As a kid, Desira Pesta fell in love with the film ‘Father of the Bride,’ but when the 2005 Syracuse University graduate watched the film last week, she couldn’t enjoy it. The wedding seemed unnecessarily expensive, the cast was entirely white and it glorified the idea of meeting someone and falling in love, living together with that person until death do they part.

‘I never think that one person can ever complete another person,’ said Pesta, who worked as a wedding coordinator at Hendricks Chapel for two summers. ‘I don’t want to live with someone for the rest of my life and close off relationships to other friends and partners or whatever.’

Like some SU students and other Americans, Pesta believes marriage is a problematic institution, as it limits who can marry, how they marry and forces people into unnatural permanent relationships. She and others believe society would be better if it was abolished, or at least the government no longer controlled it.

Many people, especially women of the ‘Sex and the City’ generation, grew up believing that if they do not get married before age 30, they were failures. Men may also feel this way, suggesting a shared sense of pressure.

‘If you’re supposed to meet someone between the ages of 21 to 30, that’s so much pressure on someone to meet someone,’ Pesta said. ‘So many people, so many women, are upset because they don’t know what’s wrong with them because they haven’t found anyone yet.’

Love for the government

For many people, finding love may be the easy part. But they cannot marry for other reasons, because legally, many people cannot be married. Some marriage opponents, like Pesta, believe the government should stay out of matters of the heart and allow people to marry who they wish.

‘The government can’t say, ‘No, you can’t buy that house’ or, ‘No, you can’t buy that car,” Pesta said. ‘Love transcends state matters, if that’s what marriage is really all about.’

For many reasons, one could argue the state should quit the marriage business and allow people to be married on their own accord, through other sorts of contracts, said Sarah Ramsey, director of the Family Law and Social Policy Center at the SU College of Law.

‘You can come up with some reasonable arguments and take the position, let’s just let people get in agreements they want rather than having the state’s rules imposed,’ Ramsey said. ‘Like a business, why shouldn’t a couple be able to set up a business they way they want? It’s not totally off the wall to say that.’

The American legal system views marriage as a contract between two consenting adults, Ramsey said. Through this contract, the state steps in and sets certain rights, rules and regulations, often above and beyond what the two individuals want, she said.

These rules and regulations vary from state to state, and oftentimes a couple does not wish to follow all the rules and regulations. To ‘contract out’ of some rules, a couple may sign something like a prenuptial agreement or other documents, Ramsey said. These ‘contract out’ options also vary from state to state.

‘There’s certainly a number of people out there who don’t want to buy into the whole package,’ Ramsey said. ‘One of the issues is, to what extent do we want to let people contract out of the state’s rules and regulations concerning marriage?’

The government can also change its marriage rules and regulations, often without much notice. A state, for example, usually does not require a spouse to provide for another spouse’s children, but it could change the law so that a spouse must provide child support for stepchildren, Ramsey said.

According to marriage laws in most states, same-sex couples cannot be married, nor can first cousins or siblings. People can also not marry multiple spouses. But, again, these laws could change. Massachusetts and Hawaii state courts have already upheld the legality of gay marriage. Many Americans believe marriage laws should be expanded (not abolished) to include same-sex couples.

‘(Same-sex marriage) would be a reason for expanding who we are allowed to get married,’ Ramsey said. ‘But it’s just a piece of the argument to me. You can be in favor of the state allowing gay marriage but not willing to the let the state out of the marriage game completely.’

Without marriage laws to define who could be allowed to marry, the social sanctity of marriage might change. The Bible, as well as founding values of America, define marriage as a union between man and woman, and society has been based on this notion ever since, said Jonathan Benedict, a senior painting major.

‘It’s a sacred thing, and it has been a strong basis for society and life,’ Benedict said. ‘It has roots, and if we’re just going to change it, it will cease to be what marriage was supposed to be.’

People could have marriage contracts with anyone, and the entire historic meaning would collapse.

‘If we don’t have something to regulate marriage, then marriage can be anything people want it to be,’ Benedict said. ‘People could marry animals, what are you going to have next? That’s a bit extreme, but, who knows?’

Polygamy is an example of a marriage contract that has been made illegal for a reason, for its history of abuse and violence, Benedict said.

‘That’s an example of marriage gone wrong,’ he said.

Religious attraction

Religious claims about marriage push opponents to boasts that marriage should be a religious institution, not a legal one. That way people could follow their own religious beliefs regarding marriage and other people who may not share those beliefs will not be subject to legal complications.

In America, marriage is a particular kind of Christian, monogamous, modern ‘nuclear family’ arrangement, said Jake Eichten, a senior sociology and African-American studies major. Marriage hasn’t always been defined this way within the European-Christian context and within other cultures and religions, it’s defined differently, Eichten said.

‘Personally, I have a real problem with ‘marriage,’ because it’s this completely culturally specific idea of what life companionship is about,’ Eichten said. ‘Then it’s institutionalized by state and church alike as if everyone can, or else should, fit inside of it.’

Eichten even questions why legal benefits must be limited to romantic couples. If people want to share insurance benefits with a best friend, or any other non-blood relative, they should be able to draw up a contract to do so, he said.

Battle of the sexes

Some opponents argue that marriage reinforces gender superiority, specifically, one spouse tends to be more dependent on the other and the other wields more power in the family.

‘Used to be, historically, under marriage law, that the wife would be defined as a second-class citizen,’ Ramsey said.

Marriage law has changed so that women no longer lose their property rights or any other economic status. Women also are no longer forced to take their husband’s name, which began as a way to show a husband’s ownership of the wife. Still, some argue that control of one spouse on another still exists, Ramsey said.

‘There’s a level in which, in terms of gender, woman tend to have less authority, earn less money and take more child-caring responsibility in our society,’ Ramsey said. ‘But as long as we have the disparity among people, it’s hard to fix that in the law. You can’t make everybody equal if they aren’t treated the same.’

If people put enough pressure on the government to change marriage law, either to be more inclusive or exclusive or to be abolished altogether, then the law will change.

‘I think of the family law area as running alongside behind society and trying to catch up,’ Ramsey said. ‘It does set norms but then sort of discovers, oops, people aren’t doing this anymore and it changes.’

Lately, opponents of marriage have decided against applying any more pressure, especially as the same-sex marriage battle rages. It’s a battle they’d rather not fight, with so many other issues facing society. Plus, finding support from others is not easy.

‘It’s so implemented in the system and people desire it so much,’ Pesta said. ‘It’s fun, why would they fight against it?’

‘It’s an awkward thing to protest, it’s divisive,’ said Rachel Moran, a senior women’s studies and history major who has planned anti-marriage actions in the past. ‘While I agree it’s wrong and it irritates me to no end, I think that we can come up with something better to fight for.’

Published on April 17, 2006 at 12:00 pm