Quick Bit About Marriage

Not even 24 hours into the experiment and I'm already blowing my cover. (Namek, don't tell the others! :p) I posted this on "some webforum" just now and wanted to share it here, too. This is a reply to a young man who suggested that perhaps men ought to forego marriage until they are in their fifties because that way they can be players up until then and then at age 50 they can go ahead and marry a pretty little thing, rather than marrying early, having kids and a family, only having sex with one woman, and inevitably end up cheating on her with the same pretty little thing from before. Needless to say, this kid's a real cynic about marriage and men's role in it, but anyway, here was my response. I hope you enjoy it:

The better question to ask might be whether or not people ought to commit to permanent social relationships in general. Marriage is one specific example of a permanent social relationship, but there are others: parent-child, brother-sister, and ruler-ruled. I think the only one missing is blood-brothers and you'd have the five classic Confucian bonds a person makes over the course of their life.

Rather than worry about age, beauty, or other things that play into marriage and divorce, ask yourself what the benefits are in publicly committing your private life and your body to one person and ask yourself if these benefits outweigh the benefits of having sex with friends, living with friends, maybe even making kids with friends but never getting married to each other and being comfortable with the possibility that they may be having sexual or romantic experiences with other men or women besides you.