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Wickstone’s Weekly Work – #2

Something that peaked my interest from this week’s lessons was the idea of marriage, and what it actually means to be married. So often we just think of marriage as the final step of creating a life with the person you love, and to a certain degree, that’s true. However, there is so much more that marriage represents that I wanted to take a little dive in to the psychological components that make up the foundations of marriage. 

A man who’s intellectual integrity and formulated opinions I have admired for quite some time now is Jordan Peterson. A psychology professor at the University of Toronto, he received an influx in fame as a result of his opposing views on a bill the government passed regarding transgender rights a few years back. Anyways though, that’s not the point. The point is I came across a video of one of his lectures where he discusses what marriage is, and what it means when you tell someone you will be with them for the rest of theirs and your lifetime.

I find Jordan to be wonderfully spoken, and his train of thought to allow for genuine comprehension and inspiration. I really liked this clip because in class we’ve been focusing so much on women vs. men and their roles, and this just reminded me of what it means to actually get married, and why people even do it.

No matter how it’s broken down, marriage will always be a way of boxing yourself in to staying with your partner. It creates a boundary that shields couples from the worry of making a mistake and losing their loving partner because of it. In this sense, marriage accepts that their will always be conflict between man and woman, that it’s natural. I can’t decide if the “voluntary enslavement” as Jordan puts it is beautiful or sad. Regardless, I get the sense that we are straying further and further from the true purpose of marriage, with couples getting married so young just to prove their love. 

Mid way through the video, Jordan gets in to divorce and discusses with his students what happens to the man and the woman in the case of a divorce. Explaining that on a fundamental level, both are screwed, with a ‘market value’ that has declined since the marriage. Jordan refers to the man in the situation as an “indentured servant”, which I find to be really interesting compared to what I’ve learned about the roles of men and women throughout history.

Humans are made for each other, there’s no doubt about that one. Sure we all have issues and faults, but they’re only downfalls if we treat them as such. Marriage is the psychological comforter that allows people to make the scary leap in to the world of certainty alongside the one they love, and that’s a beautiful thing.