The State Of The Union

Image credit: Economic Times

We live in a time of great change: disruptions in what we have all taken for granted, right down to the sources of our survival and security. The rules and codes of conduct are being rewritten every day.

Of course, this is reflected in our personal relationships: and the marriage and divorce rates, in particular. In recent days, religious leaders have declared that marriage between same sex couples is invalid, as marriage is designed as a protection for children.

But is it? Is a home unbroken and whole when the couple stay together but fight all the time, and commit deceptions and betrayals against each other within the relationship? Often with their children seeing and hearing the conflicts in the home?

The marital landscape in Sri Lanka has become increasingly complicated. The traditional scenario, as explained to me fairly recently, was that people here get married in their late twenties, or early thirties, to please their parents and secure their status in their social groups.

They have children, and then they start to grow in their professional lives and expand their horizons and sense of personal entitlement and aspirations in their thirties and forties. Having married to please others, and with comparatively little knowledge of the character of their partner, they then have opportunistic affairs with people they encounter, usually at work, with these connections being intensified by secrecy and a sense of operating in illicit and clandestine circumstances. In their late thirties, and early forties, with the children becoming teenagers, they try to persuade their partners to enter into open marriages.

An open marriage in 2025 seems like a relic of the swinging sixties, popularized in London and California. In conservative South Asia, where sex education is not taught to young people, dating culture is repressive, and pornographic material is widely available, such a lifestyle meets very little moral resistance. In fact, it is seen by many who proclaim themselves as participants in these arrangements as a measure of a person’s desirability and high value: an index of their success in life. These values are evident in the lives of those for whom monetary success, public image and social status are paramount, and whose relationships are often transactional, because that is what is modelled for them in every aspect of their lives, and reinforced by their peers.

But polyamorous and multiple partner relationships are not imported from the West. Americans always think they invented everything first, from sexuality to superfoods. But polyandry was practised in Sri Lanka for centuries, before colonial culture stamped it out, and imposed monogamy and monotheism and marital monotony.

The only way that complex interconnections between human beings who are simultaneously impacted on by traditional culture, biological imperatives and colonial impositions can be navigated is through a societal normalisation of polyamory. Both partners must be equally desired by others, for such an arrangement to truly offer equal opportunity. Obviously, protection must be used, against STDs, as well as pregnancy. And to prevent the time wasting emotional debris of jealousy and recrimination, pre-nuptial agreements should be mutually agreed on, so that if any of the relationships becomes more significant than any other, or the number of extra marital liaisons cumulatively wear away any residual loyalty or affection, the material assets of each party in the marriage are protected. Because they will each need to move on with their lives after they separate.

The people who suffer most in so-called open marriages are those who still adhere to the traditional beliefs of marriage: that the union of two people is a bond entered into for life, protected by mutual promises to care for each other, and undertaken primarily as a foundation for building a family. This concept does not allow any third party into the marital landscape, and places all the onus on the two marital partners to maintain a harmonious and fulfilling connection, navigating their differences and the challenges of modern life with as much goodwill as they can summon up.

Today, unlike the relationships which were brokered in the past, many people marry across boundaries of race, religion, social class and economic disparity. This complicates matters, but also helps expand the scope of the personal commitment between the partners. It looks as if love alone is what is guiding their decisions. Yet even amongst these love marriages there has been a significant recent, and very sharp, increase in divorce, and ‘open marriages’ in Sri Lanka entered into after the monogamous model has proved too restrictive, are usually one-sided, franchising one partner whose sexual rights and freedoms are imposed on the weaker partner against their will.

However, I would argue that in our twenties, and thirties, at the height of our biological fertility and virility, we are also often comparatively ignorant of our true self. The decisions we make are often self serving, or self sacrificial, and quite superficial. We do not yet know our value, or what our own preferences and best interests are.

It is wise to identify romantic relationships early on as being the single most avoidable cause of distress and drama in human life. They are risky. And they are rarely worth entering into. Because we enter in ignorance - not only blind but multi-handicapped. The odds are hardly ever in our favour.

