Wedding on May 12th in Harbin.

On May 12th I went to a wedding with T.C. This page has photographs from the wedding. The experience brought back to me memories of my own engagement ceremony, which I celebrated with Chun-Chih’s family and our friends almost exactly 20 years ago. I was feverish and delirious at the time (twenty years ago, not on May 12th of this year), so my memories of that occasion aren’t so clear. I remember my new brothers-in-law helping me make the rounds from table to table to honor the guests who came.

I'll put my musings at the end of this page after the photographs.

I suppose at any wedding one reflects on one’s own marriage or the issues of marriages in general, or human relationships, love, attachment, caregiving, and so forth. Someone quipped, “the ceremony is a statement to the guests that now it is legal for the couple to have sex.” That got me thinking about this question of the function of the ceremony. Naturally there are many functions. Feasts and feasting in general seem to have a few basic functions across most human societies, and these functions would include:
1) spreading wealth to reduce jealousy or hostility toward the feast-giver host;
2) displaying generosity and opulence as a power play to awe guests and make the feast-giver host a more desirable friend and ally, in short, to raise the status of the host;
3) helping the host feast-giver create and support their self-concept and identity as a good member of society who follows the appropriate rites and cares about conventional obligations.

But with a wedding ceremony I think there are a couple extra deep things going on. Marriage is a surrender to love and a commitment to work together, partly to rear children and partly to function as a unified team in society. If people love each other and live together without a wedding ceremony or official marriage (even if the marriage is simply swearing an oath in a judge's chambers), when the couple reach a point of great dissatisfaction or conflict, the option of leaving is easier.

In any coupling the quality of the match and relationship can be rated along some sort of continuous scale; the overall quality and satisfaction varies on this scale over time, in any relationship there will be lows and highs. With tens of thousands of potential partners out there, it’s almost a certainty that there would be many potential partners out there who would, if coupled with you, make a better match than whoever you presently are with. That is, if my wife and I have a relationship that averages around a 7 or 8 on some sort of 0-to-10 total satisfaction and healthy relationship index, it's quite probable that both she and I could find someone else who would be able to match with us and attain a marriage with an average satisfaction/health rating of 8.5 or 9. With so many potential marriage partners, it is never likely that you have found the person who is the absolute best match in the world. If we had 6,000-year life-spans we might search around for centuries before settling down in marriage, to be sure we had found someone who was in the top 0.5% of all potential marriage parters for us. But we only have about 30 years to find a partner between sexual maturity and the time when our fertility declines, so we typically have 5-10 years, and as we’re not getting a huge sample of potential partners, we settle for someone who is in the top 50% or top 10% of all potential marriage partners, and for about half of us, this seems to work all right (at least we don’t divorce or abandon our spouses), and for a third of us we go on to have life-long marriages that are characterized by very high satisfaction and enduring, deep love.

Without a marriage, if our relationship goes through a period where the satisfaction or relationship health is down at 3 or 4, it's much easier to think about moving on and looking for someone who will be able to help us achieve an even better partnership. But with a marriage we have committed to stay with each other and work things out, and sworn an oath in front of relatives and friends. The government and religious institutions have even officially recognized our partnership and given us some rights and responsibilities because of it. So, I think the wedding ceremony is actually a sort of tool of social control that tries to help individuals feel intense social pressure to work on keeping their marriage together. It’s a way of telling individuals, “you may sometimes be dissatisfied or unhappy in your marriage and new family life, but we’ve all witnessed a ceremony in which you wed, and it was an elaborate and expensive and beautiful ritual, so now, because of this marriage institution, you are obligated to try with all your abilities to work things out and stay together as a couple if it is at all possible.”

I think this sort of social pressure that comes with the institution of marriage and wedding ceremonies is a good thing for society. Sometime in early adulthood after dating and trying out different matches, a person gets to a point where they know themselves well enough and know what is important to them, and with some consultation or help from wise parents or friends they should be able to find someone who is “good enough” to form a family with. If the two people forming the marriage are committed to it and wise enough to work on making their marriage a good one, it can move from “good enough” to really great, and they can stay quite happy.

