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On Marriage

When I teach Pride and Prejudice, I always make it a point to talk about marriage. My hope is that, by talking about marriage in a positive, thoughtful way, it helps to inspire students to recognize how much effort it takes--the manifold sacrifices required--to make a marriage work. Many of my students come from broken- or blended families, while others come from the same sort of nuclear home life that I enjoyed. It can sometimes be a little awkward to talk about love and romance and marriage with a bunch of fifteen year olds, but it is always one of the things that I personally enjoy.

See, I'm a fan of the institution, what with it making up a very pleasant and enjoyable last twelve-and-a-half years. That doesn't make me an expert in the concept, necessarily. I'd like to think that I've given Gayle more happy days than sad ones, more reasons to laugh than to cry, but I know that my record isn't perfect. I've tried to be a better husband--one of the primary reasons for learning how to cook was to be able to help Gayle in the kitchen and relieve some of the burden of that chore--but that's an Ithacan destination if ever I've heard of one.

So while I advocate and appreciate marriage--coming from a position of pretty straightforward cis-het monogamy--I realize that courtship and marriage aren't things that everyone, even those from the same background and religion as I, can experience and understand. So we're clear, I'm not talking about marriage equality here. I last wrote about it a couple years ago, and my feelings haven't really changed since then. Instead, I want to say a little about what I stumbled on today. It looks at marriage within the community of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the position of a single member.

Context is Key

If you're LDS, then you can skip this part. If not, here's a quick explanation. In Mormonism, marriage is a specific ordinance (similar to the sacraments of Catholicism, if that helps). It's designed to bring together a man and a woman in more than "holy matrimony", but instead eternal partnership. It's viewed as a permanent fixture, rather than a "till death do us part" concept. Because it's considered a salvific choice, it has a lot of pressure built into it. The ins-and-outs of how Mormonism got to this point is an interesting bit of history, but rather immaterial to the point. The big idea is that marriage isn't just high stakes relationship: It's the be-all, end-all (thanks, Shakespeare, for giving us that phrase!), one of the primary reasons for existence. Its centrality to the "Plan of Happiness" or "Plan of Salvation" (those phrases being rather interchangeable but basically summing up the entire purview of the Mormon eschatology) means that Mormons take marriage very, very seriously.

The Ring's the Thing

As you can tell from the article I linked above, there's a huge amount of cultural expectation for Mormon young adults--preferably that they be returned missionaries--to get find each other and get married. It can sometimes become a little overbearing, as I've heard told.  See, I never had to "put myself out there" on the dating scene. I got engaged to my high school sweetheart (very) soon after returning from my own LDS mission to Florida. We'd known each other since we were juniors, and it made sense--it made us both happy. It still does. There's no regret on either of our parts that we didn't explore more options before settling down. 

That means that I only have the experiences of others that I can run off of, but I think the article's author, Morgan Lewis, is fairly spot on. I dislike her (self-admitted) clickbait of a title, as I think there's a lot of room for misreading what she means. But if you read the article, "Marriage is Not a Blessing", you'll see that she draws some pretty important lines around the issue.

My biggest beef with the hyperfocus of the LDS culture on marriage is summed up in one of her points: "Bottom line: Single people are no less righteous than married people." 

There is a frequent invocation of relationship advice, of Sunday School lessons with marriage and family responsibilities as the focus. And I realize there's a lot to explore there. But one of the problems of becoming too enamored of one particular idea is that the rest gets left behind. There's a reason that I don't teach Shakespeare all year in my history class: There is (hard as it is for me to admit) other, worthwhile stuff to see in the 700 years of history that I cover. 

It feels like the ring's the thing that the youth of the Church are too heavily fed. I know of a number of students who have (from my purview) rushed into a relationship because of this overwhelming expectation that they get wedded as rapidly as possible. I've seen friends struggle with being single, feeling as though they've done something wrong by not yet orbiting their finger with a band of metal. It's as if they as themselves are unworthy of selfhood because they weren't in a situation that would lead them to marriage. 

And that's the thing: We humans are complicated. And there's so much to each individual. I'm a husband, yes, and a father. I'm also a teacher, a writer, and a nascent cook. I'm a retired quidditch player, Bardolator, dinosaur geek, and Milton maniac. Spider-Man and Batman adorn my bookshelf along with Slavoj Zizek and Guy Debord. I'm many things. 

"Yeah, well, what's the thing you're the most?"

That's not even a good question, but the answer is none of them. I'm not mostly a guitar player. The only thing, I guess, that I am is I. This isn't arithmetic; I can't conjure who I am simply by calculating the parts of my soul. There's no sum at the end of a spreadsheet that can denote me truly. This is the big problem with what Peter Coffin calls "identity politics". Though he looks at it from the point of view of capitalism and consumer culture, there's a toxicity that we humans tend toward within that concept in most areas. 

Here, I think it comes from a desire to be a part of a crowd in which behaviors are very sharply prescribed. The identity of a "good" Mormon is too often derived through Mormon Ads and the pedigree of the diploma. Darcy doesn't marry Elizabeth because of one thing--it's the charm and beauty that she has as a whole person. 

I feel like the culture of my religion could do more to encourage people finding themselves rather than finding themselves in someone else. 

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