In this blog post, we will look at whether marriage is still considered a choice of love or a traditional institution that is being neglected as times change.
Marriage is hard work. American actor Chris Rock said.
“Marriage is really hard work. It’s so hard that even Nelson Mandela got divorced. Nelson Mandela got divorced. He was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years. He endured torture and assault on a daily basis for 27 years and forced labor in the South African desert, which was over 40 degrees Celsius. He endured those 27 years of hell and came out of prison, but he divorced his wife after spending six months with her.”
If this sounds like a joke, there is a more serious story. Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Marriage is when a man halves his rights and doubles his obligations.” Abraham Lincoln called marriage “hell,” and Thomas Edison compared his wife to a broken phonograph. It’s similar all over the world. Just look at the married men on TV variety shows, they criticize their wives without hesitation, and married women also criticize their husbands without hesitation.
In fact, the marriage rate is on the decline worldwide. According to Eurostat, the marriage rate in the EU has fallen by 30% in the last 10 years, and the National Center for Health Statistics of the United States announced that the marriage rate in the US has fallen by 17% in the last 10 years. In South Korea, the number of marriages per 1,000 people last year was 6.0, the lowest since statistics were first recorded in 1970. Such dramatic statistics make even boring numbers seem real.
But if marriage was really that hard, shouldn’t people have just not gotten married in the first place? Then why have people become increasingly reluctant to get married? It seems important to look at why people got married in the first place, rather than why they are not getting married.
Marriage is a contract between two people who have lived completely different lives to live together. Of course, there are same-sex marriages, but in this article, I will only discuss marriages between opposite-sex couples. Contracts come with conditions. Both men and women must adjust their respective lifestyles to the other, and someone must earn money to make a living, and someone must take care of the housework. As Schopenhauer said, marriage increases obligations. It is inevitable that friction will arise because we have lived in different environments. On the other hand, as we spend money and time on our families, our individual rights are reduced. Why is the institution of marriage still in place in most cultures?
Love is the most ideal answer we can think of. A loving man and woman become a family through marriage to spend their lives together. However, the history of love marriages is not as long as we think. Even arranged marriages have a much longer history than love marriages. It is not much different today. The scale of the marriage information companies around the world is considerable.
Looking back in history, marriage appeared to resolve paternal uncertainty. The greatest duty of humans is to reproduce the species, and marriage is a socially accepted institution for this. Unlike women, men are less likely to be sure that a child is their own. Having a family through marriage increases the likelihood that the child is one’s own. Also, humans have a long pregnancy period and take a long time to become adults, so they need a stable fence, and families can faithfully fulfill this duty.
However, these benefits of marriage are not as strong in modern society because other methods have been developed to reduce paternal uncertainty. Various contraceptive methods can prevent unwanted pregnancies, control the timing of pregnancy, and confirm paternity through DNA testing. In addition, compared to the past, the social safety net has been expanded, so marriage alone does not serve as a stable fence. Above all, I think that having children to pass on the family line is no longer a necessity.
Modern society values individual freedom and choice. Having children is also an area of personal choice. However, there is a problem here. It is not a truly free choice, but an “involuntary choice” due to external circumstances.
In South Korea, it costs about 275 million won to raise a child to university graduation. This is a huge amount of money, and we are faced with the choice of having children or giving them up. There are many things that can be done with that money instead of having children. When you get married, you need a lot of money in addition to the cost of raising children. The problem becomes more serious when you consider not only the cost of the wedding but also the cost of the house. Marriage and childbirth cost too much money, so a new term, “3-Po Generation,” has emerged, meaning “people who give up on love, marriage, and childbirth.” This has led to the emergence of many single people. While most single people in the past were people who liked to live alone, today’s “involuntary single people” are people who cannot get married because they cannot afford it.
Of course, there is no guarantee that they can lead a single life properly. This is because living alone is different from the typical family structure in which they have lived. Since they do not have a family, there is no one to help them when they are sick or have difficulty moving around, and no one to share their worries with. Living alone is fine when you are young, but it can become a problem when you get old. In addition, the social perception of celibacy is not good. Celibates are often seen as inadequate people who have not married, or accused of not respecting their parents.
A prominent professor says that as the number of people who give up marriage is increasing, this phenomenon is no longer a “giving up” but a “culture.” Unmarried men and women will follow the trend without serious thought about being single, seeing their friends and family members give up on marriage one by one. They will only come to face the problem of not getting married one by one, and by then it may be too late to reverse their decision. There are also few people who have experienced this problem before, making it difficult to seek advice.
The institution of marriage has been maintained by inertia. It is good to reconsider whether marriage is really necessary. Stagnant water is bound to rot. However, I hope that we will not make the mistake of emptying all the water out of fear that it will rot.
