Marriage By Love or by Law

Synopsis: Who’s really married; fighting legal love wars; let us remember ill-legalities of the past; not what you have been led to believe; the big comprehensive question; where are we headed; what matters to and for you.

Really Married?

Who’s really married?  Some answer only those who are deeply bonded together with true love.  Others say only those who hold a valid, governmental, marriage license.  Still others argue only those who have been sanctioned as married according to religious law and its authorities. 

Then there are those who reject the religious law viewpoint but hold that the truly married are those spiritually bonded together with divine power.  Of course, there also are those who use a sociological or cultural anthropology checklist to answer the question of who is really married and who is not.  There even are some who hypothesize that, in the future, possible psychoneurological phenomena measured as present or absent in behavior and/or in the brain could be used to analyze who’s really married and who’s not.

Legal Love Wars

Did you know that there are ongoing court battles over who gets to call themselves married and who does not?  Involved in some of those disputes are arguments about whether or not the litigants have marital type love for one another.  Calling yourself married and not having a license is legally punishable fraud, some argue.  Not being ‘in love’ and getting legally married also is considered legally fraudulent by some authorities.  Then there are those who propose that the state ought be legally banned from having anything to do about who is and who is not married, and that the government should be kept out of love relationships in general.  They argue that both love and marriage are private matters about which the government has no good reason or right to regulate or interfere.  Of course divorce lawyers, various political and governmental groups like those involved with family law, and especially immigration authorities tend to vehemently disagree with that position.

Throughout history both secular and religious law has had a lot to say about both love and marriage as well as the often related topic of sex.  Actually it is thought that long ago people got ‘love married’ to one another without any governmental or formal religious involvement at all.  Some think we ought to return to those days.  Others think we are indeed progressing or, depending on your point of view, regressing toward that very thing.

Did you know that how courts come to rule on who is married and who is not may influence how over 1000 federal rules, rights, benefits and crimes are adjudicated in the US alone?  In some other countries the numbers are even higher.  All over the world love and marriage questions are being legally struggled over and new trends are emerging.  In some lands parents who said they no longer loved each other and could not live together were not allowed to legally divorce and their children were awarded to the father, in other lands they were awarded to the mother, in still others to the grandparents, and in some cases to the state.  In the developed world this is giving way to ‘joint custody’ but that arrangement is by no means a universal option.

Can same-sex couples marry or even call themselves married.  The answer varies from country to country, and within some countries from state to state or province to province.  In some jurisdictions certain people are afforded the right to behave married in every way known, except they do not have the right to call themselves legally married.  There is a movement which proposes that all legal, romantic, partner unions be legally termed ‘domestic partners’ and the term ‘marriage’ be totally dropped from legal usage.

Let Us Remember

It is worth remembering that the battle over legalized, interracial marriage is still being fought in some places and that it was illegal in some US states until 1967.  At various times and places (and still to this day in some locales) battles were fought concerning banning people from being married legally if they were disabled, retarded, mentally ill, of different religions, different ethnic groups, different nationalities, too closely related, too old, too poor or in debt, were in slavery or indentured servitude, were in certain occupations, certain classes, certain casts or were already married to too many others (4 being a common limit).  Remember also the French Courts of Love once held that people married to one another could not love each other because marriage was essentially a relationship of unequals, while romantic love necessitated equality.

Not What You’ve Been Led to Believe!

Many people have been misled into believing romantic love and marriage have always been pretty much the same thing they think it to be now.  Factually who is really married is a question with vastly different answers throughout history and across the world’s many cultures.  Giving birth to a child has been a prerequisite for marriage in some places and times.  There were times and places in which commoners could not marry and only the Royals and the rich were allowed to wed.  Women marrying sets of brothers, men required to marry their wife’s sisters if the sisters became available, siblings marrying each other, parents marrying their offspring, some married to various deities, time-limited marriage, being more married by way of having sub-wives and sub-husbands and many stranger (to us) and more different customs all have been part of the world’s ‘who’s married’ picture.

