Which IDEAL is really BETTER?

[charliekeenjr]

I want to marry the person I fall in-love with.
I want to fall in-love with the person I marry.

It seems that the second ideal leads to a lower divorce rate... it's something we're discussing in my SOCIAL RESEARCH class...

Comments

[pathwriter]

Marriage is a legal partnership with a heavy cultural bias to its permanency. Humans, however, don't mate for life, unlike eagles. Therefore, it's a phenomenon at odds with human biology.

If divorce were a possibility that people walked into marriage with, a theoretical result that need not entail the sort of bitterness and hatred that wells up currently as a result of the myth of permanency, the former ideal would be better. Since we're told that marriage is supposed to be for life, however, people choose to stay married to people they cannot tolerate and it eventually leads to ugliness, thus the reason why the latter ideal appears better on a sociological scale.

In other words, if you want to fix marriage, fix divorce. Love shouldn't enter into the legal equation either way, though it's often the impetus for actually getting married.

[strickly_biz]

real marriage is impossible without love, IMHO