Should marriage be abolished (or just reformed)?

I've been reading a lot of books about family and marriage law and custom lately, as the gay marriage debates have whetted my appetite to think about such things. And always lurking in the back of feminist/queer critiques of marriage is the ultimate question: Should marriage be abolished?

Not that there is any chance of marriage being abolished soon or anything like that, but when crafting a critique of an institution, it doesn't do well to assume that the institution is necessary. One should always be open to arguments that the mere existence of the institution is the problem. I have thought long and hard about the validity of the very existence of some institutions and if I think they should exist. Church? It should just go away, but I certainly wouldn't make laws against it and I'm open to understanding that it has its benefits. Government? Well, we need it, but top-down hierarchies are an abomination. Democracy is the ideal that we should strive for. Schools? We absolutely need them, but their methods should be scrutinized. You get the picture. But Marriage? I've not spent a whole lot of time considering all the various arguments against its very existence. But here's some I've cobbled together and I'm open to more.

Reasons to Abolish Marriage

*Marriage has historically been defined as a way to transfer ownership of a woman from one man to another. Therefore, the main purpose of marriage is to perpetuate male dominance over women. This is one of the major arguments you will hear from feminists. Believe it or not, this one doesn't really wash with me, for two reasons. One is that even if an institution's entire existence was to perpetuate one social value that has been firmly rejected, it can actually be reformed and have an entirely different reason to exist. Government is a good example; it orginally existed to consolidate the power of the aristocracy. Presumably now it's to enact the will of the people. It's possible that marriage can be reformed, and no longer exist to reinforce male dominance but exist to give people the means to create egalitarian relationships with legal rights and privileges. In fact, the entire reasoning behind legalizing same-sex marriage is that the latter definition is now the standard one.

Nonetheless, we still have an informal system to maintain marriage's place as a tool of male dominance. Weddings still are conducted on the model of bride being passed from father to groom; wives still honor the tradition state of non-existence by taking husbands' names, albeit on on a halfway basis now by retaining their first names. Outside of custom, marriage still makes women subservient to men, if for no other reason than the average man's larger salary makes his wife economically dependent on him on some level. Achieving wage equity would go a long way towards actually making marriages equitable in our society.

*Marriage gives people privileges on an unfair basis. This one is pretty devastating. Married people are the recipients of all sorts of government and business benefits that are unavailable to same-sex partners, straight partners who are unmarried, and single people. While there are some efforts to change this, the laws and standards can be surprisingly backwards. Believe me, I adjust my marital status according to what it's going to get me. I shouldn't have to do that.

The attempts to fix this problem are incredibly inadequate. Same-sex marriage would be a huge leap forward. But even if same-sex marriage were legalized, there would be many people unfairly discriminated against. Unmarried couples (like myself and my boyfriend, in fact) would still suffer from having our families deemed inadequate. Inheritence rights, decision-making rights, things like that can be acquired through some lengthy processes, but it's never complete. For instance, an unmarried couple has some amount of inheritence right, but it's nothing like that what married couples have. I recently watched a friend suffer through having the relatives of her live-in boyfriend swarm like vultures, trying every trick in the book to squeeze any penny she might have they could even slightly attach to him after he died suddenly. This shouldn't happen.

On top of all that, single people are routinely discriminated against for not having primary conjugal relationships. There are all sorts of financial benefits tied to marriage on the weak theory that marriage itself is good for the state. I have yet to see convincing evidence that married people are in and of themselves better citizens than unmarried people.

*Marriage is an arbitrary marker of adulthood. One of the Brothers I had as a professor in college told us that his whole family gathered every Easter at his aunt's house and that she had an Easter egg hunt. The cut-off for joining the hunt was not a certain age, but marital state. And every year she pushed him into it, until finally he threw a fit and told her that she needed to respect that he wasn't married and that he was still an adult. We were all amused at the story. The Catholic Church has solved the problem of how to regard the celibate clergy by equating their vows to God and to the order as the equivalent to the marital vows; it was clear that she should have recognized his adulthood when he took his equivalent vows.

Our society still treats the unmarried (and the childless) as somehow still childish, regardless of the number of years they may have under their belts. It's subtle how it works, but if you make it into your 20's without marrying, then you will start accumulating horror stories about being treated as childish compared to someone younger than you because of your marital status. I went to a bridal shower once where the older, unmarried sister of the bride was treated as a child even though she had her own job and bought her own house, two things her sister had not done. She make a joke about how she had a huge new kitchen and no stuff to put in it after her sister opened a duplicate gift of some kitchen stuff. The old ladies clucked and said that she would get all that stuff when she needed it, when she married.

