Marriage vs. Cohabitation

Maybe I have a fear of commitment, but what does marriage really say about a couple? That we can spend fricktons of money on one day and then get some tax breaks? Why can't we all be like Johnny Depp, living with his unmarried wife (who he still loves) in pretty lavish villa?

Marriage is less of a legal concept than you think and is more of a cultural concept and experience. You're right in many aspects however I think the concept of marriage has devolved into a legal binding contract rather than a ceremony celebrating two people who appear to actually love one another.

It really depends on your view in today's society and whether you wish to accept the devolved meaning or perhaps "adjusted" meaning of marriage in 2007. It's all perception, your spouse can just as well cheat on you married or not married--it's all a formality on paper.

With a name like Batman, I am surprised you wouldn't want to bring a new girl back to your cave every night!

Wow--that seems like it was a personal jab, kwidge--let's keep it professional. How I spit my game in my batcave is not the issue at hand.

I'm not trying to make cohabitation seem like something crass--I'm just saying that love, which is a quintessential human emotion, should not have to be justified by a document. Love is much more than that. Although I found your automotive analogy quite interesting neeru (because you don't seem like a car person), I actually feel that it is you and your marriage devotees who have the greatest insecurity. You refer to the "the idea of being bound" and the need for contracts to keep the community together. I can understand documentation for a land deed--but love? It seems that those who need marriage are insecure about their love and need something more to justify it. Cohabitation seems to imply a higher understanding of love (if treated with care--not regarded for its "temporariness")--that love supersedes some concepts of humanity. Maybe only those who have this understanding can cohabit.

Thus, sex could ultimately happen when those individuals have reached that level of understanding of their love. Hopefully most of society will continue to teach abstinence--and for most until marriage---but for those select few--

'Hymen, Hymenee, why do you tantalize me thus? O, why do you last only for a single moment? Why can you not continue? Is it because, if you were to last beyond that moment, it would surely kill me?' (The Goddess of Marriage employed as a synecdoche for the Supreme Communion of the Self with the Self; All Love is an Allegory of Masturbation).

It's a bit of a banality, nowadays, to presuppose a distinction between Love and Lust; that difference is a Vapor. Your Libido has as much to do with your 'transcendent' relationships as your Soul, or your Mind. Love between Strangers cannot begin without the interest (whether sublimated or explicit) of the Flesh (the Body being the provenance of our Dreams; thus spake the First Meditation of Renee Descartes). In order to sustain that love, moreover, one always requires the presence of an erotic Vitality (By this, I allude neither to the 'copulations of Lady Chatterley' nor to the diagrams of Vatsayan; The theatricality of the relationship, its aesthetic beauty, has to be maintained). When it comes to Autonomous (as distinct from manufactured) persons, I do not see how anyone can disagree with Marcello (8 1/2): 'I don't want your sticky, maternal love. It's not love. It's brutalization.'

I don't know what, precisely, Batman could mean when he writes of 'a higher understanding of love.' Is it superior to Shakespeare's understanding of (fleshly) love?

'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the Sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips' red,
If snows be white, why then her breasts are dun,
If hair be wires, then black wires grow on her head'

Love has to be apprehended as an Antithesis, the Beloved outside of Consciousness, outside of Mimesis: Pure Negation.

There is no place for experiential reality when it comes to relationships amongst autonomous beings; there is only theatricality. The motivations are simple: the relationship has to be kept interesting. The dialectics of Marriage/Cohabitation (the two relationships are precisely the same) always have to stress the Devourer, not the Prolific. And Creative Energy, as everyone knows, originates in one's phallus. What Batman describes is Angelic Love, love amongst the unsexed; he forgets that Angels are inferior to Men. You are a mammal, sir, and an embodied Self. Spirit, for us, is always a Bone.

Well--quite the post from iqbalicarus--replete with allusions galore and some interesting perspective. I feel that you do not understand me completely ("I don't know what, precisely, Batman could mean") but you appear to pass judgment on my perspective--calling it "Angelic Love"--so I'll try to clarify--

Firstly, I agree that there is little difference between love and lust--they are intertwined. I do not attempt to make that distinction in the higher understanding of love--it is a combination of the carnal and spiritual. So this "higher understanding of love" is not superior to Shakespeare's fleshy version--if anything it encompasses it.

The love which I describe is an all-encompassing and tacit part of human nature. I don't know if iqbalicarus has felt such love--that bond of unspoken care, romance, passion, and lechery for a single individual--that it pains you to have a moment without their presence. Maybe it is this "Beloved outside of Consciousness" of which you speak--

Developing this sort of bond is what keeps the relationship as you say "interesting". It is this bond that makes me believe that there is a noted subtlety between marriage and cohabitation, between wanting security and already having it. Maybe I am idealistic in my interpretation--maybe I am just a mammal governed by my phallus--but humanity to me is the juxtaposition of the mammal and the mind it comes with--capable of a higher understanding of love.

'I don't know if iqbalicarus has felt such love..'

What a feeble attempt at churlishness;

What you're describing isn't complex; it is burlesque, a farce on humanity. The old Monastic Poets had one thing right: they apprehended Christian love through the tropes of 'a disease of the mind.' Don't you see how ludicrous the effusion, 'I love thee,' is? You don't even have access to a 'Thou'; all that you apprehend is a fucking simulacrum! You're lorded over by a Golem (and I wonder what its name is: Meth or Aemeth?)

If your Beloved is an Eidolon, then what, precisely, is the World? To allow yourself to be subsumed under the Negative Presence of another consciousness is to abjure the world that both of you inhabit. What you call 'Love' is preternaturally Evil, a hysterical farrago, a parody of Love as it should be: the Love 'of the rose for the nightingale, for the chevalier who never comes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of Rudolf for the Lady of Tripoli'. The Love, in short, of Absence.

Authentic relationships, amongst authentic people (as distinct from automatons) do not involve Transcendence of any kind: they are immanent, 'Pure Being;' they occur as interlocutions and copulations, not as Sighs.

Your love, by the way, remains an Angelic Love: unsexed, androgynous, etiolated.

There has yet to be any set rules pertaining to cohabitation- I remember reading from the Law Society a few years ago that although it has been attempted, since 2002, there has been very nominal significance in creating a set structure-perhaps that is why cohabitation may seem appealing, because there are no true restrictions, as opposed to "being wed." Simultaneously, in a legal outlook, I only see cohabitation as adverse. Taking into account the difficulties that would exist in joint loans and pensions..even considering what would happen post-breakup, it just seems that this yield more complications than anything else. In the case of a break-up, extrication of property; there would be no proof of ownership, maintenance of costs, division of expenses..etc. I feel like such agreements exist because of a couples inability to figure it out on their own. Of course, if you consider what is bringing the two individuals together, regardless of the title "marriage" or "cohabitation," I guess what should only matter is the fact that the two are in love..

Haha--it was only a feeble attempt because I held back my friend. How can you be the judge of what is a farce on humanity? Because you've read some literature? Although you call my attempt feeble, you make no attempt to counter my claim on whether you've personally ever felt love--

Although I did enjoy your verbose bad-mouthing, I feel that we are at crossroads. You are a strong believer in this Love of Absence (because of your experience reading) and you have heard my views. So I feel that this argument (on love in a marriage vs. cohabitation debate) has run its course.