SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448
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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like... if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success... I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
About marriage: the whole concept reside in the mutual promise of a "forever after". If that's not your thing, totally fine. But then you wouldn't engage in it in the first place? In that sense, the marriage would indeed have failed (to deliver on its core premise).
Putting aside an afterlife, common wedding vows have "for better, for worse, ... in sickness and in health, until death do us part." So at least for people using those vows, they are committing to stay together until one of them dies. A divorce would mean a failure to follow through with that commitment.
I'm all for ridding our society of marriage and transitioning to civil unions instead. It's a dumb-ass concept to promise to love someone for your entire life when both of you are bound to change a lot, sometimes becoming unrecognizable. The only reason it "worked" in the past is because the primary concern wasn't actually love or happiness but rather performing the duties assigned to genders by patriarchy.
On a more philosophical note, did the marriage really "fail" if the person you promised to love changed so much so as to become a different person in the same body?
The "ship" of Theseus
what you're saying is only true for some religions that don't allow divorce. most do. there's no forever after promise in most cases, just living together and caring for each other.
Then you shouldn't use that phrase in the marriage vows, that's the issue. If you don't promise the forever, you are not failing the promise
it's not a requirement in vows; I'd be surprised if most people did it. your perception is colored by TV and movies which generally uses Catholic traditions because it's more suitable for visual representation.
I grew up in a Swedish pentecostal church so my experience in vows are more coloured by experience from that denomination rather than catholic tv
fair but still there's a lot of religions and countries out there. where i live people usually just promise to take each other as spouses.
I've watched people who got married in high school go through divorce in their twenties and thirties and forties. It's more than religion. You come out of the situation angry and insecure. You plunge into a dating pool that's anxiety ridden and full of other jaded people. You carry your own insecurities with you. Often, the divorce is necessary, but it's rarely fun.
Feeling as though you have someone who wants to be near you and care for you, then waking up to discover that person is gone is extremely difficult.
There's no forever. Everything ends. But the end of a relationship means assuming a great deal of emotional and financial and physical baggage. A home built for two people is radically changed when one is gone.
It isn't something to trivialize or make light of.
To clarify: I meant this purely at an interpersonal level, i.e. if you enter a marriage, you should at least honestly intend it to endure.
Plenty of people get married and don't believe in an afterlife.