You can marry before you can drink, enlist, attend college, vote, or get a real job. That marriage is some sort of marker of adulthood is nonsense.

*Marriage is still considered women's primary job in life. Gack, there's not much to say about this. Suffice it to say, the major reasoning behind the huge amounts of money spent on the big fluffy wedding is that it is the primary purpose of a woman's life. If something gives your entire life meaning, what's mere money?

Disagree? If you're a woman, try telling someone that your wedding wasn't the most important day in your life. If marriage were abolished, it would force people out of thinking of women as only wives or potential wives.

*Marriage creates an false moral system. This is a biggie, since this myth has a lot to do with our current political mess. There are still a number of people who think that George W. Bush is a Good Man because he doesn't cheat on his wife, unlike that Evil Man, Bill Clinton. Point out the good old slogan, "When Clinton lied, nobody died," and you will get incomprehension. There is a great deal of investment in the belief that marital fidelity is the highest of moral goods.

Actually, valuing marital fidelity as a moral good isn't all that it's cracked up to be. A little secret: Many of us unmarried but monogamous people out there pity the monogamous married. See, a good number of monogamous married people are faithful to the institution; you don't cheat because it's wrong. Or they may say that they don't want to lose the marriage itself. But us unmarried people, we have to come up with reasons. Like say not cheating because our partners are enough. Or not cheating because we value our partners' feelings and wouldn't want to hurt them. Or fear of losing our partners. Now that cohabitation is becoming more acceptable, it and marriage are beginning to resemble each other and you hear different couples borrow each others' reasons. But the fact of the matter remains--one major reason that couples reject marriage is because they are afraid that you stop being in a relationship with a person and start being in a relationship with an institution.

Still, despite all this I still think marriage should be approached with reform in mind instead of abolishment. Even if you can minimize or erase all these issues, people are likely to still keep coupling off, and most couples are likely to form around a conjugal relationship and/or to raise children. Instead of the weak arguments about how marriage is good for the state, it should be examined in context of civil rights, something that is happening now with the same-sex marriage issues. Since the state serves us, it's fair to demand marriage rights for ourselves. If we can reimagine marriage rights as a right to choose our own home life, I think that we can reform it into something useful.

First of all, marriage should be open to anyone over a certain age. There should be no racial, religious, sexual, or economic discrimination. Second of all, divorce should be easy to obtain. Marriage is not useful to citizens or to the state if getting out of one is taxing on individuals and the court system. Certain economic privileges need to be taken away from marriage completely, but others exist only because of marriage and should stay. For instance, tax filing as one entity, a "married couple" is nonsense. All incentives to get people to marry should be abolished; it's not the state's business one way or another.

The state should reconsider what it determines a "family" to be in terms of inheritence rights. Couples who have blended finances should have the same rights as married couples. In fact, any informal family arrangement should be respected as such. There is nothing uglier than watching a bereaved person fight with the dead loved one's estranged family over a few meager possessions, as I can attest from personal experience. Plus, it's ridiculous that two near-strangers can gain all sorts of legal rights and benefits via $25 and a night in Las Vegas that couples who have lived together and are each other's primary relationships don't have. We will have to rethink our entire family law system, but so what? I think we have enough brainpower to undertake such a project.

Socially, the stigma must be removed from people who are single or divorced or remarried or homosexual. This is already underfoot; domestic partnerships are quickly being elevated in most social circles to the same standing as marriages. Certainly in my liberal community, no one would treat an unmarried straight couple or a same-sex couple as lesser. In fact, I know of many instances where some couple's marital status was revealed and it surprised everyone. I still can think of a few couples I know off the top of my head who's marital status I don't know. My boyfriend and I had a guest we'd known for a year stay with us for two days before he realized that we had never made it "official". He only mentioned it in passing; these things aren't important. The benefit of this is obvious--every person, coupled or not, married or not, is still an individual first.

Marriage then must be devalued. This will actually help married couples, as it will take the pressure of the Institution off them and allow them to enjoy the plain ol' relationship. The first step is to take the wedding ceremony down a few notches. Hey, we all like weddings. But the fact is that we all like parties. There are plenty of great occasions that are losing their luster compared to big fluffy weddings--house-warmings, graduations, whatever. Why have only one HUGE party when your whole life can be a series of celebrations?