What Are We Actually Committing To When We Get Married?

Hi, this is Adrienne from the Aquarian Answers Existential Helpdesk, following up on your open ticket: What are we actually committing to when we get married if not love until death do us part?

You ready? Great.

So the first thing to understand is that masculine and feminine are in recovery from an extended bout of structurally enforced co-dependency.

The feminine, as we are well-aware, was dependent on the masculine to meet her material needs. It’s tempting to wave this off as ancient history, but one fact to put this in perspective: women didn’t have the right to a bank account, mortgage loan, or credit card without a male co-signer until 1974. Almost every US president, including the current one, grew to adulthood in a time when women still needed a husband in order to buy a house or a car or any other big material asset. The influence of this dependence is still very much with us.

But the masculine was dependent on the feminine, too, to meet his emotional needs.

The regular helpdesk didn’t cover this, I know. This is an existential exclusive.

Good parents know that when their kid is having an emotional meltdown, the first thing is to check all the physical comfort boxes: Hungry? Tired? Diaper? Physical pain? Stressful environment? Deal with that, and usually the kid will settle down and become playful and happy again. Now, I can’t prove whose idea this was, but since women were so materially dependent on men, it was critically important for women to keep men dependent on them in some way, too. And for a very long time, men were—childlike—dependent on women to regulate their uncomfortable emotions by meeting their physical needs. Sex is the obvious one here, but men have also depended on women to cook for them, clean and maintain their home and clothing, nurse them through illness or injury, and mediate stressful social situations (think hostess, secretary, flight attendant).

And before you dismiss this as mere entitlement, consider that showing emotional or physical vulnerability was quite dangerous because it led to being bullied by other men, so it was actually extremely important for a man to have a woman to take responsibility for his emotional state and manage any situation where he might experience emotional vulnerability. In the absence of women, the manly emotional outlets were pretty much substance abuse and violence. Think pirate ships and Lord of the Flies.

The legal and social structures that enforced this masculine-feminine co-dependency came down in the 1970s. And that was good, because co-dependency was bad, but to be honest, we really haven’t known how to do this masculine-feminine thing since then.

Fifty years later, as individuals, we cover the full spectrum in terms of how dependent our behavior remains. We have female breadwinners and auto-mechanics and we have trophy wives. We have male nurses and stay-at-home-dads, and we have incels. We have divorced sexual orientation from gender and some of us have renounced gender completely. We’re all over the map, in terms of what we do or don’t think we need from a romantic partner.

But many of us still carry an unconscious belief that was so deeply instilled that it remains unaffected by our conscious choices and lived experience. And this unconscious belief is that we are not safe without a partner. Because for so long, both masculine and feminine were truly unsafe without the other—that was the basis of the co-dependency.

And here is where we finally answer the original question: what are we actually committing to when we promise to love until death do us part? It really comes down to this: I promise not to leave you, if you promise not to leave me. And the reason we want this from another person—regardless of all the evidence that being trapped in a relationship we can’t get out of is one of the worst things that can happen to us—is because we’re afraid. That fear is the fear of the dependent—literally the fear of the abandoned infant—I can’t make it in this world without you.

There is a lot to say about this situation, but the most important point is this: When we choose our relationships out of fear, we don’t pick the person that we most admire, enjoy, adore and want to spend all our time with. We pick a person we think will stay. That is a very different calculation, and it has nothing to do with love, after the shiny coating has worn off. In fact, fear is the opposite of love. So before we promise to love until death do us part, we’d do well to make sure love is what we’re starting with.

And if it’s very important to us that the other person promise never to leave, I guarantee that need is coming from fear, and not love.

Absolutely. My pleasure. Bye bye.