Why the selfish love cohabitation, and not their 'lover'
CNN asks if cohabitation is wise, even in the face of scientific studies showing it leads to divorce. Predictably, this woman makes the argument that you want to 'test drive' marriage before you start it "for real."What I think she doesn't understand, is that cohabitation entails two essential things:
1. it becomes marriage-lite
2. it facilitates the selfish desires of people, and becomes the opposite of commitment
Both of these run parallel to the 'trial run' argument, but she's then operating her life, and her major commitments, as though they were a game with a reset button. Relationships are tough, and are not a game. Breaking up, at least for me, has been an emotional rollercoaster and, often, total trainwreck. It's not something you flippantly do and then renege upon, it's not something you enter into and then decide that one's small eccentricities are too much to handle and you want that 'perfect' someone instead of just a 'good' someone. People who operate in that fashion are serial killers without the murder: emotional sociopaths who are out for number one at all costs.
Listen to how she describes her failed cohabitation situation:
Living together is a two-way street. I'm sure Jeff had no idea that I hated doing dishes, slammed doors when I was angry, liked to eat out for almost every meal, couldn't control myself around his ice cream, and hated to sit around the house doing nothing.
I mean, let's call a spade a spade, this woman is a bitch.
No wonder her boyfriend didn't marry her. She was completely in it for herself, there was no submission of her own desires to the other, there was no unity of the two souls into one. Marriage ought not be an economic arrangement a la Alyssa Rosenbaum's silly notions about relationships, it ought to be the transcendent blending of two souls into one. This is where I think the religious aspects of marriage cannot be factored out, and those who enter into marriage without that understanding, agreement and conviction are really rolling the dice with divorce. And so that brings us back to the cohabitation problem, and its significance for Christian couples, where I think, as with too many other things, Christians have integrated the Pagan ways too much recently, and as it regards cohabitation it enables their own selfishness, materialism, doubts, worries, commitment-phobia and denigration of the ones they claim they love.
Everyone knows the cliches from Corinthians about love, which is read at every single wedding I have ever been to. But they should add to it that love is also neither independent, casual, temporary, short-sighted, child-free, intimacy-lacking, tame, tempered, calm, dispassionate, cold, delaying.
Love is, or at least ought to be, wild and untamed, unpredictable and zealous. Love ought to be full of children because intimacy isn't something planned for birthdays and special treats, but the side effect from being unable to be apart emotionally, mentally and thus subsequently physically. Love is not metered like a utility, or as constant as the sunrise, but wild flares of danger and passion.
Even to write that seems cliche, as though it doesn't exist. Yet, I've felt it before. I know it's out there. I've had a muse or two and not only did they spark me to great things, they still continue to spark me to great things even though we don't talk.
That kind of love should never cohabitate, it should marry, procreate, and live life as it really is, not as a test-run to what it could be. And any love that doesn't fit that bill shouldn't live together anyway, at least not until the people involved can figure out how to really enjoy, embrace and love one another truly, fully, utterly, completely.
Labels: culture, love, society
posted by . @ 12:38 AM
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