But, if a society doesn’t invest in the institution of marriage or have wedding ceremonies, people will be more likely to dissolve their partnerships and go on looking for a better match. With that sort of increased instability in long-term partnerships, where they become long-term rather than life-long, I think child-rearing will generally suffer in quality, and caregiving in later years of life or during serious illness will also be more difficult. While many individuals might find deeper happiness by splitting away from their long-term partners to find a better partner, many other individuals would never find a better partner. Also, the strength of character and the virtues that one develops by working through relationship problems and negotiating difficulties so that problems get resolved would be lost if people just gave up when things weren't easy enough for them. Also, with long-term or life-long commitment people will be forced to learn how to improve their relationships and get happiness out of their marriage while making their partner happy, and such skills are useful outside of marriage in nearly all human relationships. But if people figure it’s easier to go out and find the next-and-better partner instead of working on dealing with the relationship they are in, their skills of improving relationships will to some extent atrophy.
But of course there plenty of relationships where the individuals have changed so much that they can no longer get any reasonable level of satisfaction or happiness together, or one partner is so selfish or cruel, or the couple realizes they didn't make a good match and it will be easy for each of them to find a much better partner after a break-up. So, a culture needs to allow some flexibility for divorce, but also needs to discourage it, so it’s not too easy, not so much for what this does to any particular couple, but for what it does to social expectations dominant in the culture about how people should approach marriage.

I've lived through a major transformation in marriage and divorce patterns in America. The divorce rate spiked way up in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then settled down or slightly and slowly declined over the following decades up until now. But divorce rates are still quite high, with about 40% of first-time marriages ending in a divorce (although if the couple haven’t had a child before marriage and have one within a few years of marriage and both are well-educated and in their 20s the divorce rates at first time marriage are still pretty low, like maybe less than 20% I think). Marriage rates have declined as well, as more people remain single or don't remarry after their first divorce. In my society, more people live in single-person households than at any other time in American history. The median age at first marriage is also the highest it has ever been. Pre-marital co-habitation or co-habitation and long-term partnerships as a substitute for life-long partnerships (marriage) are also at their highest level ever in American history. I can look at Sweden, where marriage is widely being abandoned in favor of long-term or life-term partnerships that are not initiated with a wedding ceremony, and I wonder if that is where American society is headed. I'm not sure what is behind all these trends.

On one hand, I suppose that men were not treating women very well, and then feminism came along, women understood how marriage was often a bad deal for them, and so women were more cautious about marriage or more willing to divorce. So, high divorce rates seem to me to be partly a temporary problem as the American male gets his act together and makes himself into a better person who can attract and sustain a worthwhile life-long partnership with a more discriminating and powerful American woman. On another hand, I think capitalism tends to commodify all aspects of life, and more people probably go into relationships and marriage as consumers who expect high levels of satisfaction. To some degree this is good, as couples can be more aware of what they want and communicate with each other what they like or don’t like about their relationship. But to a larger degree, I think people take up a consumer attitude where they expect much from their partner but do not consider as deeply that their partner is also a customer, and each must give just as much as they take. So, the commodification of human relationships and the self-concept citizens in capitalist societies take as consumers who want the best products probably also undermine marriage. There are economic reasons as well for changes in marriage, as young adults entering the workforce are now less likely to earn a wage that would adequately support a decent lifestyle of the costs of rearing children, and this economic problem makes it difficult for people to get married. It is as if we have a nation of apprentices who never move up to journeyman or master status, and so have difficulty taking on responsibilities of marriage. But I blame economic conditions just as much for the immaturity of some people who are kept in a state of dependency by the inequalities and injustices of capitalism. (Capitalism has many advantages as well—there are trade-offs, and just as capitalism harms families it can also be a tool that could strengthen families, given the right political circumstances or popular will).

China seems to be following the lead of the western capitalist nations such as the United States in terms of higher divorce rates, more people deciding to live as single-person households without getting married, and more people accepting long-term partnerships as a substitution for life-long partnerships. Marriage as an institution is still strong here, and it’s still strong in the United States (and in some ways probably stronger than it was 30 years ago). In most of China I suppose marriage is still very traditional, and the new trends in marriage and relationship formation are probably mostly concentrated among wealthier Chinese in the wealthiest and most capitalist/cosmopolitan centers of trade and commerce (in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc.).

I’m optimistic about the long-term future for marriage. As the feminist and post-modern ideas spread across the world, the global generation of people born in the last years of the 20th century and the first years of our current century are likely to strive to attain more equality and egalitarianism in their married lives. Housework and child-rearing will be more fairly shared, and extremes of masculinity and femininity will be softened as people become more balanced and androgynous. Rising levels of education and psychological sophistication should also help people make better choices about whom they marry or how they improve their marriages.

At the wedding today, I was thinking about these things when my brain became tired of trying to understand what people were saying, as I can only understand about 25% of the words people use in most cases, although in some conversations about simple matters I might easily understand 80% of what people are saying and make reasonable guesses from context about the remaining words and meaning.