Loving a left-handed person, an orphan, a redhead, a person whose middle finger was shorter than another finger, anyone born with any deformity, along with people who possessed full-length mirrors and full immersion bathtubs were forbidden and condemned because they were obviously under the influence of Satan.  If you married a person who was later discovered to be any of the above, or of a different race, nationality, ethnicity or religion, of a lesser cast or under-class annulments were easily obtained because no true marriage could have existed with such a person.  Slowly in most parts of the modern world love has won out over these restrictions and democratic inclusiveness has pushed autocratic exclusiveness aside in the world of who can love and marry.  Unfortunately in some parts of the world attempting to love or marry the ‘wrong person’ still can get you ‘honor’-killed (even without there being enforced legal or religious sanctions against it).

The Big Question

Do you believe or suspect that true marriage really is best understood to primarily be love-based, psychologically-based, spiritually-based, religiously-based, societally-based, biologically-based or legally-based?  What people come to think about this is perhaps going to determine the future of marriage in the world.  There are people preaching, teaching and proselytizing for each of the above positions.  There are people arguing for each of the above positions, putting forth public policies related to each, proposing and attacking laws related to each, and shaping their own personal lives according to each.  You, or your children, or your grandchildren and the community you live in are likely to be effected by this issue.  The very structure of society may become shaped by how people align themselves according to the answer to this question.

Where Are We Headed?

All over the developed world fewer and fewer people get married, stay married or live in what is called traditional marriage.  Various religious and political groups are fighting to reverse these modern world trends.  It seems they hope to take us back to what they suppose was the way things were a century or more ago.  These regressive and sometimes repressive forces try to deny the great historical tenet that says ‘you can’t go back’ or at least not successfully.  But what will progress look like?

Egalitarian marriage is already replacing male dominant marriage in much of the world.  Will that continue or will people living single dominate the future?  Will a majority of people float in and out of various temporary married-like living arrangements as their life situations ebb and flow?  Will most mothers and fathers have other lovers as they carry on parenting as is so common with current divorce rates being what they are?  How many people will come to live communally or semi-communally as is common in retirement communities?  Could polygamy, polyandry or polyamore lifestyles someday proliferate?  Would we ever adopt having primary, secondary and tertiary spouses copying a people who live in southern India.  What about the Eastern sect that allows for temporary additional spouses?  Might we someday become like a people of southern China who have no form of marriage whatsoever?  Might we eventually have all of the above and more, as yet not invented, forms of doing love-bonded relationships?

What Matters To and For You?

Are you ready for the coming changes whatever they may turn out to be?  Or are you going toward the future of love and marriage blind and unaware?  Are you afraid of the future and want to go back to your childhood understanding of how marriage and love should work?  What will you do if you come to love someone who sees love and marriage very differently than you do?  How will you react if your offspring experiment and explore love and marriage outside the traditional box’?

Currently there seem to be lots of parents getting upset because they are hearing their offspring say

things like, “We are going to live together but not get legally married”.  The core of some family counseling I once supervised was epitomized by the statement “We might marry someday but if we do it won’t be until after we have a child”.  “I’m going to legally marry and live with Xavier so he can stay in this country and finish his degree, but after that I’ll probably move in with Tom”, initiated another set of interesting family sessions for one of my colleagues.  “Mom and Dad, will you attend if Sarah, Lester and I have a wedding ceremony and non-legally marry each other next summer?” was a question that lead to some fairly intense, extended family and parent guidance counseling I am aware of.

Sometimes it’s the parents upsetting their offspring that brings forth the ‘who’s really married’ issues.  Here are a few examples.  “After retirement next month we’re going to start co-habiting but we will not be getting legally married because it would be bad for us financially.  We hope that won’t be a problem for you bringing over the grandchildren, will it?”

Another: “We have started sharing our bed with Rosalind every so often because she lost her spouse a while back and she’s lonely and misses making love, cuddling and hugging too, and, well, it just seems like it’s the kind, loving thing to do.”  Also:  “Its better here at this swanky, old folk’s home than I thought it would be.  The custom here is called roaming.  Every night I can be in someone else’s bed if I want to, and it’s not always about sex but if it is we practice safe-sex.  I think I’m coming to really like and maybe even actually love some of these people here.  Also I need to let you know Larry and I may move in together.  That way we can afford one of the cottages they have for couples, and we’d have more room and it just would be nicer all in all.  We both agreed we will let each other keep roaming, at least some of the time, because truth be told we both like it”.

