Editor's Blog Mar 21st 2012
UNHOLY MATRIMONY
Is marriage dead? Apart from a few success’s (or are they failures too), marriages are just not what they used to be. Or are they?
Divorce has always been as popular as marriage, in ancient times you could get out of a Roman marriage by uttering these simple words in latin, “Tuas res tibi habeto” (Keep what’s yours for yourself).
In China only the husband had the right to end his marriage for the following reasons, lacking piety when serving his parents, childlessness, adultery, jealousy (over concubines and or prostitutes), sickness, health and gossip. (I like the Chinese)
In Tudor England, you could either just change the whole country’s religious inclinations or have your wife’s head chopped off for having bad body odour. Take the case of poor Catherine Howard who was caught fooling around by Henry VIII and also suffered the chopping block. It would certainly save you an arm and a leg in legal costs.
Marriage is a serious proposition, by entering it, you are basing the union on many assumptions, the first one would be that you will be together until death do you part. You are also assuming that the man or woman that you are marrying will not make any of the faux pas that in days gone by would have made you shorter by a head.
I am a romantic at heart and find the idea of undying never-ending love for another very attractive, but foolish. As a species we are probably not equipped to start making promises we cannot keep. Why can’t we keep these promises? The simple answer is that we humans are at base level animals, and like animals, we are on the constant search for new partners to mate with. (64% of marriages end due to adultery).
We are also fickle creatures controlled by emotions and desires that we almost always act upon. When living in close proximity with someone else you tend to see them for who they really are and sometimes this will endear you to them even more, but it can also have the opposite effect, where even the slightest character flaw can be so hideous that you can no longer bear looking at that person.
But all is not doom and gloom, my grand parents where married until my grandfather popped his clogs, almost fifty five years after they tied the knot and my grandmother swears he was the only man she loved. Even though I witnessed some epic disagreements.
If you do enter the sanctity of marriage, do so with caution. As in the past, any union between a man and a woman will only last if you both work at it.
Ed.
