If you've been on Medium for a minute, you've probably run across a post or two from Y.L. Wolfe. Recently, she dropped a post entitled The Secret Reason Why So Few Relationships Make it. If you haven't read it yet, I've linked to it. What follows is going to look suspiciously derivative and I have to cop to being triggered by what she wrote.

Triggered, in this case, is a good thing. I have had some thoughts of my own, regarding our near-universal assumptions about the "undeniable" merits of wedded love for a long time. So, what follows is kind of a "yeah, me too…" That acknowledged, it's not entirely derivative, as you will see.

My Admittedly Imperfect Perspective…

There's a disconnect between the "needs" of society and the whisperings of our soul. And in no realm is this more obvious than how marriage institutionalizes our very real need for connection. Often, the expectations with which we saddle marriage wind up working against the connection many of us hope to find when we marry.

I placed needs in quotation marks above because it isn't obvious to me that the "needs" marriage is mythologized to fulfill are either universal or (necessarily), even needs. Most of us learned in freshman anthropology that culture is "shared, learned behavior." Is it possible that those "needs" are actually learned habits of thought that have leveraged organic needs for purposes that have nothing to do with our fulfillment?

Is marriage as we've come to view it so deeply embedded in cultural determinism that many of us can't see it? My own answer is maybe, but I think it depends. It depends in part on our lived reality in the particular socio-cultural context we call home, (and how our socialization was managed growing up) and our own tendencies to question things.

To be clear marriage has been around a long time and in some form is found in virtually every society today. But is that because marriage is an individual need, or did the self-appointed social engineers way back when settle on one of a number of ways to order a complex society — and we all bought in?

These days, I can't exorcise the suspicion that social architects going way back have known all along what they were doing. What follows is not, I hope, gratuitously iconoclastic. Note the emphasis on gratuitous. Some icons, however useful in the past, need to make room for different ideas whose time has come.

Why Marriage?

The first recorded reference to marriage of which I'm aware is found in cuneiform, in Mesopotamia, circa 2350 B.C. I say "perhaps," because history, anthropology and archaeology are all living bodies of intellectual inquiry, in a constant state of revision.

Few on this forum will be unaware that reputable anthropologists are in general agreement that marriage was as much a way of consolidating ownership and property claims as it was a matter of what we're inclined to call "love." This is true whether you view it through religious/deistic or anthropological lenses.

Marriage as a largely practical institution reflected the emerging needs of a social structure centered around property and who had "rights" to it. Families protective of their wealth and standing wanted to safeguard it with matches that helped accomplish that goal. Men with property to pass on wanted to ensure that the offspring inheriting their wealth were in fact their own.

Marriage in the 21st Century

With the enfranchisement of women (in 1920, under the 19th Amendment in the U.S.) and the subsequent second wave of feminism during the sixties, I think the first faltering steps toward balance in marriage started. My mother, rest her soul, taught me to be completely self-sufficient — precisely so I didn't need to depend on a wife to cook, or clean house. A good thing, as it turned out. More than half of my adult life, I've been unmarried.

And growing up in a university town, most of the young women with whom I went to school received every bit as strong an education as I did. Dating a national merit finalist in high school quickly disabused me of any notion that women might need a man. She might want one, but her survival or comfort was unlikely to be conditional on anything I did.

For that reason, I gave gender dynamics little thought, even though the second wave of feminism was already underway. I just took as a given women had both the equipment and the right to absolute agency in their lives. In retrospect, I think I grew up in a cultural bubble, of sorts, in which women's competence and rights were taken for granted.

Nobody asked me but…

At this stage in our development, unless you feel a need to gift your genetic material to posterity in the form of offspring, the arguments for a "permanent" bonding with a spouse are getting harder to justify logically. And perhaps not even in the case of procreation. As someone who grew up in a house with absent, abusive, or indifferent male role models, I can confirm children may be better off with one loving parent than with one loving parent bound to an abusive one.

In my own experience, hetero-normative marriage doesn't guarantee either a child's survival or emotional balance by any means. And with 43% of first marriages and 67% of second and subsequent marriages ending in divorce, it seems clear that our take on traditional marriage may need critical rethinking.

So…where from here?

First, I second Ms. Wolfe's assessment of the social pressures driving us toward marriage. And it's hard to disagree that we might all be better off if the officiously interfering (if well meaning) friends in our lives would simply butt out. Especially in a time when marriage is of increasingly questionable practical efficacy. Having been in and out of a few of them myself, I can confirm I've generally been happier alone with the occasional companionship of like-minded, attractive women.

The social pressures that cause even the thoughtful, well-meaning in society to advocate for the "unpaired" to marry are atavistic relics of thought. And — if we're honest — the unsubtle pressures of a capitalistic society buttressed by consumption models. Among the many things we need to re-think as we attempt to redefine what a sustainable society looks like going forward is whether the marriage paradigm as currently practiced is either desirable or necessary.

I'm not anti-marriage or anti-procreation. I've done both. But I'm over the narrative that it's the "most mature" or "healthiest" approach to living. Marriage doesn't "complete" us. Often as not, marriage limits us — both of us., rather than "completing" us.

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. And for those who've managed to build something special in some form of marriage, please accept my heartiest of congratulations. I'm genuinely happy for you and admiring of your success. But can we all agree it's in no one's best interest to overly romanticize, mythologize, and over-hype marriage as something all mature, adjusted adults must do?

I can't help thinking that much of the acrimony on both sides of the gender debate is one of the proximal outcomes of clinging to outdated assumptions about how we should relate to each other. How much better off would we be if we could genuinely applaud each other's fulfillment defined by an ethical pursuit of our best selves — with or without a spouse? Just wondering out loud… What do you think?

D.B. Sayers is a retired Marine officer, former corporate trainer turned full-time author with six titles in print and three more in draft. If you would like a sample of his work, snag your free copy of his anthology of short stories, Through the Windshield, Drive-by Lives.