Another: “Your father and I won’t be babysitting for you as often as we were now that we’re both retired.  Frankly, that’s because our sex life has picked up now that we have more time.  Also our social calendar is looking a lot more full”.  What will you do if your parents, aunts and uncles, or other older family members tell you things like this?  What will your offspring or younger family members do if messages like these are your messages to them?  You see, love and marriage-issue culture shock can go both up and down the age continuum.
Seeing your options provides freedom.  I like to suggest that people see and study their own possible opportunities.

The many points and life style options presented here are not to advocate or disparage any particular choice or custom but rather to put forth the many ways human beings have behaved, are behaving and might behave in regard to love, marriage, bonding, and marital law.  Some get upset when they are faced with new or different options concerning marriage.  Let me suggest the guidance message (see the entry “Dealing with Love Hurt: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”) of ‘feeling upset’ is a warning about vulnerability requiring some study and strengthening.

So, dear reader, how do you think and perhaps even more important emotionally how do you feel as you contemplate these issues?  Do you want governmental law, religious law, scientific law, societal ‘law’ or the natural law of love to provide the dominant answers to the question ‘who’s really married’?  All these different situations and scenarios are put forth as important to think about, not just to accept what you may have been conditioned to believe in regard to marriage by love or by law.

As always, Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Concerning love and marriage, for yourself and those closest to you, which do you think will give you more trouble, being more old-fashioned traditional or being more New Age progressive?

Related posts:

1. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?
2. All or Nothing Love – The New Way of Marriage
3. Exes And Love
4. False Forms of Love – Spouse Acquirement Syndrome
5. Age Differences and Romantic Love 

Independence with Love

Ted said “I’m finally in a marriage that helps me be more independent, not less”.

Judy replied “I don’t think that’s possible.  When you love someone don’t you always become dependent on them and have to sacrifice your independence for the relationship?”  Gloria responded with, “Not in my love relationships.  Love helps me be who I really am and how I want to be me.  Without love I wouldn’t get to be the real me”.

Qi-shi remarked, “That is not my experience.  My lady friends always want to restrict me, hold me back and get me to be dependent on them, and keep me that way.  That’s why I am not with anyone right now.  I like my independence and for me love gets in the way” .  Sally with disgust commented, “You all know that’s the way it always works out for us women.  Men just don’t want to give you any independence at all”.

Jeremy came back with, “It’s not just men, you women may be more subtle but in my experience every woman wants to ‘break and tame’ her man.  That takes away every bit of every poor guy’s independence”. “I totally disagree,” said Mark.  “Before Jan and I hooked up I was so love-starved I couldn’t do anything but look for love and affection.  Once I started really loving and being loved it set me free to be more independent than I’ve ever been”.  Then Judy jumped in with, “José and I would never dare interfere with each other’s independence.

The whole basis of our relationship is allowing and helping each other live independently. That’s how we do love.  For us it wouldn’t work any other way”.  Sharon then asked, “Doesn’t independence sort of imply being separate and alone.  I never have felt comfortable with the words independent or dependent.  They both sound like things I don’t want to fully embrace.  What about interdependence and self-dependent?   Shouldn’t we consider those also”?

This energetic discussion continued on for quite some time between the participants at a Love Advancement weekend workshop.  As you can see in their discussion there are many differing viewpoints when it comes to the subject of ‘Independence and Love’.  No small number of couples, families and even friendships break up when there are clashes over independence versus dependence issues.  And to the contrary many relationships maintain their health by assisting their participants to have a high degree of independence.

When commenting on love, independence and marriage the great Middle Eastern poet/philosopher, Kahlil Gibran wrote:

“… let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond [prison] of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
… Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strains of a lute are alone though they quiver
with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

Indeed, among relational professionals it is generally thought that in healthy, real love the love relationship is carried on in a way that promotes, assists and nurtures independent individuality.  Love-based actions which help each person grow their self-dependent abilities and help them act in interpersonal, independent teamwork result in healthy, mutually beneficial love relationships.  This means shared independence and democratically chosen interdependence are a significant part of well functioning love relationships.

One of the prime ways to identify a real, healthy love from an unhealthy, false love has do with examining dependency issues.  Those relationships that promote shared independence tend to be far healthier than those relationships that suppress and restrict independence and individuality.

