Marriage - Institution or Prostitution?

I am fully aware that the title is sounding very scandalous as it is, but a shocking statement is befitting the state of affairs in today's society. I always like to start my post by posing a question and this time around I shall do the same. Ask anyone you know what is the most important thing that he would like to have? While I have not researched the answers prior to writing this, I can give a fairly good guess that the top two answers that are most likely to be popular are "love" and "money".

By now you must have realized that I have a tendency to psycho-analyze every single event or thought, that I come across and today's topic is merely another agenda. The way I look at these two answers, love and money, are that one symbolizes independence while the other dependence. Let me explain. Everyone of us have dreamt of how we will live luxuriously. Even if we achieve a certain amount of luxury, money is still a prized possession no matter which class of society you hail from, rich or poor. So what makes money such a lucrative possession? If you think about it in layman terms, I believe the single fact that money can give you the independence to spend it the way you want, buy things that you want, or go to places that you want, explains plenty. So a simple equation of having the utopian control over how we want to lead our lives is the epiphany of how much money we tend to have. So we could say that in a distorted way, Money in today's generation is a signature of our independence. Period. I can hear people saying material things aren't everything, but let's face it.. money is and probably will be the only most important asset any human in this world would covet or fight over. Now moving on to our other answer, every single human has a natural instinct towards feelings and showcasing them upon one another. A person looking for 'love' is necessarily a person looking for someone to depend on, to bank on when times get rough, or when times get happy or sad. Even a person having the independence of money will not be able to substantiate his stand without the dependence of his co-members of society. To be specific, a person achieves many things, but he can never achieve love, he can only earn it. And in order to earn it, you need to depend on someone to give it you. So, this brings us to the next equation of how love is the true form of dependence. While sometimes love can be bought, as in the case of prostitution, nevertheless we humans rely on this dependence and we strive on it all our lives to find that true soul who can provide it to us for free.

I believe a positive harmony of love and money, where independence meets dependence and together they form an 'union', is when a marriage is born. It becomes an institution when we give ourselves guidelines such as love each other until we die, be there for them through sickness and health, and most of all learn to be selfless in sharing our love and money. But this kind of utopia is currently non-existent. Every person has a selfish reason to be with someone, and although we may do acts of love and sacrifice, not all marriages are an equal equation. There are unbalanced marriages out there that are striving purely on 'tolerance'. When the tolerance level decreases dangerously, the equation breaks and divorces into fragments. While we see the negative aspect of this positive union, what if from the starting there is a disharmony of love and money where one buys the love from another through money. Well, don't we see this happening a lot nowadays? So many celebrity marriages, and sometimes even your friends and relatives tend to make a decision to marry someone based on their social standing and jingling fat pockets. Are they any less than prostitution??? Why not! Now, I know prostitution is an ugly word and not everyone wants to use due to its context of 'sex'. But, if we consider sex to be an act of love, we can call love as a derivative of sex in the terms of prostitution. I think nonetheless of what we believe, we do see a huge imbalance of how people mix love and sex and money to make an ugly affair of their lives. Almost all the marriages that end up in a shipwreck must have started in disputes related to money, and the selfishness towards asking a price for all the care and affection that we provide.

In olden days, men tend to scrutinize women for their role in society to the extent where it was considered prestige for a woman to be wed, no matter how old or how bad her relationship with the man is, and a woman who is unwed was considered an outcast. So many women would have felt it a boon to be married in the first place, and therefore they were pretty much happy with their place in the society, to be known as someone's wife. That may have been enough then, but that is not the case today. We, women are looking for self-worth and identity. We need the independence of doing what we want and the dependence of being associated with a man. So when we find a lot of marriages breaking up, we tend to see a pattern in how dissatisfied the woman could be if she finds herself a mere shadow of someone else' personality. So the institution with guidelines have broken down today and are no longer valid. Every person is on his own and he/she soley becomes responsible for their happiness or wreckage in this life. Not to say that men dont play a part in marriage, I just wanted to give a woman's perspective. If a woman marries a man only to eat off his assets and just be an eye candy to be showcased everywhere, I believe it is the man who has become the prostitute. He is being used for his money and his love is no more valuable than himself.

I know that for ages we have come to realize that marriage is one of the most significant event occurring in a person's life, but whether we really do understand the concept of love and money and how their integration can easily lead a marriage from an institution into a prostitution is my food for thought for the day.