Posted on 10/08/2006 4:16:31 PM PDT by NYer
There are enormous differences between being a "husband" or a "wife" and being a "partner," a "friend" or a "significant other".
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But attending the weddings of two of my three children this past summer made the differences far clearer and far more significant.
First, no matter what you think when living together, your relationship with your significant other changes the moment you marry. You have now made a commitment to each other as husband and wife in front of almost everyone significant in your life. You now see each other in a different and more serious light.
Second, words matter. They deeply affect us and others. Living with your "boyfriend" is not the same as living with your "husband." And living with your "girlfriend" or any other title you give her is not the same as making a home with your "wife." Likewise when you introduce that person as your wife or husband to people, you are making a far more important statement of that person's role in your life than you are with any other title.
Third, legality matters. Being legally bound to and responsible for another person matters. It is an announcement to him/her and to yourself that you take this relationship with the utmost seriousness. No words of affection or promises of commitment, no matter how sincere, can match the seriousness of legal commitment.
Fourth, to better appreciate just how important marriage is to the vast majority of people in your life, consider this: There is no event, no occasion, no moment in your life when so many of the people who matter to you will convene in one place as they will at your wedding. Not the birth of any of your children, not any milestone birthday you may celebrate, not your child's bar-mitzvah or confirmation. The only other time so many of those you care about and who care about you will gather in one place is at your funeral. But by then, unless you die young, nearly all those you love who are older than you will have already died.
So this is it. Your wedding will be the greatest gathering of loved ones in your life. There is a reason. It is the biggest moment of your life. No such event will ever happen if you do not have a wedding.
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Likewise when you introduce that person as your wife or husband to people, you are making a far more important statement of that person's role in your life than you are with any other title. |
Fifth, only with marriage will your man's or your woman's family ever become your family. The two weddings transformed the woman in my son's life into my daughter-in-law and transformed the man in my daughter's life into my son-in-law. And I was instantly transformed from the father of their boyfriend or girlfriend into their father-in-law. This was the most dramatic new realization for me. I was now related to my children's partners. Their siblings and parents became family. Nothing comparable happens when two people live together without getting married.
Many women callers to my radio show have told me that the man in their life sees no reason to marry. "It's only a piece of paper," these men (and now some women) argue.
There are two answers to this argument.
One is that if in fact "it is only a piece of paper," what exactly is he so afraid of? Why does he fear a mere piece of paper? Either he is lying to himself and to his woman or lying only to her because he knows this piece of paper is far more than "only a piece of paper."
The other response is all that is written above. Getting married means I am now your wife, not your live-in; I am now your husband, not your significant other. It means that we get to have a wedding where, before virtually every person alive who means anything to us, we commit ourselves to each other. It means that we have decided to bring all these people we love into our lives. It means we have legal obligations to one another. It means my family becomes yours and yours becomes mine.
Thank God my children, ages 30 and 23, decided to marry. Their partners are now my daughter-in-law and son-in-law. They are therefore now mine to love, not merely two people whom my children love.
When you realize all that is attainable by marrying and unattainable by living together without marrying, you have to wonder why anyone would voluntarily choose not to marry the person he or she wishes to live with forever. Unless, of course, one of you really isn't planning on forever.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Dennis Prager. “Five non-religious arguments for marriage over living together.” Townhall.com (October 3, 2006).
Reprinted by permission of Dennis Prager.
THE AUTHOR
Dennis Prager is a writer, theologian, and one of America's most respected radio talk show hosts. He has been broadcasting on radio in Los Angeles since 1982 and became nationally syndicated in 1999.
Among his many accomplishments Dennis Prager has engaged in interfaith dialogue with Catholics at the Vatican, Muslims in the Persian Gulf, Hindus in India, and Protestants at Christian seminaries throughout America. For ten years, he conducted a weekly interfaith dialogue on radio with representatives of virtually every religion in the world. New York's Jewish Week described Dennis Prager as "one of the three most interesting minds in American Jewish Life."
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So appropriate today!
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Duplicate thread:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1712541/posts
26 years of marriage with my life-long soul mate as of October 10 could not possibly compare to "living together" for any length of time.
That was 5 days ago and not put in the Religion topic, and subsequently was not pinged to the religion lists, as this thread.
I've been married now for almost twelve years. But I'm really glad I lived with my wife for more than a year before we married.
I write this as someone who didn't believe in living together, before then. But I got sick, she stayed over a few nights to take care of me, and never left.
But, I think there may be a difference between living together as a prelude to marriage and living together a substitute for marriage.
Same author, same title, same article, different publication.
That is irrelevant to my statement.
Absolutely relevant: the threads are counted by the content units [i.e. sources]. I simply reject your base premise of counting by forum.
Our daughter made us get married, before she was born, 31 1/2 years ago.
You're making an argument for living together before marriage, but the stats overwhelmingly suggest to wait until after marriage. Marriage is tough, but "trying it out" actually makes it tougher and gives you a 80% higher divorce rate.
http://www.leaderu.com/critical/cohabitation-socio.html
There is a built in bias in those studies. A lot of marriages that are proceeded by living together are last-ditch attempts to save a relationships that are failing. They are marriages out of desperation to make a failing relationship work, often between couples who did not intend to marry at the start of living together.
But when my wife moved in with me, we were already engaged. We started with then intent to marry. Had we discovered that we didn't get along, we probably wouldn't have proceeded to the marriage.
The ironic thing is that while many live-together marry in hopes of making a failing relationship improve, when we got married we had no particular expectations that the relationship would get closer. It was just a public confirmation that our living arrangements were permanent. Instead, the relationship did get significantly better.
When living togethers marry as an affirmation of their relationship, I suspect it works as well as marriages without living together. However, when living togethers marry out of desperation, that is far less likely to succeed. It is the latter sort of marriage that probably accounts for the higher divorce rate among living-togethers.
First of all, thank you for posting this and pinging me. I didn't see it the first time around. The difference between living together and actually making a committment before God, your family and friends is your state of mind. Deep down the people who just live together know that at any point they can just walk out. For people who are married it's a little more complicated. My husband, 33 years ago, told me he respected me and loved me and was not afraid in front of God and everyone else to say it. The piece of paper thing is just an excuse not to make a committment because there is something in the back of someone's mind that they don't want to make it permanent.
Come to think about it, there's another confounding variable. People who are opposed to living together, particularly for religious reasons, are more likely to be opposed to divorce, for similar reasons.
and so....?
If you don't put a thread in the right topic, it renders it impotent. Articles are often reposted for good reason. Multiple threads of the same article from different sources posted to the same topic is indeed redundant and annoying and I've called it myself more than once.
If you live in Baboonia, and try to publish a translation of somebody's else scientific work done somewhere else into the local language, with the prefacing phrase "the first time in the baboonian history it has been observed that...", you do not have claims to authorship, only to the translation. Translation here was not needed: another forum within the same site. Thus your claim is not accepted.
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