Plus

Plus

Marriage during our time
By C. N. S.
There was a time when sex life began with married life. That time seems to be over, now sex seems to end with marriage. Unmarried young people are having more and more of sex, and middle-aged married couples are having less of it. Britain's celebrated sex therapist and psychiatrist Dr. Colin Wilson made this observation about the sexual revolution that has put marriage in a topsy-turvy state. "Marriage was once about getting sex; now, it's about giving it up," says Dr. Wilson. This revolution has not left even our part of the world untouched.

A case in point is that of the parents who sent their son for tertiary studies abroad. During a university vacation, he returned home on holiday with a pretty young woman from the foreign country.

They spent a happy holiday in the home of his parents-a conservative couple with roots in a distant rural culture, but now resident in Colombo and of liberal outlook. The young couple went back to their studies in the foreign country and in due course, news arrived that the son was now a father. The baby grew up and a couple of years later, they had their wedding in the foreign land, which the parents of both parties attended.

Test drives
This simple story of wedlock after, not before, the birth of a child and accepted and blessed by kith and kin of both husband and wife may not be an earth-shaking story today. It does tell us something about how we love now. Parenthood outside wedlock and then marriage is a sequence of events that seems topsy-turvy, out of joint, or udayatikuru, as we say in pithy Sinhala.Reassuring FPA advertisements of emergency contraceptive pills to be used the morning after are confidence-building aids for young people, who are now engaged in re-engineering the institution of marriage and family.

It all makes short shrift of our schoolboy theory of yore about the reason for morality: lack of opportunity and fear of consequence. Now there is no lack and no fear. The advent of the ‘pill’ liberalised sex and heralded the sexual revolution.

‘Cohabitation’ has come to stay between man and woman, though, unfortunately, it did not between our President and our Prime Minister. Anyway, ‘constitutional cohabitation’ has been described by a leading constitutional lawyer as "a political masquerade!"

According to veteran journalist S. Pathiravithane, "to say that either a man or a woman have been cohabiting suggests immediately that the two together have been doing something illegal or immoral." A quasi wife without having to commit is what cohabitation at the man-woman level provides," says David Popenoe of the Rutgers University National Marriage Project in New Jersey. Opportunities are open and consequences are of no matter in the matter of living together as husband and wife without being married, which is what cohabitations means.

To have and to hold
More and more couples are choosing to live together before wedlock. Sex is now easily available whereas it was in those days available after marriage. The result is that sex, which in those days led to the consummation and culmination of marriage, is now a different kettle of fish. George W. Bush, known as a family man, is planning a marriage drive this election year at a huge cost of federal funds. Advertising campaigns will promote the value of marriage. Training will be provided for couples to survive rocky patches in marriage.

Britney Spears, who shot to super stardom as a teenager with her debut album Baby, one more time, had her marriage to Jason Alexander annulled within two days. She told the judge that she and her new husband were incompatible. They did not know each other's likes and dislikes, and each other's desires to have or not have children and each other's desires as to state of residency. They were lawfully restored to the status of single, unmarried persons. Marriage is cheap, divorce cheaper. The Christian marriage vow "to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health… till death do us part" is being made a mockery of.

Back to Plus