At 12:36 PM -0700 7/5/09, Daniel Baer wrote:
As always following a conversation like yesterday’s around the picnic table, I had many thoughts, reactions, and questions that didn’t make it “to the table.” Art, Bryan, and I commute just about everyday of the school year, and we had a lingering conversation after the schoolyear was finished, so we kept it going by email. Email seemed like a good way to hold a discussion/debate because it allows a person adequate time to formulate questions and arguments, plus everyone can be heard. The problem with table discussions is that whoever is speaking is generally determined by who bubbles up with an idea quickest and pushes it out there the hardest. Maybe our discussion was just a fleeting one and is now lost, but it would be fun to revisit it or another one, with Margaret in on it too.
Part of the conversation was about marriage (or committed monomgamy). Much of it was about marriage as tradition and whether doing something for the sake of tradition is good or bad, with I think the underlying theme (of the unmarried speaker) being we get married because its traditional, ie ‘they’ tell us we should.
I was struck at the high level politics of the conversation, because a big part of my construct of marriage is very low level and personal. I noted in the conversation that tradition is tradition for a reason – it works. It may not work any more and that’s always something we have to think about, I was not advocating blindly follow tradition for its own sake, but before we do throw it out we should think hard about what we are tossing. Among other things, I think what makes marriage so useful in a selfish sense is that it is a path to personal growth, and its a kind of growth that leads to wisdom and fulfilment.
You can achieve significant personal growth in the ‘cauldron’ of marriage through intimacy, through commitment, through living life and facing its daily challenges, small or large, together (or not) There is something that comes of working together that is hard to get alone, and its not necessarily an easy thing to obtain, in fact I’d argue it takes a lot of hard work as does anything worth achieving. Its when you have differences that the growth opportunity is most available. While you can certainly be married and opt out of that (and not committing would be the biggest opt out, no judgement applied here), its pretty hard to have this kind of growth outside a committed relationship. We are social beings after all, and that’s why I think we obtain the most wisdom and maturity through working with each other.
I’d make the same argument about having kids, it provides a whole new set of growth opportunities that is pretty hard to access outside of parenthood.