Relationships that are too dependent and too anti-independence promote stagnation.  Stagnation leads to deterioration, and deterioration leads to death (of the relationship and sometimes of a person in that relationship).  It is generally thought that to grow your independence means to grow your selfhood.  Dependency makes you less, not more.  Being less seldom, if ever, helps ‘the team’ that is a love relationship.  The team is strengthened by its members being ‘all they can be’ as independent individuals who share their strengths and unique abilities in interdependent teamwork.  This is one of the most important dynamics which make up ‘the teams’ we call couples, marriages, families and strong friendships.

Let’s look at what the most famous and very independent seagull of all time told us about love with freedom and independence.  Jonathan, the seagull, was reported to have said:

“If you love something set it free.  If it comes back to you, it is yours.
If it doesn’t, it never was.”
-Jonathan Livingston Seagull, according to Richard Bach

If, in the name of love, you try to possess someone, own them, capture and confine them, make them yours alone, deprive them of independent free choice, it is likely if you dare to set them free there’s a good chance they won’t return.  But if you encourage free, independent choice that is an act of real love.  Real love cannot be done as slavery.  If they choose you day after night, after day, after night and you choose them also, then together you can own and operate a growing, ongoing love.  If when giving someone the freedom of love’s partnership they leave you, then the relationship, in all probability, would never have worked out anyway.  That is because only a love operating with ongoing mutual choice and desire seems to be able to sustain itself healthfully.

Healthy, real love promotes independence and sick, anti-freedom, false love promotes dependency.  This is the contention of many who study love and its dynamics.  To investigate how all this may have influenced your life let’s look at the ways Western world society has taught people to talk and think.  The following sentences are ‘supposed to’ represent the dynamics of love, as many people understand them, but do they really?  “I need you”.  “I can’t live without you”.  “You’re mine”.  “You belong to me”.  “I’m totally yours”.  “Let me be your slave”.  “I totally surrender myself to you”.  “Do what you want with me”.  “I love you so much I will do anything you want”.  “You’re my everything”.  “I’m completely under your control just like I want to be”.  “I can’t go on without you”.  “Because I love you I will become whatever you want”.  “Use me, abuse me, dominate me, control me utterly and then I will know you love me as much as I love you”.

To the mental health professional all of these statements suggest an underlying drive to retreat into infancy where a person is totally dependent on a parent/caretaker.  A lack of wanting to become self-directed, mature, and growing, improving and becoming increasingly responsible as an adult is infantile and regressive; it’s not what real love is all about.  Healthy, real love promotes growth toward independence, freedom and being more, not less.  So why do many people confuse the desire to regress into infantile dependency with love?

There are a number of interwoven reasons.  One part is what our culture teaches us to think.  Another part involves the freedom from the stress of having to make decisions, and choices and experience the consequences of our choices.  Seemingly that can be achieved by turning your life over to another who will play the ‘parent-like, lover/mate’ role in your life.  However, that seldom turns out well.  More frequently it leads to abuse, neglect, misuse and eventually either rebellion or destruction.  Debilitating dependency on a lover is no better than debilitating dependency on a drug.

There are a fairly large number of people who fear independence because they don’t think they have what it takes to handle it.  They often are attracted to, and join with, very dictatorial, dominating types of people.  There are three big problems with this strategy.  First, dictators are usually secretly weak, fear-based people hiding under a mask of pseudo-strength.  The second problem is the weak person who wants to have the safety of being governed by the strong often slowly grows their own strength.  Then they rebel or break free from their dominator.  The third problem is the dominator may slowly grow real strength and become disenchanted with the weak person depending on them.  They then often become attracted to stronger, more dynamic, self-dependent others.

There are those who are strong, decisive leaders most of the time but want to take a break from the stress of decisiveness and let others run the show, at least for awhile.  That sometimes gets acted out in various sexual scenarios where the usually powerful leader gets to be submissive and dominated.  Then there are those that have been brought up to believe dictatorial leadership and domination are masculine and submissive masochism is feminine.  This too may occur only in sexuality but sometimes it involves a total life position.  When that happens it is very hard to arrive at a democratic, partnered, love relationship of equals.

Having someone be overtly, strongly dependent on you and on your love at first may have the strong appeal of a seemingly safe relationship.  It also has the appeal of being in control and being able to get whatever you want from the person who is dependent on you.  Later, not having an equal partner with which to share burdens, not having the input of ideas that are different from your own, not having another’s creativity and not having an equal, adult companion tends to get old, less functional and lonely.

