Marriage Is Necessary, But It Can’t Fix Relationships

For a long time, I wanted to get married to my long-time boyfriend. I felt that with all the trials and tribulations that we had been through, we should have been ready for the next step. What more could we need but to tie the knot? So I decided, without his opinion on the matter, that we were going to get married.

I was narrow-minded to think that at 20 years old, marriage was the answer to all my problems. To all our problems as a unit. Me and him, he and she, would become we, and everything would be better.

And then like a villain in the night, infidelity crept up on us. My eyelids weighed a ton, my flesh scrunched up tight as my nails dug into my own skin. Tears rushed down my face like waterfalls. We had reached the end of peace. I felt like I died.

No one had taught me what marriage was, and I began to ask myself if I wanted to get married after all. I didn’t know many married people and those who were married were on their way to divorce. Has the necessity of marriage lessened? Why aren’t people interested in happily ever after? Marriage should be the goal that everyone strives for, but there are too many factors preventing it.

The independence of women has enabled men to get away with not fully devoting and investing in a relationship. Men believe that money is the only factor in getting women and use that as leverage, and women have come to believe that their bodies are the only leverage in getting a man.

What happened to falling in love because of conversations that captured your mind and fed your soul, making you wanting more? Money and sex is all it has become. Money and sex will never lead to a truly wholehearted marriage. Men believe that a woman who wants to be independent has no right to ask them to pay for dates or for anything, while women don’t want to waste their time with a man who can’t pay their bills and take them shopping, especially if he expects to have sex. This has made the whole dating thing confusing, and so we forget about marriage.

Dating is the pathway to marriage. You’re never supposed to stay in the dating phase. Dating with intent means that you are dating with purposeful ideas. That you have things you want out of the relationship, and begin to transition from dating to marriage.

Deep down inside, I realized that the true meaning of dating is finding your opposite equal. Finding someone who has different values as you, but can agree to disagree because you have decided that you’re here to learn from and teach each other. Then, you should move on to marriage. Marriage should be the place where love constantly grows, because we have that right. We are designed for marriage.

When I was younger, I believed that everyone had a soulmate. Then I grew up and wasn’t sure what a soulmate was. I felt it was my duty to never need a man, and it was the duty of men to know I never needed them.

Every turn you see, people say they need to be independent, they don’t need a man. In reality, we need each other. But with people in the media screaming to use men for their money, women like me who do not agree become so independent that we do the man’s job for him.

We constantly tell men that we don’t need them for anything, and that creates pain for real men who want to provide. The passive men use the mentality of the independent movement to benefit themselves, believing that they can get away with being with a woman and not investing in the relationship.

We are in a world where we give and take from each other. This might sound like a bad thing, but it isn’t. When the world has beaten up men, we women should shield them and love them. And when the world has threatened women, men should be there to protect them.