Why would anyone get married?

Because sharing a drink they call loneliness is better than drinking alone 

Here’s an observation: if you’re a man who gets engaged to a woman, every woman you know will jump up and down and make those little giddy clapping gestures and want to know the proposal story and whether you’ve picked a silver pattern for your registry.

Your single male friends, meanwhile, will look at you as if you’ve just told them you joined the army and say, “Woah. Really?”

And married men, if there are no women around, will say with alarming regularity, “Don’t do it. Seriously. Don’t.” And then they’ll smile in that way meant to indicate they’re kidding, but that it’s the kind of joke that’s supposed to be funny because it’s true.

This all may seem obvious to you (especially if you’re a man whose recently gotten engaged). But it is a particularly interesting real-life observation in light of this passage from a recent essay in the New Yorker by Ariel Levy:

“It’s not difficult to see why men would want to marry women. As [marriage memoir author Elizabeth Gilbert] points out, ‘Married men live longer than single men;… married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.’”

After pointing out that for gay people, marriage has novelty value as an attraction, she does the math for straight brides: “…married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women are. According to Gilbert, married women are not as successful in their careers as single women. Married women are arguably less healthy than single women. Married women, until recently, were more likely to die a violent death than single women — usually at the hands of their own husbands….

“Marrying for money hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion, but generally we are not engaging in strategic dynastic mergers. And in contemporary America we no longer need to get married to produce additional farmhands. So what’s the point?”

Here’s the small observation. You can fill a library with volumes on the patriarchy if you like, but most of our real-world observation will confirm that men tend to avoid marriage if they can, and women tend to push towards it.

If, as Levy proposes and the book she is reviewing suggests, marriages can be seen as traps for most women, then they are traps set, baited and monitored largely by women. Perhaps the key to the difference in happiness reported by husbands and wives relates, at least partly, to their differing expectations going in.

Recently after leaving a completely forgettable romantic comedy with my wife Rebecca, I said to her that I wish more often I could see a movie — a romance movie — that starts with a wedding rather than ending with one. Because in the context of a love story, of most enduring love stories, the wedding is merely the end of the prologue. The interesting part, the real challenges and trials and triumphs, take place over months and years of laughter and screaming.

Interestingly enough, Levy’s essay ends with a related observation: “There is a good reason to end such stories with weddings, buoyant celebrations of love. Because what follows a wedding is a marriage. And marriage is an institution, not a party.”

Drawing on my seven years of experience with marriage — during which, I can report the statistically average information that I am happier, healthier and wealthier than I’d expect to be if I were still single — I can observe that this is true. And, having reached an age when my friends are getting divorced, and when the stages of love we think of as romantic (the fluttery feeling in the belly, the urge to stare endlessly into each other’s eyes) have passed and come back and passed again, I can report that any idea of marriage based on the kind of “love” portrayed in romantic comedies is setting you up for disappointment.

Because marriage is an institution. Or rather, as I see it, each marriage is its own institution. People married to each other form a family. A distinct unit in society. A team. And its key value to the partners in it is exactly that — not in a spicy sex life or googly-eyed romantic dinners or personal goal achievement or any of the other things marriage therapy self-help books recommend.

Individual married people need to — really, they do — work on their own relationships to ensure women are better able to be happy and achieve their goals. That’s obvious from the numbers. But for each woman and man, the calculus of personal advantage breaks down differently — when you enter into a marriage, you are by definition compromising some of your many and various desires. Any marriage with any chance of success depends on both parties to it sublimating their own actualization to the actualization of their new family. But that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. And besides, it’s unavoidable: the essence of freedom is that in making choices, you limit it — when you go through one door and close it behind you, you give up the opportunity to go through all the other doors in the corridor.

If you have a less rom-com, less bridal-magazine view of what you’re getting into, you expect marriage to suck quite a lot of the time, but you get into it because, as the vows say, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, you will be a family. And just like the family you were born into, you will face the world together, indivisible.

And if that sounds like a raw deal to you, then likely marriage is not the right choice for you. Because what becoming institution of two has in the “pros” column, no matter whether you’re gay or straight or male or female, is maybe a single thing, poised against a long list of “cons.” But that positive is the most basic thing, and it changes everything. The world is a big, exciting and often cruel place, and navigating it presents a lot of long nights and difficult decisions, hurt feelings and petty frustrations. Life can often feel like climbing a mountain or riding a rollercoaster or spending a night lost in the middle of the woods with no idea where you are. And all of those situations are better faced, in my humble (married man’s) opinion, with a friend and confidant and partner — a family member — at your side.

» Tell us your ideas about marriage at letters@eyeweekly.com. Follow @EYEWEEKLY on Twitter.