On the Meaninglessness of Marriage

This could equally well be titled Late-night Ramblings of a Disenchanted Young Adult but isn't, mostly because the title I selected is more to the point.

Marriage is not something I have written about extensively before, particularly not here.  This is mostly due to the fact that in the past three or so years, since I've been writing here, my thoughts on the subject have never been rigid enough to put into words.  But they've finally solidified.  Or perhaps it simply seems that way because it's rather late at night.

Marriage means nothing today.  Growing up, it represented in my mind a commitment as permanent as the individuals making it.  It was forever.  It signified selecting someone to spend your life with.  Someone to share the most intimate portions of yourself with.  Someone to grow with.  And it was something that I spent a large portion of my childhood looking forward to.

But something changed.  And I'd love to say that this is a realization that came with age, but it didn't.  It hit me out of the blue today.  And that is that marriage is meaningless.  It doesn't mean anything anymore.  I don't mean that divorce is not frowned upon as much as it once was, and I don't mean that same-sex marriage is infringing on the sanctity of it or anything (for the record, I don't have any problem with same-sex marriage).  I simply mean that who you live with doesn't matter.  A modern-day marriage is an agreement to be roommates with someone.

I think that in this age of technology we have forgotten how to forge intimate connections with those around us.  We are more comfortable with confrontations over the internet.  We text.  We Skype.  We IM.  We hardly ever send full-length emails anymore, not to mention letters.  We don't go for walks or sit down to have conversations.  We are so preoccupied with the people we know on the internet, that we no longer really bother with the people around us.  And that is precisely why marriage doesn't matter.  Because no matter who you choose to live with for the rest of your life, your most important conversations will still take place over the internet.  The things you will look forward to most will all be associated with what someone texted you or put online somewhere.

We are worse at communicating with those in close proximity because we feel no need to use the internet to communicate with them, but we are so fucking absorbed in the world of our electronic devices that we forget to interact with them in meaningful ways.  So the most meaningful relationship isn't going to be a marriage.  It's going to be a long-distance friendship, possibly with someone you have never met.  We are all busy falling in love with the things that people on the internet say, whether we know them or not.

And as we become more and more absorbed in our technologies, as we have internet everywhere and the capability to text wherever and whenever we want, we are going to forget about the people around us unless they follow us into these online worlds we are creating.  Spending your life with someone will mean living in the same house, possibly having children.  No more, no less.  At this rate, it will never be a meaningful relationship, because we are too busy burying ourselves in the internet to notice anything going on in the real world.  And maybe I'm the only one who sees it this way, but I don't like it.  At all.