Ball and Chain: The Culture of Heterosexual Marriage

Do you know what the second image result is when searching Google for “wedding cake toppers”? A bride pulling her groom along by the leg. Do you get the joke? Men hate their wives! Marriage is a trap and it’s oppressing the men! And my God, there are so many of these.

A man about to be married once confided in me that he did not want to go through with it and only proposed because he considered marriage to be a social obligation. He told me that he had to get married at some point, so it might as well be with the woman he'd been dating for almost 10 years at that point.

There’s an idea in our culture that women, desperate for marriage, hunt and trap men for that purpose. That women are on a conquest to snare unsuspecting men into their devious plans of marriage. It's portrayed sadistic and evil, yet also pathetic. Men, in the meantime, must suffer in their shackles to these women.

There are obvious historical reasons for this. While marriage traditionally helped men “pass on their name” by having children, many men would prefer not to be beholden to one partner. We see this in sitcoms, as the friends of bachelors try to psych them out: “Dude, can you even imagine being with one person for the rest of your life?” How often do you see women being asked this question? Women, who have historically relied on the social capital of their husbands and thus needed more security, had more incentive to be married--and soon, because social structures have often made courtship into a competition and men don’t really like to be with women their own age or older. So, for men, the foundation of marriage is a contract that gets them children for the price of having to provide for and be faithful to their wife (and still, they found ways around that).

In the modern day, our connotations of marriage have changed, as have our understandings of romance. But the structure of marriage seems to be incompatible with many of our modern tendencies, especially when it has served so long to maintain the division between genders.

Many fearful traditional thinkers have cited the high divorce rates of the 20th century as an indication of the downfall of Western Civilization because of Evil Feminism. But they actually indicated a social change that put more power in the hands of women, especially those in abusive situations. Plus, divorce rates have gone down since then, presumably because people’s approaches to marriage have caught up with their attitudes about romance and partnership.

Perhaps we can hope that the “ball and chain” mentality will finally be killed within the next generation or two, among people with a better understanding of gender relations and romantic partnerships. Maybe we'll even kill the idea that marriage is an obligation for anyone.