Contributors

Friday, March 23, 2018

Ambush Proposals, Romance, Love and Marriage

The other week my wife and I were watching the second season of Jessica Jones. At one point a man ambushes a woman with a marriage proposal in front of all her friends and family. She of course has to say yes, but her reaction speaks volumes: she's only doing so under duress.

Wow, I thought to myself, that was really cruel and selfish. Do men really do that?

It seems so. Today I saw an article in the Atlantic entitled "Marriage Proposals Are Stupid:"
The marriage proposal is one of the most ritualized moments in modern American life. Growing up, many girls are instilled with a specific idea of how it should go: He’ll take us somewhere romantic—we’ll have no idea what’s happening—he’ll get down on one knee—we’ll start crying—he’ll pop the question—we’ll immediately say yes. It should be magical.

But for a lot of heterosexual couples, the proposal—as movies portray it, as many millennial women have internalized it—doesn’t reflect the kind of modern, egalitarian relationships many women want today. Whom to marry is among the most important decisions most people will ever make in their lives, and yet it’s not a choice made in the course of a conversation—the normal way two grown humans make big life decisions. Instead, it has to be a show, with a prefixed grand finale: “yes.”
But the marriage fantasy doesn't end there. Recently, the gimmick is extravagant "destination weddings." Two recent ones I'm personally familiar with were on Caribbean or Mexican beaches, where all the attendees had to pay for an expensive weekend trip, one to an island that turned out to be in the path of a hurricane.

Last year the average cost of a wedding was over $35,000. That's almost nine months of the average American's salary.

The Atlantic writer concludes that the whole idea of a fantasy marriage proposal is totally stupid, and that marriage should be a joint decision, carefully discussed and considered. I couldn't agree more.

My wife and I have been married 38 years. We went to college together (she studied electrical engineering, I studied computer science and Russian), and in our junior year we decided to get married. Neither of us can recall any proposal. Over time we just decided that we wanted to get married. I can remember the day we talked to the priest to arrange the wedding, but that's about it.

I was living in an apartment with a friend at the time and I didn't have any extra money. My wife and I went to the jewelry store together to pick out the rings she wanted and we (mostly she) spent a couple hundred bucks on a modest engagement ring and wedding bands.

After graduation, her parents footed the bill for a modest church wedding and reception with family and friends (as the eldest son and daughter, we were the first children in our families to marry). Our honeymoon consisted of a weekend trip to small hotel on Lake Superior, paid for out of the savings from our library and programming jobs. We moved into a modest apartment, got jobs in our respective fields, and within a year bought a small starter home in a Twin Cities suburb.

When people talk about marriage, they always throw around the dreaded statistic: 50% of all marriages end in divorce. If this is true, does it really make sense to spend all that money on an engagement ring, a fancy wedding and a honeymoon? Does spending all that money improve the chances of a lasting marriage? Or does it have the opposite effect?

Before we go too far, let's acknowledge that the dreaded statistic is a lie: 50% of all marriages may end in divorce, but because those include second, third and fourth marriages, it doesn't really tell the whole story.

Despite what popular culture likes to say, the divorce rate is actually going down:
About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist.
This is borne out in my wife's and my immediate families. Among the 13 marriages (12 kids, two sets of parents and one stepmother) five ended in divorce and two ended in death and the rest are still intact. Three of the divorces involved the same sister. Out of the 17 people in our families only three are divorced (17%), even though we have a "divorce rate" of 38%.

There are many reasons why divorce is declining: people are waiting longer before getting married, birth control is better (resulting in fewer shotgun weddings), prior cohabitation, more people are marrying out love rather than economic necessity (women are more independent), the birth rate has declined (kids cause a lot of stress in marriage), and men taking on more domestic duties. In addition, the marriage rate is down among groups that tend to get divorced -- in particular, people without college degrees.

The real problem with these fantastical marriage proposals and destination weddings is that they confuse romance and love. Romance is a combination of physical attraction and play-acting: it is a fleeting and ephemeral thing that cannot last because people cannot keep up the charade their entire lives.

Life is driving to work, vacuuming the floor, doing the dishes, making breakfast, lunch and dinner, raising kids, not getting enough sleep, paying the rent, and finally, when you find the time, and aren't sick with a cold or having a period, making love.

When the romance ends -- and it always ends -- there has to be enough love to keep people together through the humdrum details of daily life. And the most important part of that love has to be the desire for your spouse to be happy in everyday life.

Extravagant proposals and weddings set the wrong expectation for the realities of life: if you think dropping a major chunk of change on a fancy wedding ring proves your man loves you, do not get married!

An extravagant proposal, a pricey ring, an expensive wedding and honeymoon set the stage for economic disaster by putting the newlyweds in debt immediately. And when the reality of work, and kids and having too little free time destroys the romantic fantasy, if you are wedded to the romance -- and not your spouse -- the disappointment will crush you and the marriage.

Life after marriage is the same as life before marriage, only you're not alone any more.

If that isn't enough romance for you, you should watch reruns of The Bachelor instead of getting married. And as we just saw, The Bachelor brand of romance really sucks.

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