Lots of insecure, underdeveloped men want a dependent, weak woman for their mate.  Later, as they grow in maturity and ability, they start to get bored with the weak woman at home and are attracted to highly competent, independent females out in the world.  Lots of insecure, underdeveloped females want a ‘big daddy’ to take care of them and treat them like a princess.  Later as they grow in maturity and confidence they want out from under ‘Daddy’s’ control and to associate with more challenging, stimulating and independent equals.  Of course, these are stereotypes and gender specific but they help to demonstrate the concepts here.  Human beings act in all shades of stereotypes and usually not completely like any stereotype.

Sexually lots of couples like to ‘play’ with one being a ‘sex slave’ while the other is the dominant, ‘erotic master’.  However, doing a total relationship in that format seldom gets healthy, lasting results.  Be aware that many couples who play at ‘sex slave and master’ often trade roles.

Here is a challenging thought to consider.  If you want to control, dominate, be in charge, etc. instead of being equal partners, and if you tend to think only one person can be in charge, that someone has to be the boss, have the final say, etc. then maybe you’re not strong enough or mature enough to operate in a democratic love relationship of adult equals.

Likewise, if in your love relationships you want to avoid or lose your independence, be dominated and governed, be lost in dependency and be someone else’s well-controlled puppet then healthy, real love is likely not to be in your future.  However, if a love-filled partnership of democratic equals who work to do life together is your aspiration then healthy, real love has a real chance of filling your romantic and other kinds of love life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Questions
Do your love relationships tend to lead you to an ‘I want you’ rather than ‘I need you’, ‘I choose you’ rather than ‘I am stuck with you’ or ‘I am more free with you’ rather than ‘I am enslaved to [or with] you’ relationship dynamics?

Related posts:

1. Is “I Can’t Live without You” Real Love?
2. Validation Love Stamp Giveaways
3. Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love 

Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?

Anna said, “If you love me you will marry me.”  Bob replied, “If you really love me you will live with me without marriage”. Anna then declared, “Marriage proves we love each other and we’re committed to one another”.  Bob then responded, “Anyone who believes marriage proves love might deserve to be committed”.  He sharply added, “If we really love each other we do not need marriage”.  Anna responded urgently, “Marriage makes me feel safe”.

With obvious frustration Bob replied “Marriage makes me feel unsafe, trapped and scared”.  Anna then firmly said, “Its marriage or its goodbye”.  Bob somewhat angrily remarked “Marriage apparently is more important to you than love or than me, so I guess it has to be goodbye”.  After a pause Anna rather softly remarked, “Perhaps we might keep discussing this.”  Also after a moment of reflection Bob responded in quiet, kind tones with, “Yes indeed, and I suggest we take it up at some later date”, to which Anna nodded agreement.

According to a recent poll almost 40% of Americans suspect legal marriage is becoming obsolete.  This percentage is even higher in some European and South American communities.  Every year the number of people living together as a couple without legal marriage goes up.

Every year there are more people who see legal marriage as either unneeded or actually detrimental to the process of being a successful couple and to the progress of modern society.  Throughout the developed world there seems to be a growing number who find legal marriage as having a destructive effect on psychological marriage and upon love itself.  So, we might wonder, will marriage and couple’s love get divorced from one another in the New World society of the future?

Could it be that we are going back to the way marriage and love were once seen long ago.  Did you know that in the 1100’s the French Courts of Love officially ruled that real love between a husband and a wife was impossible.  That was because they believed the marriage relationship was unable to be one of equals.  They vigorously believed equality between participants was required for the existence and success of true, romantic love.

According to a number of historians romantic love and legal marriage did not start to become commonly interwoven until the great experiments in democracy of the 1700’s.  Until then legal marriage was primarily for the attainment of progeny, property and political power.  For most men and many women True Love and real sexual satisfaction were to be obtained extraneous to marriage.  In many times and places formal marriage for the poor did not even exist, and marriage for underlings like slaves, indentured servants, surfs and many minorities was not allowed.  For them love occurred but if there was any form of marriage it was kept a secret and was punishable.

