-Essay-
HAMBURG — Many years ago, I found myself sitting next to a young man in the back seat of a limousine. We were on our way to his wedding, and I was there for moral support. To my surprise, he started having serious doubts about the whole thing. He stared tensely out the window, constantly rubbing his thighs. He eventually stammered that he was happy, he wanted this — just… “Just…?” I prompted. “Just one more woman! For the rest of this life, just the one! How does that even work?”
I was floored, though I didn’t mention that his last car ride as a bachelor seemed rather late in the day for this kind of existential clarity. Instead, I heard myself offering him some distorted kind of comfort: That it didn’t have to be that radical. If it really came down to it, I told him, he could still sleep with other women, even after getting married.
That advice might strike some as morally suspect. To be honest, I didn’t think much about it at the time. I just wanted to get the groom to his wedding with a bit of peace of mind. And it seemed, back then, like a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Of course you can have sex outside marriage, secretly or openly, depending on the kind of relationship you have. And sure, you can get divorced if you’re no longer into being married. What I said, while cold and matter-of-fact, felt objectively true.
Today I think: it was objectively wrong. Because once you get married, you really shouldn’t sleep with anyone else. Once you’re married, you can’t just call it off. For me, it’s not even about morality. It’s about the entire, maybe even the only point of marriage: you commit, you stay faithful, for life.
Dubious roots
And as we all know, the arguments in favor of marriage aren’t exactly piling up. You’re putting a huge amount of pressure on yourself, and many (maybe most) people find that pressure hard to manage. (In Germany, the divorce rate has hovered between 33% and 52% for the last two decades.) If you’re looking for solid reasons to marry, at best it’s something for penny pinchers; the German state gives married couples tax breaks. Quite deliberately, it’s designed to promote marriage. After all, why would anyone go through with it, plant this so-called “nucleus of the family”?
People aren’t fools. These days, you don’t need to get married to have sex, live together or raise children. And aside from tax perks, pretty much all the other privileges of marriage have long since faded away.
That’s probably a good thing. The Western concept of marriage, as we know it, has some rather dubious roots in ancient Rome, where it served to legalize the transfer of property, secure inheritance or ensure a line of succession. That seems pretty outdated. Marrying for love, on the other hand, was for a long time the stuff of poetry, novels and fairy tales. It belonged to gods and nobility, not real people.
The romantic marriage still haunts us today, with those absurd tuxedos, the over-the-top puffy dresses, the mute married couples sitting across from each other in restaurants, the nervous sexting in the shadow of so-called adultery: that whole concept comes from the Romantic era. It was dreamed up by people like Rousseau, men who had beautiful ideas about love and soulfulness, but not much evidence to back it up.
Because marriage is the most radical kind of relationship there is.
So, yeah, marriage is dumb, outdated. Why tie yourself down when you could be polyamorous, which is clearly more fun? Or at least skip the whole state-sanctioned forever-promise thing. Why get married?
Because marriage is the most radical kind of relationship there is. I believe that. And sure, I’m not exactly a neutral party here; I’m a husband. But I honestly think it’s one of the most fascinating ways to live, provided you actually take it seriously.
As I said, I think it’s ridiculous, or at least totally misguided, to be married and not live monogamously. And while I don’t look down on people who get divorced (I know some relationships are hell, and escaping them takes real courage), I do raise an eyebrow at folks who get married over and over again. For marriage to be what it’s supposed to be, it has to be forever at best, and at the very least, a one-time thing. You get one shot.
You can’t hide
It’s only with that mindset that marriage starts to make any real sense, beyond money stuff. And with that, it also becomes something rare. There’s no other commitment we make quite this thoroughly. So why would anyone do it?
Well, I can only speak from my own experience. It’s not vast, I’ve been married for nine years. So I’m no sage when it comes to marriage. Who knows if I’ll still be singing this tune in five, 10 or 30 years. But here’s how I see it now: it’s exactly that total commitment that makes marriage feel weirdly freeing. If you’re in it for the long haul, you’d better be kind and careful with your partner. But the truth is, you can’t hide from them forever. They can’t hide from you, either. And you can’t keep hiding from yourself.
Marriage is like psychoanalysis.
Marriage is like psychoanalysis: everything you’ve swept under the rug to keep the peace, all the annoying, sad, awkward, stupid, beautiful, childish stuff you’d usually run from in a looser setup — it all starts coming out. Not necessarily (some couples avoid each other for a lifetime), but ideally. All this can be terrifying, uncanny, a wild ride. But it’s also enlightening. It’s comforting. I don’t think anyone knows me better than my wife — and yet she’s still with me!
At the same time, I’ve never felt like I fully understand her. Not only because she’s got depth and complexity, but also because we’re changing all the time. Life shifts us around, reveals things we hadn’t seen before. Sharing that, seeing it up close, being part of it, I find that incredibly interesting. And yeah, even a little moving.
It’s smart
Nietzsche once said there’s something offensive about being understood. I get that. I think the flip side to the claim that marriage lets you truly know someone is realizing that even a lifetime might not be enough to really understand them.
Incidentally, this is also the eroticism of marriage. Desire, as we know, feeds on distance. Wanting something is about trying to close a gap. So people say marriage is the death of desire. I think that’s nonsense. Sure, in marriage you can’t repeatedly discover and seduce strangers. That kind of excitement, in my experience, doesn’t last long anyway.
If you love music, you know the same melody can be played a thousand ways, over and over, always fresh.
But marriage doesn’t mean the end of seduction: it just means you’re always seducing the same person. For people who need constant novelty, marriage probably isn’t for you. But if you love music, you know the same melody can be played a thousand ways, over and over, always fresh. And what happens when two melodies intertwine? That is no small feat, and it demands a lot of effort.
Men who chase endless partners are often chasing something else, trying to fill a hole, find themselves, beat back their own loneliness. Marriage is also a cure for that, just a different one. Honestly, I think I’d water down my relationship with my wife if I weren’t monogamous. For us, the whole game of desire and intimacy exists in one, single relationship. That makes it more meaningful. More intense. More insightful.
And yeah, given all that, marriage is probably a pretty solid foundation for having children, for a family. But that’s another story entirely. Of course you can live without marriage. Lots of people do. Sure. But I’d still ask: why not just get married? It’s smart; it has enormous tax advantages. And, I think, It feels really good, too.
