Aug 31, 2007   | COMMENTS     

I FIND IT ironic that at the same time the gay civil rights movement has marriage at the forefront of our political agenda, in my personal life, I am seeing repeatedly how insufficient the institution of marriage truly is.

Most people I know who are my parents’ age — which puts them in the 60s or 70s now — entered into marriage as a lifelong commitment. Along the way, they encountered roadblocks and barriers to fulfilling that lifelong commitment: infidelity, homosexuality, a desire to live life in a different way, a greater desire for autonomy and independence. All of these things and hundreds more lead to the end of a marriage.

When I was younger, I thought that divorce was a consequence of poor choices as a younger person or a lack of commitment to solving problems as an adult. I thought that divorce was a tragedy and something to be avoided — a plague on marriage. I see things differently now. I know that people divorce, even in their 60s and 70s, for a wide variety of reasons, but all of them are doing it to try and live the best life that they know how.

I CAN’T HELP but think that part of the problem is not divorce itself, but the narrowness with which we construct marriage. The notion that two people live together their entire lives in a primary relationship that is to fulfill their sexual, emotional and spiritual needs is limiting, at best, and bunk, at worst. In short, I’m coming to the conclusion that marriage doesn’t work.

While the sociological evidence may be overwhelming — 50 percent of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce and the number of people marrying in Europe is in steady decline — it has taken personal experience for me to understand that marriage does not work and to begin to articulate an alternative.

The bottom line is that people should be able to live their best lives in relationships that are warm and caring and supportive and loving. For some people those may be lifetime relationships; for others, they may be serial relationships. For all, those relationships will be with many people. Regardless of what church and state recognize, we all craft multiple relationships over a lifetime to fulfill multiple needs.

IF MARRIAGE DOESN’T work, what should we be doing? We should be working to create, make visible and recognize kinship networks as an important and healthy response of all humans to our communal lives. To do that I have five modest proposals.

First, we need to recognize the significance of a variety of kinship relationships in our lives. We aren’t all living in coupled relationships in nuclear families. Most of us construct a kinship network that is beyond blood and beyond the law.

Second, we need to create language that recognizes the variety of roles and relationships that we have in the kinship networks of our lives. Having a common nomenclature will help others to understand the complexity of our intimate lives.

Third, we need to celebrate these relationships in our own communities. Recognition by peers and communal networks is critical for human happiness.
Celebrations of relationships — without the constraints of religion or morality — is a more honest and humane connection that we can share with one another.
Fourth, we need to have government recognize and encourage these kinship networks as essential to having a happy and healthy populace.

And fifth, we must create “real” marriages — a public policy that recognizes how we live in marriages and doesn’t force us into a model that is out-of-date and broken.

 Collectively, these strategies are not a roadmap to ending marriage, but by expanding kinship networks and recognition, I believe we craft a new way of understanding how we organize our familial lives — and a way that will be more realistic and satisfying to all.