Before conducting this project, I saw marriage as one dimensional. Everything I knew about the social relationship came from experiences with my own family and since I came from a non-religious relatively typical suburban household marriage was more of a legal and cultural norm than anything extremely personal r sacred. From project group to public interviews though I experienced a more pluralistic view of the rite of passage and I saw how diverse and individualized marriage can be. Moreover, talking with peers about the institution I realized how much the idea of marriage is in flux with this generation and I was forced to come to terms with how I want to incorporate this rite of passage into my own life.

Interacting with my group members I saw two sides of marriage I had barely meaningfully interacted with. Lauren came from a religious background with marriage. To her, she has always wanted to be united with someone and to the church through this rite of passage. To Lyam, marriage was heavily culturally incentivized since she came from a Latino background where marriage is central to family. Right at the start my domestic, legal and secular interpretations of marriage were challenged and I began to see how pluralistic of an institution it can be.

Moreover, when we expanded out to peers and mentors on and off campus, my interpretations of marriage became even more broad. Interestingly I found that the conversations that stuck with me the most were those that were critical of the institution. In my head, all the conversations I had which talked about marriage being a beautiful and deep relationship all seemed to blend together in my head. They seemed like platitudes—words which were the default descriptors for the relationship. In a Freudian manner, I feel like this subconscious blending together reflected my deeper opinions of marriage. Everyone says it is this wonderful, life changing relationship, fetishized year-round in holiday and summer rom-coms, but to me that just seemed like a norm we all go along with to distract from the many dissatisfactions we actually have in our personal relationships. Marriage can be really hard and be really painful. My friend Zach commented that to him marriage means “60 percent divorce.” Since we gave women the legal and cultural power to leave bad marriages and divorce has become normalized, the plurality of poor relationships in marriage has become evident in the divorce rate. My other friend Phoebe’s comment that “marriage is a great opportunity…to ruin your life” also highlights how immensely stressful and negatively impactful going through a bad marriage can be. I think the best resolution towards marriage came from our interactions Lauren and I had with two soon-to-be spouses in the Dartmouth print shop. To the future husband, while wedding as a verb is a “pain in the ass”, marriage is fine.” To me this quote made the most personal sense to me. Marriage can be hard, especially as your personal relationship has to go through the societal lens but your relationship is what allows you to get through it. We do marriage not because it makes our relationships real but rather because it is something we do once our relationships are real and can react to pressure.

Lauren and my conversation with Professor Dominy especially struck me. In my family, marriage just made sense to do when you were comfortable with someone. To Dominy though marriage simply didn’t make sense once he was comfortable with his wife.  Dominy and his now wife, Erin, were doing all the same things as a married couple but they weren’t married. To Dominy, marriage was simply a huge waste of resources, he loved his wife and that was enough. Still though they decided to get married because his wife wanted to and because there were substantial political incentives to get officially married. While talking to Dominy I realized that I wasn’t entirely like my parents, in my head I always had an idea of eventually being in a long term meaningful relationship and sharing my life with someone who I deeply cared about but marriage never really seemed like an essential aspect of that relationship. Perhaps a better way of describing that is, marriage doesn’t require a wedding to me. I don’t feel like I have to have my personal relationship elevated t the societal level for it to be meaningful and like Dominy’s photo of him and his wife sitting on a cliff face in Africa, marriage is meant to be an adventure not an institution. Although I probably will end up having some sort of wedding just because of how culturally normative it is. Although as we’ve seen as creating this website, marriage as a cultural norm is dramatically declining.