'...we have enough fun.'

A recent habit of mine involves hanging around the Yahoo! Answers site. Now, if you’ve never had anything to do with Yahoo! Answers, it’s a great way to kill time. You can post and answer questions, gaining and losing points according to what actions you do (ask, answer, vote, etc.) . This morning, as I was waiting for my parents to wake, I was doing some voting and I came across a question that made me shake my head.

The question itself wasn’t what caught my attention, but rather what was written in the description. This is part of what the asker wrote: ‘I’m 19 and he’s 25. We’ve been together for over a year now. I’m not interested in getting married because we have enough fun, but I want to add a baby to the picture.’

You might ask, what’s wrong with this? To me, it’s the whole having a child and not wanting to get married. In fact, forget the child, it’s just the part about not wanting to get married because ‘we have enough fun.’

I wish I could find the article now, but I can’t remember where I saw it. It was a blog post stating how marriage is becoming obsolete in the US. In the past a couple wouldn’t dream about having an intimate relationship without being married, but nowadays, it seems the majority of couples would rather stay boyfriend-girlfriend than commit to each other in marriage. The building block of families is becoming non-existent across the nation.

I will admit that I am both old fashioned and orthodox in my following of Islam, so I am of the opinion that a lot of our societal problems stem from the waning of marriages. I could be wrong, but I have my reasons. To me, these causal relationships tend to be more about sex than anything else. Marriage is more; it’s about working in tandem with someone else, thinking of them in almost every decision you make, and so on. Without marriage, where’s the commitment? When the sex gets old, what’s going to stop her from leaving? What’s going to keep him around after the child is born if they aren’t married?

I know there are plenty of people out there who disagree with me and my views, and good for them. I’m sure just as there’s research supporting my opinion, there’s research supporting theirs. What do think? Is marriage becoming obsolete? If it is, is it a bad thing?