Originally it seems marriage and love were just things people did all on their own.  People hooked up together by unsanctioned choice, stayed together the same way or not, and their coupleness was entirely taken care of by themselves with some help from friends and family.  It is thought that not too long before the dawn of recorded history men invented marriage so that they could own women like they discovered they could own land and cattle, and love had nothing to do with it.  Some think that we are headed back to the form of self chosen and self governed marriage, and love relationships free of governmental, religious and societal control.

A surprising number of couples who have successfully lived together for years eventually get legally married and then divorce within about two years of the legalization their union.  A good number of them report that they think they would still be together had they not legally married.  Thus, it seems legal marriage was bad for what might be called their ‘love marriage’.  Have you heard the satirical prediction that eventually only Catholic priests, nuns and homosexual couples will be doing legal marriage.  Everyone else will have given up on it except, of course, for divorce attorneys.

It’s not time to give up on marriage and especially not love-based marriage, at least not yet.  A vast majority of unmarried people still want to get married; especially the many younger, never married singles who hope and plan to have a marriage in their future.  It still is true that most, but not all, of the cultures of the world have one form of marriage or another.  Also marriage has a way of evolving into different forms to fit various changing situations and conditions.  In lands where war wiped out most of the men and among the aged where there are more women than men women practicing ‘sharing’ husbands has been known to become somewhat popular.

Where women have been scarce marrying multiple men, and in one society marrying sets of brothers, has been the adaptive development.  ‘Temporary wives’ abroad for the traveling man, sub-husbands for powerful and wealthy women, official concubines, mistresses, and champion lovers for high-ranking royalty of all genders, arranged marriage, egalitarian marriage, serial marriage, homosexual marriage and bisexual threesome unions are all part of the long history of marriage around the world.  You see, marriage has never been the one thing we are sometimes taught to believe it is.  Nevertheless, marriage and especially marriage for love remains a very common and popular social institution in today’s world.

For a sizable minority of people intimate mate type love and traditional legal marriage are ‘un-joined’.  Amy describes living with her ‘two husbands’ and the children by both as providing all of them with an extraordinarily happy life.  Bill rotates between three major successful relationships without deception or emotional dissonance.  Celia lives in an artist commune and says she feels outstandingly well loved and would never live otherwise.  Don reports that his love and romantic life for decades have been fulfilled by having deep friendship relationships, some of which are ‘with benefits’.  Elaine loves and romances both males and females and speaks of abundant love saturating her life.

Ferris says his love relationship with his God takes care of everything.  Georgia tells of children, grandchildren, best friends and pets giving her more love fulfillment than she knows what to do with.  Harry says he and his love mate have lived happily unmarried together for 35 years.  Isis is very active in the polyamore movement and describes living as a polyamore gives her and her two teenage offspring a huge loving family life.  Do you think these people are telling the accurate truth?  Could people be quietly going about living these ways somewhere near you?  Could you be one of them?  Are you open to and tolerant of more ways of succeeding at romantic and mate style love than the standard married one?

Every year more people decide they can live and be well loved without legal marriage.  Of course, they may be living with someone in a state of psychological marriage and/or spiritual marriage.  Every year more people choose to live and love in one form or another of an alternate lifestyle.  Every year more couples decide they can glean the parts of legal marriage they want and leave the parts they don’t want behind.  That’s because issues concerning children, finances and property now can be taken care of by way of contracts and other legal instruments without anyone becoming legally married.

Couple love, sexual love, parent love and family love for many people function quite well without marital legality.  Social, family and religious issues usually can be handled without marriage paperwork being filed at a courthouse.  Even the ceremonies of marriage symbolically and socially expressing love sometimes occur without legalization.  Especially many of those who have been through a divorce avoid becoming legally married again, while at the same time they often work harder at having enriching, healthy, real love relationships in their life.  Growing numbers of younger adults plan to avoid marriage altogether but they certainly don’t plan to avoid love or sex in their future.

Now with all this in mind you may want to ask yourself what is best for you and your loved ones?  Would it perhaps be good for you to examine your understanding of the relationship between love and marriage?  Could it be that for you or for someone you love marriage and healthy real love may not mix well?

What about children you may ask?  Every year more children are being raised by non-legalized couples and by single parents.  Recent studies show these children are usually doing just as well or better than the children of the legally married on every standard applied.  They also tend to be far healthier mentally than the children of abuse-filled marriages.

