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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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It's understandably hard to find someone who will swear "for better or worse" if they fear "for better or else" in return.

At some point, it just seems strange that you'd even want a marriage after developing such a firm opposition to lifelong vows, based on experience with many failed marriages. Why not just have a succession of long-term relationships? Isn't that what your worldview would suggest is the healthy model for relationships? Her post quite evidently states her belief that there is no real continuity of obligation between the past and the present:

But the exclusivity choice was made by their past self, decades ago- a different person, to a different woman, and I can’t help but wonder if they would make that same choice if they knew what they were getting into.

Under those conditions, why get married at all? It's a commitment to a person who -- by her own statement -- disappears, ceases to exist, over time. That's a worldview where marriage doesn't even make sense as an option.

The problem with marriage is increasingly people seem to be treating it as a time-limited commitment: "we'll be together until we decide we don't like it any more, and then divorce." But our legal system is set up based on the older model where marriage is supposed to be truly life-long, and the two really are supposed to have a joint legal identity in a way that makes everything each partner does common property. So, we end up with bitter divorces, vengeful custody disputes, alimony battles.

Not everyone agrees that marriages are made by God to join two together into one flesh -- but without controversy, marriages are made by the state to join two together into one mass of property. The resulting dissolution can only be described as a form of twin-separation surgery, which always leaves damage. What therefore the state has joined together, let not man put asunder.

It really is no wonder to me why so many millennial-and-younger couples are cohabiting, without marrying. They're not in a social and mental context where holding to marriage as a true indissoluble commitment is thinkable, but marriage as it exists on the books imposes costs and consquences that revolve around that kind of commitment.