- #36
verty
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However, some people enter into marriage or make promises with good intent, but perhaps without thinking thoroughly regarding the promise, or perhaps without full internal commitment, hence the marriage fails and the promise is broken.
But society frowns on people who have children outside of wedlock. Therefore, people are likely to marry before or shortly after having children whether or not they have thought it through or whatever. They'll do it because supposedly it's 'the right thing to do'.
So they follow the tradition because it is traditional. Traditions have that effect, so saying that traditions can be meaningful seems to miss the point that traditions have 'social merit' pretty much regardless of what they mean. Any meaningfulness is largely irrelevant.
It's like when I read books on etiquette, perhaps by Dale Carnegie or Peter Post, and I read that one should "be genuinely interested in listening to people" or "show people that you are genuinely interested". They typically follow it up with something like "I don't mean that you should lie, I mean that you should be genuinely interested". This seems very similar to "you should marry if you have children and you should mean it". It all seems rather disingenous to me.
If you want to keep the meaningfulness of marriage, then divorce it from the matter of having children and from the matter of it being the right thing to do. If you want to keep the children-connection, forget about the eternal commitment. I don't see that one can keep both.