The invention of marriage
They say that getting married and starting a family is something based on love. It has never always been like this and it will be never, maybe. Hidden Brain explores the contemporary marriage and gets a glimpse of the future
The fact that marriage is based on love is surprisingly pretty new. Not very long ago people used to get married mainly for economical reasons: to share expenses, to raise kids, to get old together and have someone to rely on.
Nowadays it’s not longer like this: we live longer, we are (more or less) economically more stable and we can rely on ourselves for many kinds of practical stuff.
We can trace back the idea of a love-based marriage to the birth of Romantic Love: you know, all that stuff about living a life together till the end and finding your soul mate? That kind of stuff. Turns out — and we’d better acknowledge it the sooner the better that it’s a false myth rooted into a certain kind of literature. What’s true is, on the other hand, that getting older together doesn’t necessarily means that two people develop at the same pace. It could be that their roads take different paths somedays and it’s just human nature. From that point onwards those two people have two options: to stay together and try to work it out or to split. And find someone new, someone more “tuned” on their current view of life.
The good thing is that today that’s easier than before, even if it still remains often painful. That is possible because we — as a society — have already fulfilled many basic needs: we fell safer on many terms (economically, physically, mentally) and that’s why we can move up towards the top of Maslow’s pyramid. And what’s up there? Self-actualization, that’s right. What do we need when we already feel safe and that we belong to someone or something and we don’t need to think about how to get some food and things like that? We try to self-actualize ourselves.
Societies change, people change as well. Habits and institutions too. There’s not shame in realizing that our design for life should be based on the search for happiness or, at least, well-being. That could be with the same person for all our life. Or with different as well.
