There are one and a thousand reasons why people marry. Love and commitment, the foundation of marriage, may not necessarily be one of them.
Britney Spears, in one drunken moment in Las Vegas, tied the knot with a hubby, and the following day, she sought to annul it. There have been many marriages of this sort, when couples, euphoric for an instant, decide to marry, only to realize days after, that there was no love at all. They separate as quickly as they got married, err lust subsides.
Mail order brides? Even before the internet, there have been many unions via the mail. The usual plot is repeated several times over: a lass from a poor country has a pen pal from the rich country. The pen pal is old but has enough money to bail out the lass from the cycle of poverty.
The internet now has only made things a lot easier and faster. Desperate, a lass goes to the an internet café, surfs the net for an online lover, and bingo, if the terms of endearment are okay, another couple ties the knot.
Whether it is through the mail or the internet, you find the same actors and the same script, but the plot now is like that in the movie The Matrix, fast, swift, and surreal. After a series of chat, the man flies over and dresses up the lass, and a wedding before a judge or a mayor is had.
What have become of marriages? Recall the courtship before the cell phones and the internet. Then, the courtship was up close and personal, The suitor goes to the house of the lady, professes his love, and promises to cup the stars and the moons in his hands, and basically offer, his life for the lass, and he does this, before the eyes of the parents. The courtship takes longer, and the man has to pass though many gauntlets, and only those who truly love wins the heart.
Tragically however, poverty has pushed so many lasses to marry not out of love but of a necessity to survive, to break the cycle of poverty. Marriage has a price tag.
As one goes higher in the social strata, the price tags are not packaged in mails or chats, but the same, there is hidden the economic factor. On the average, marriages take place between couple who are capable of economically supporting each other. There is one joke here that says, “teacher, teacher, and doctor, doctor”. Meaning, couples of similar stature should marry each other. Can you imagine a lowly laborer in a wharf marrying the daughter of the president of a country? That was unthinkable, then and now.
But there are marriages that are based truly on love, not necessarily of commitment yet. Commitment you see, does not grow from nowhere; the seed of love during the marriage rite must be planted, nurtured, and grown in the course of the relationship, and until love finally ripen into commitment.
“Till death do as part”, so the couple profess. But life is changing so do passion, lust, and love. You cannot pass through thru the same river twice: the water you step on is in constant flux. As you go through life, you realize that the way you see your beloved at the time of matrimony is not the same as you look at her now, and in the future, and that too is certain. Even the love of eros later on disappears and you begin to wonder what happened in between.
A marriage built on the sandcastles of money, passion, lust, and even love, is doomed to fail. There is the legal provision in the Philippine laws that states: “Marriage is not a contract. It is an institution.” Money, passion, the burning love may later on dim, but for the institution to survive, it must be founded on commitment, the will to perpetuate the union even if all expectations have failed. Even as the couple change, the willing heart and mind commit to something greater than themselves. Passion, erotic love may go, but the will to commit, to take the vow “till death do as part” till the grave, remains.
But alas, should there be a reason for marriage, and love, and commitment? Is it not marrying for a reason reveals the selfishness of it all? Why don’t we just proclaim “till death do as part” out of the abundance of our heart?
Tags: marriage, mailorderbrides, commitment | Edit Tags
Posted by tmpjr70 
