Worst Reasons to Marry
People marry for many reasons. The worst reason to marry is because you are in love. Love is a feeling and feelings can change. If the only reason you're getting married is because you love him or her, don't do it. Love cannot be legalized, and marriage is not a guarantee that love will last.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, Marriages and Divorce Data for 2005, there were 2,230,000 marriages in the United States. The marriage rate was 7.5%, and the divorce rate was 3.6%. That means almost 50% of marriages in 2005 ended in divorce. I theorize that the marriages that ended in divorce were probably based primarily on feelings.
Men marry for practical reasons like companionship, someone to grow old with and take care of them in their old age, or the tax benefits afforded married people. They don't go into marriage wanting to surrender their independence. The love he feels for his spouse reflects his respect and trust for her. For him, love is the proverbial icing on the cake, but it's not the whole cake.
When my 60-year-old Aunt Ola passed away in 1981, she had been married for over thirty years. My uncle remarried about six months later, but not because he "loved" his new bride. It was a means to an end. He needed someone to continue to take care of him as my aunt had done for all those years. That was also true of the woman he married. Her husband had passed just a year earlier and she needed someone to share the rest of her life with, too. She was from that generation of women that married to be taken care of as their father had taken care of them.
Modern women marry for love. They have careers and can buy their own house, brand new car, and pay their own bills. They don't need a man to take care of those things for them. They marry for love or they don't jump the broom, which is the worst reason to get married. They view marriage as a status symbol. They start out wanting to be one with their spouse and end up stressing and whining about losing their independence.
Their reason for marrying is more of a fantasy than the reality of what it takes to wake up every morning with the same person breathing in your face for the rest of your life. Then when he grows comfortable in the marriage and doesn't feel that he needs to say those three magical words every single day, she begins to doubt the solvency of the marriage. When this happens, she is becoming aware that feelings can change from exuberant and exciting to comfortable and complacent. Because she married for love, therefore; she constantly needs reassurance that the love is still real. She fails to take into account the inner qualities of her spouse and what he does for her. Love is a verb. It's not what you say, but what you do.
My assertion that love is the worst reason to get married is supported by couples who have been together for many, many years. When asked what keeps them together, they say something like communication, we're best friends, respect and trust, having a sense of humor. The fact that he loves her is like an after thought. The man usually express it this way, "And, of course, I love her."
Love alone is not enough to persevere a marriage. The super glue that keeps couples together is the quality of their character and personality. Love is not a quality of a person. It is "the basic, real, and invariable nature" of your being.
In the 1987 romantic comedy film "Moonstruck", 42-year old Johnny Cammareri (played by Danny Aiello) proposes to 37 year-old Loretta Castorini, the main protagonist (played by Cher). He wants to take care of her. Loretta's father, Cosmo (played by Vincent Gardenia) opposes the marriage because he believes she's jinked when it comes to marriage. But her mother Rose (played by Olympia Dukakis) doesn't care one way or the other, but asks her daughter this question:
Rose: "Do you love him?"Loretta: "No."Rose: "Good. 'Cause when you love 'em, they drive you crazy, because they know they can. But you like him?"Loretta: "Oh yeah. He's a sweet man, mama."
But, when Lorretta and Johnny's younger brother, Ronny (played by Nicolas Cage) falls head over heels in love, she breaks off her engagment to Johnny and accepts Ronny's proposal to marry him. Rose asks Lorretta the same question as before.
Rose: "Do you love him, Loretta?"Loretta: "Ma, I love him awful."Rose: "Oh, God, that's too bad."
