emotionally in ways that are toxic to marriages.” So, he’s affirming that sexual fidelity isn’t the only issue.

Indeed, Jenny Block wrote a whole book praising sexually open marriage. In her opinion, sex isn’t the issue so much as the secrecy and deception that usually accompany a sexual liaison with someone other than the spouse.

That philosophy was shared by a high school friend of mine who, in adulthood, was a sexual free spirit. He was very open with his wife, who gave her permission for him to make booty calls and have f*ck buddies. At one point, she helped him write a personal ad seeking a “girlfriend” and interviewed the candidates with him. They had been married 25 years when he died.

So, sometimes couples set their own rules. Ours is a second marriage both for me and for my husband of many, many years. Before marriage, we agreed to two things: if either of us got sexually or emotionally involved with someone else but it didn’t threaten the marriage, don’t tell; and, if the marriage is threatened, for any reason, we would seek counseling before taking any other action. I realized that I felt very married when I stopped tracking our finances separately, calculating my financial status if the marriage ended.

A different version of very married is presented in COUPLES IN THE EMPTY NEST: VERY SEPARATE MARRIED LIVES (susanorfant.com). The thesis is that empty nesters have three choices: learn how to be a couple again, divorce, or stay married but lead very separate lives in terms of friends, activities, etc.

And speaking of those who are not-so-very-married: Hartwell-Walker (above) reports that 41% of first marriages, 60% of second marriages, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. According to “8 Facts About Love and Marriage in America” (pewresearch.org) although the marriage rate has declined, between 1990 and 2015 the divorce rate among adults ages 50 and older doubled, and among those 65 and older, the divorce rate roughly tripled. Although the Pew report just mentioned found that only 23% of the general population consider legal rights and benefits a very important reason to get married, Sexton (above) emphasizes that marriage is a legal contract, and that few people examine that ahead of time.

I can speak to that. Only after I married in New York State did I learn that my husband had the right of domicile—i.e., determining where we would live. If he wanted to move and I refused, he could divorce me on the grounds of desertion. When I took a job and moved elsewhere, we had a commuter marriage only because he did not divorce me on the grounds of desertion! 

Note to writers: know the rights and responsibilities that are included in the marriage contract, because they vary widely by state.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, life can throw all sorts of obstacles in the way of a lifetime of wedded bliss. If one partner develops Alzheimer’s and forgets the marriage entirely, what is the spouse’s obligation or possible response?

If one partner suffers an accident that makes physical affection impossible, is the spouse entitled to seek affection elsewhere? How can a couple keep their marriage healthy and strong if they are separated through geography, incarceration, military deployment, deportation, or some other element out of their control? After two people have been happily married for decades, is the widow/ widower still committed to the marriage when their spouse dies?

Bottom line for writers: there are many potential elements for being very married, but the one absolute is the commitment to remaining married. Consider all the ways you could show your characters’ strong or weak commitment to a marriage/relationship.