Manly Thor's Day Special: Piece of paper?

We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
from "My Old Man" by Joni Mitchell

Heartiste*, formerly known as Roissy, is channeling Joni Mitchell arguing that a long term relationship has just as many benefits for a man as marriage.

Sex, love and affectionate companionship don’t feel any more fulfilling when a piece of paper is signed. If you really think about it, it makes no sense that a man’s health would improve and his lifespan increase because he signed on the marital dotted line. Something else is at work here, and that something else is long-term shared love, with or without the imprimatur of a marriage license.

And the really important thing here is to acknowledge that all of that is true. As far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn't go very far.

Heartiste manages to acknowledge at least one direction he might have gone farther but does so only in a tangential way. The give away is in this line:

(In point of fact, this blog advocates learning game and the way of the alpha so that men have the freedom and the options to pursue whichever type of relationship with women they want, whether that be marriage and its attendant risks or frisky one night stands and their attendant, albeit lesser, risks.)

Those parentheses are in the original, the comment is very much parenthetical. What is he getting at here with this talk about risks?  This: When you study who is happiest in our society the very happiest people tend to be married, the next group down are people who never married and the most miserable are people who are divorced. And this the greater risk that goes with marriage: the consequences of failure are huge!

If, however, the benefits of a long-term relationship are equal to those marriage then the risks will also be equivalent.

But when he's gone
Me and them lonesome blues collide
The bed's too big
The frying pan's too wide

That's Joni again and the sad truth is that all of Joni's men left her. And there were a lot of them. Yes you get most if not all of the the benefits of marriage from a long-term relationship but only as long as the relationship lasts. A split will rip you apart psychologically and financially and it's fantasy to pretend otherwise.

The question I'd ask is this: isn't a long-term relationship really just a marriage? No, it's not a legal marriage but who cares what the state thinks? The state is already overly involved in our lives as it is. I'm married because I believe in God and believe that he has designated the Church as his and it was important for me to get sanction from the church for what I was doing.

It also mattered to me to find a partner who believed that marriage is a binding commitment, as an exchange of persons wherein I gave myself to her and she gave herself to me. "No one gets out of this alive," is our line. (We stole that from Pia de Solenni.) The commitment is not that I marry you because I love you but that I will cultivate and grow my love for you because I'm married to you.

But I can't see why a non-religious person would bother with the legal contract. I can't even see why a Christian who didn't believe marriage was a sacrament would do it. (Heartiste, if he were here, would also insist, and absolutely correctly, that the civil law regarding marriage has been changed so that the game is loaded against men.)

There is a sort of "argument from legal insurance".  That argument would say that it is precisely because the risks of failure are so high that you want the state-sanctioned contract in place. If it does fail, you'll be miserable but you'll have recourse to the civil law (that is you'll be able to sue one another) to limit the amount of damage the other person can do to you. The problem with that, as anyone who has watched their friends divorce will tell you, is that it only works when the two parties are able to co-operate relatively amicably. People who are really angry and hurt just destroy themselves whether they have a marriage license or not.

And you're already in trouble if you are going into the thing with an exit plan in place. Although that exit plan is also what Heartiste is doing in pushing the "freedom" of a long-term relationship on your own terms.

Here is the thing, commitment means making promises you can't break. In any relationship at all, the longer you are in it, the less excuse you have for leaving. Everyday you are together you are a little more married. The bond grows, the risk grows. At some point the logic goes the other way—if a piece of paper wouldn't give anything us that we don't already have then we are already married.

What doesn't happen is what Heartiste thinks he can make happen:

... this blog advocates learning game and the way of the alpha so that men have the freedom and the options to pursue whichever type of relationship with women they want ....

This reminds of a night years ago when I was drinking underage in a pick up bar. A woman somewhere in her mid thirties started talking to me. She'd been through a lot. She was also wearing a red dress and shoes and nothing else. You could tell. And she was trying to get me to go home with her, a prospect I wasn't adverse to at seventeen. And I would have except that she suddenly started talking about "relationships". I was stupid at that age but I wasn't so stupid that I couldn't see that a woman sitting in a bar with a slinky red dress and no underwear talking about relationships was insane. And then she said:

What I insist upon in a relationship is complete freedom.

If your freedom matters to you that much, you don't want a relationship in the first place.


* Oh yeah, a link, you may want a link. Okay, but a caveat: Heartiste is vulgar, blunt, insensitive and a misogynist. If you still want to read him, go here.