Have you pondered if marriage might be bad for the stimulation of healthful real love in your life?  There are those that say they are far better loved outside of marriage rather than inside marriage.  Could you be one of them?  Could some of those near and dear to you be counted in this group?  Let me suggest that the important thing here is to find what is healthiest for you and for those you care about.  For some people not doing what is standard or what has become common practice works best.  Sometimes with love there are those that do better by traveling the roads less traveled, by pioneering new pathways and by exploring virgin territories.  There are those for which love grows strongest and greatest in uncommon ground.  Might you belong among these?

Of coarse, you may find it healthiest and most workable for you to do couple’s love in the context of legal marriage.  In most circles that is, and is likely to stay for quite some time, the majority viewpoint.  It seems that for a great many people they have to at least try legal marriage once.  In the modern world half of those who attempt legal marriage attain a fair amount of success by doing so.  Most of those say they married primarily for love and they stay married because of love.  Therefore, for a great many people love and marriage mix together quite well.  Also in the societies in which arranged marriages are common many say they grew to love their spouse and it is because of that love that they stay married.

However, it is a modern truth that a growing number of people are taking various non-traditional ‘other’ approaches to love and romantic connection.  Some of them may turn out to be members of your family, friendship group or your acquaintances.  A question you may want to ponder is are you able to deal with the ‘non-traditionalists’ of love and marriage as well as you do the more traditionalists.  If you are a non-traditionalist yourself the question may need to be reversed.  Can you deal lovingly, tolerantly and democratically with the traditionalists?

There are naturalists who hold that mother nature insists on variety in all things.  This is a truth concerning love and marriage because around the world and throughout history the relationship between love and marriage has taken many forms.  There even are whole societies in which there are many thousands of members who have no form of marriage at all such as the Na (also known as Nari or Mosuo), an indigenous people of southern China.  By all accounts they have much love, healthy children and highly functional, stable families usually led by a brother and sister in the role of never-incestuous co-parents.  They also have a great deal of sex with a great many partners.

There have been cultures in which virtually everyone was married, and societies in which only a special few married.  It is not generally acknowledged that all the major religions of the world including Judaism and Christianity historically have sanctioned more than one form of marriage.  These same religions also have understood and taught that more than one form of love can occur in relationships.  Then there are those who suggest that, as we speak, in our own Western world culture we are on the way to developing new ways of mixing love and our connectedness to special others.  So perhaps love and marriage as we have traditionally thought of them might eventually ‘divorce’.  However, at the same time love and new forms of marriage probably will emerge, combine and grow.  What do you think?

As always, go and grow in love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
How comfortably loving are you able to be toward both alternate lifestyle and traditionalist individuals, couples and others in love unions different than your own?

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Image credits: “Stained Glass Doors, St. Peter’s Oxford” by Flickr user Bridgman Pottery modified for use here (with apologies) by Wade Watson.

All or Nothing Love - The New Way of Marriage

Mini-Love-Lesson  #207

One of over 200 FREE mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: A new and possibly higher, more excellent and more rewarding way of doing couple’s love and couplehood seems to be emerging, built on the past but surpassing it and striving for higher quality living, personal potentials fulfillment and equality love relating.

An Emerging Fresh Form of Couplehood

First, they were each other’s mentor, trainer and sensei in different forms of oriental music, fitness training and martial arts.  That continued but melded into being each other’s hot, passionate partners in an affair.  Then that then morphed into living together couplehood.  Legal marriage followed their psychological marriage a year later as they began to think about having children.  They both proudly proclaimed that their love grew as they pushed each other hard for excellence and to be the best that they could be, not only athletically but in every other way to.  Bringing out the best in each other by way of what can be called Adamant Love (“Adamant Love – How It Wins for Us All”), became the major modus operandi of their love relationship.

In the developed nations of the world that is suspected as becoming the new, emerging, major goal, lifestyle and form into which 21st-century couplehood/marriage is now evolving.  Pushing, encouraging, assisting and challenging along with praising, complimenting and rewarding a spouse for growth, strengthening and improvement in any area of human endeavor is becoming a new, primary way to show love and do couplehood.  Those ways have always been part of how love could be demonstrated but before they usually were more focused on helping children and loved friends become better at something.  Now apparently, these coaching, pushing and improvement-oriented behaviors are becoming more love-mate focused.

