that you'll always stay

For better or for worse

ST journalist Teo Pau Lin

With friends around me divorcing, is marriage for keeps, I sometimes wonder. But I believe that to have and to hold - at age 70 - is still a beautiful thing.

There's a Hollywood-Watch column published in this weekly news magazine that always makes me laugh. Titled 'But how long will it last?', it assesses in witty point forms the chances of marital success whenever a celebrity couple decides to tie the knot. Jennifer Lopez made several appearances in it. Britney Spears' 24-hour tryst in Las Vegas was so brief it warranted such a headline, 'Annulled and Void'.

But it's no laughing matter when such sniggering derision creeps into your own life.

Lately, I've developed a streak of cynicism which I find quite unsettling. Mention that a friend is getting married, and my first thought would not be congratulatory, but an almost cocksure 'But how long will it last?'

The name of marriage has fallen on hard times, at least to me and some around me. That marriage is difficult is a fact that was drilled into me throughout my growing up years. Someone's mother is having an affair. Uncle so-and-so has taken a second wife. Oh no, the neighbours are fighting again.

But for better or for worse, people stayed married. Divorce was a huge taboo you resorted to only when things got cataclysmically beyond repair.

You can hardly say the same for the current generation. It's a sobering thought when I realise that among my peers, I know of at least 10 people who have divorced, and four who are twice divorced. They had different reasons: incompatibility, extra-marital affairs, diverging career paths, lack of support and respect for each other. And you could blame it on many things.

You could say women are now financially independent enough to call it quits if married life doesn't suit them. You could say the pursuit of the good life has couples more bent on building careers than mending homes. You could say the consumerist culture has people ditching their spouses the moment they fall out of favour, pretty much like an old mobile phone or a boring TV show. Judging from its failure rate, you could even say that marriage is nothing more than legal cohabitation with a 50-table banquet thrown in. If it doesn't work out, just bail.

Which leaves unmarried people like me wondering: Is marriage even workable? Is there reason to still believe in it?

In my quest to find some answers, I asked a few people, both married and unmarried, why they want to be married. To have kids, said one. For stability, said another. To be in a long-term loving relationship, added a third. But one sentiment echoed throughout: marriage is 'damn scary'. The odds against it are high.

Man is not meant to be monogamous, said one, and you can dig up reams of anthropological texts to support that. Another observed that modern urbanite couples are assaulted by so much temptation, as both husband and wife are exposed to the lures of career, money or that secret fling. A married female friend dished out the biggest blow of all: 'If two people don't love each other any more, they should just divorce.'

Anyone who's ever been in a long-term relationship would know that it's common to fall in and out of love with your partner, sometimes even in the course of a day. If marriage is based on how you feel about your spouse, and feelings are so capricious, what hope is there in a lasting union? Amid the storm of opinions and, frankly, nuptial dampeners, came a voice that brought some order.

My elder brother, who has been married for six years and has two young daughters, crunched down the reason that marriage hasn't worked for so many people: 'It's easier to find something new than fix something old.’ Of the many ingredients required to make a good marriage - compatibility, trust, respect, communication, similar values and goals - one other sticks out above the rest.

The will for the relationship to work.

'You'll always have bad times in a marriage,' he said. 'But if you have the will for it to work, it will get you through. You'll try harder. You wouldn't give up so easily,' he said.

This sentiment was repeated when I posed the 'Man is not meant to be monogamous' theory to a 27-year-old guy friend, who belongs to a rare breed of young men with an infectious optimism about marriage. 'Yeah, but Man is not meant to fly too. It's about having determination to do it, right?' he argued.

To me, what's undeniable is that Man is not meant to be alone.

Marriage is not a better way of living. Many single people lead happy and productive lives, enriched by friends and family. But personally, I'd love to relish in the comfort of knowing that there is this one person who will stick around through all my thick's and thin's.

In an age where everything is changeable and disposable, I'd love to say that there is at least one thing I've stuck to and nurtured for over 40 years. Friends will not be there when you're 70 and coughing in bed in the middle of the night.

I'd like to know that there will be someone who will fluff up my pillows and get me my pills. More than that, I'd love to be able to feel trusted and depended on by someone as I do the same. This, perhaps, is the very meaning of marriage: that you will always stay.