What Does Marriage Mean to You?

Within marr iage, there is often a struggle between intima cy and separateness. You want to be close to your spouse, yet maintain your own individuality or separateness. There are times you want to be alone and times you want to feel totally connected. One of the ways you may overcome separateness is joining with another person through mar riage. When you do use marri age to overcome that separateness, you hope never to be alone again. Marr iage in such a case becomes insu rance against being alone. A growing concern with this mindset is that it sets the stage for serial marriages to occur. In serial marriages, you may be in and out of a series of marriages. When one fails, you find another person to take the place of the missing person in your life. You may consider marr iage as merely a matter of living with another person, or having a roommate with special privileges, with has no other deeper or special meaning. Marriag e in such cases becomes a box you check on their tax returns and describes your present living arrangement. Another variation on this is when marr iage describes the main person you are sleeping with. It does not mean that you are bound to them or that they have special claims on you. It means that you have a legal backstop so that you always have one person to keep your bed warm, even though you avoid any claim of exclusivity, which is often termed as an 'open mar riage'. You may be one of those for whom marr iage serves a deeper purpose. For your marri age is having a special deep relationship with another person. It is about having a special sense of connectedness and union. This is more than just overcoming your separateness. You want and desire having a special closeness with someone else. You believe marria ge is joining two people as one on many levels at once. With all the misunderstandings about marr iage, many couples miss this deeper purpose of developing inti macy, and instead think that the mar riage itself is the whole purpose of the institution. They go through the ceremony for societies' approval, to give their children two parents and for special tax status. When they make mar riage the whole end purpose of going through the ceremony, this misunderstanding leads to many people re-evaluating marr iage in terms of its importance. Rather than marriage being a special event, it becomes nothing more that another business deal. A factor contributing to this situation is the movement away from the church sanctioning of marr iage to the legal sanctioning of marri age. In previous ages, there were no marri age licenses. Marr iage was not considered as being under God rather than the authority of government. Government’s role in marr iage was limited; therefore, no license was needed. The government had no said so in who was married. It was the church who decided whether or not a couple married. With marri age in the church, the specialness of the ritual and ceremony was upheld.