The Changing Face Couple’s Love

Previously such actions in marriage as mentioned above usually involved one spouse helping another toward some occupational goal.  That goal would then result in mutual financial and lifestyle benefit.  The new “all or nothing” love relationships include that but are a lot more about personal ways of developing outside of job and career advancement.  One modern couple I am familiar with push each other to be repeatedly improving at rock climbing, poetry and their respective hobbies of gardening and wine making.

It used to be, and still is in many places, that most people got married as a way to permissibly have sex, have children, have parental and family approval, have social acceptability, have okayness for career security and advancement, have their religion’s blessings and have companionate love.  Now in the developed and in some cases developing world, all of those things are much more achievable without authorized marriage.

Recent evidence suggests that more and more couples first grow psychologically married and may or may not legalize it later.  Legal marriage which used to seem like a necessity to almost everyone is dropping in importance for increasing numbers of both younger and older couples.  What is of increasing importance is personal fulfillment and quality living including a high functioning couple’s love relationship.  The new idea is “go after it all” and go after it “all or nothing”.

What modern, young couples may do differently to achieve those all or nothing goals is start mutually and cooperatively exploring for their own and each other’s potentials for human growth and development. A big part of this is quite equality based and focused on both partners becoming stronger, tougher, healthier and with stamina enduring in spite of discomforts, pain and other difficulties which might occur when striving for those improvements.

For the kind of couplehood were talking about, these traits count not only physically but psychologically and relationally.  Equality between genders and every other differentiation category seems to be quite important in this new form of being a loving couple.  Living mutually together as authentic individuals who help each other with self-expression is also of strong importance.  Mutual higher order parenting skills (“Parenting Series: How to Love Your Child Better”) are part of what is pushed for, along with ever advancing learning for all family members not just children.  Being able to continually grow and improve in all the skills of healthy, real love development is seen as fitting quite well into this new, so-called “all or nothing” form of couple’s love relating.

The Issue of the “Older Ways”

This emerging way of doing love as a couple is not being done in rebellion or as a rejection of older ways.  Security still is highly valued, sexual love counts for a lot and love, if anything, is even more important.  Home life and home itself as a sanctuary and refuge from a difficult world definitely is sought after.  In addition, the home is seen as a major place for growth in which adamant love can push for many kinds of personal, couple and family improvements.

The goals, values, styles and forms of marriage in recent, former times largely are seen as fairly acceptable although perhaps in need of some freshening revision.  What is evolving and transpiring in this new form appears to be a further development on a perhaps higher and healthier plane.  This form builds on the past and perhaps can best be understood much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where when one need or potential is fulfilled we develop and evolve to fulfill a higher potentiality.  It also seems that this new relational development may provide couples with a form of coupleness much better fit for the future and for healthy, love functioning in that future.

The High Demands of High Functioning Love

This so-called All-or-Nothing form of couple’s love relating is seen as perhaps requiring more than a lot of individuals and couples easily or comfortably can produce.  Living with and loving your high challenge coach, your truth telling therapist and your champion who you don’t want to disappoint (all wrapped up in one person) can be quite demanding for a couple.  But that is exactly what appears to be happening, at least part of the time in this new form of doing couple’s love. This is exactly what it’s all about – jointly developing the ability to do things better, focus on and push each other to fulfill potentials and live higher and beyond the standards of the past.  And it seems this expenditure of effort, time and personal involvement may be paying off in higher quality life and love.

To live in that elevated way, couples quite likely will have to love each other well and skillfully.  They will have to communicate, cooperate and, in good teamwork, conjointly get good, really good at being a couple.  They likely also will have to organize their life to include adequate periods of letdown, relaxation, non-demand freeform recreation and anything goes and who cares what happens fun.  It may not be easy but it may become superior.

For Learning More about This New Form of Couplehood Love?

If you want to learn more about the new all or nothing approach, you can read the recently published book, All-or-Nothing Marriage by Northwestern University professor, Eli Finkel.  He has made a long-term, comprehensive study focusing on where the trends in couple’s love relationships currently are headed and how the ever changing forms of marriage likely are to evolve in the not so distant future.

One More Thing

If you found this mini-love-lesson interesting, intriguing or in any way engaging, how about sharing it with and talking it over with a friend or two?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How do you think the new form of doing couple’s love might benefit you – or would it?

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