We are warned in the religious scriptures to not be ‘unequally yoked’ in life. This is an image taken from the days when oxen were harnessed by farmers into a wooden frame to enable them to keep an even and steady pace, side by side, when furrowing a field, to ensure a good harvest. Marriage is a harness into which both partners willingly enter. Both at the outset give up other opportunities to choose each other. To the extent that they remain in unity, the productivity is high, the yield abundant.

But such a unity develops over time. And most people who do not select their partners wisely are unequally yoked from the beginning. In addition to sexual naivety is the related problem of psychological unawareness: lack of insight into one’s own specific circumstances, needs and desires. Social stigmas operate here, to keep us unsafe and vulnerable.

Superficial selection processes stress the physical appearance of the partner, and look at their social and economic status rather than their emotional and psychological resilience and mental health, and what their aims are, in life. Discussions about financial ambitions, monetary habits, health issues, and daily routines rarely seem to occur before the splashy or showy ceremonies are planned.

Marriage experts say that the best predictor of longevity in marriage is how well the couple handles conflict. And the best indicator that the marriage is beyond saving is when they feel and express not hatred, but contempt and indifference for each other, and dismiss their concerns as irrelevant. Intimacy is defined as ‘Into Me You See’, and this is only positive when such insight is handled respectfully, and with care, not weaponised when the couple argue.

Respect is the healthiest foundation of a good union, and long term friendship, and accountability. The ability to identify patterns of behaviour and work to alter them is also a key component in durable marital relationships. The vital skillset required is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. People evolve in astonishing ways throughout their lives: at a far deeper level than a mere makeover.

Marriage requires us to confront the roles society would try to allocate to us: wife and mother; husband and father; head caterer; financial provider; bill payer; bacon home bringer; multi tasker; activities organiser; supporter; social engineer; tower of strength behind the scenes; unsung hero, etc. And outside this circle of respectable covered wagons are the freelancers: the unicorns; the potential homewreckers; the sugar babies; the filles de joies, the women with the push up bras, the men with the ambiguous visages; the escorts and third wheels.

If a person marries with a sense of a soulseated and spiritual bond, and an intellectual connection, as well as with the attractions of their hearts and bodies, this is the most connected two people can be. But even such a blessed union can only deepen and strengthen with mutual observance of what is due to it.

Marriages face innumerable challenges in the predatory society of today, where people are deemed to lose value when they age, or lose money, or become less successful, or are otherwise devalued by society. Women who have children believing they will gain respect are often disillusioned when the opposite occurs, if their husbands are not family men: they are taken for granted, and diminish from a trophy girlfriend to a mother of children, too tired to hang on a partner’s arm or be one half of a glamorous power couple. Many men in a patriarchal society seek to have both a private life and a public one: the most brazen conduct their affairs publicly.

How does a person develop their life path in a productive way, in such a volatile context? How do people commit to responsibilities and commitments as part of being a partner in a union, instead of seeking temporary escapes every time something frustrates them? If a person is surrounded by fawning and flattery at work, but confrontation and challenge at home, where his/her flaws are known by his/her partner, how can s/he withstand the contrast? Will s/he not choose the easier option?

In Celtic culture, marriages were deemed to end each year, unless both parties agreed to continue them. There is much to be said for this approach: it flips the script on the assumed longevity, and takes nothing for granted, bringing any grievances out into the open, where they can be dealt with.

We human beings live a long time, now. And the odds are against a partner chosen in their 20s being able to grow in compatible ways with us throughout the eras of our long lives. Children are our legal responsibility for 18 years. Once they are mature enough to make their own path, the parents still have each other to care for. It’s at this point that some people choose to return to a single state. They have shared their lives, bodies, dreams and finances with another person, and there’s a time limit on that level of exposure when the need is gone.

Now there is less stigma in divorce. Everyone understands that mistakes are made, in early life. Open marriages prolong the messiness and the boundary collapses which erode a primary connection. Some practitioners of open marriages say infidelity provides safety valves and avenues of release. But it draws third parties into unwanted drama, and contaminates the dynamic between the marital partners, eroding mutual trust and safety, and devaluing the promises the partners initially made to each other. It makes heartfelt repair of a relationship almost impossible to achieve.

I want to add that in a good union, it is the increased need of partners for each other’s support as they grow older that consolidates the marriage.

But that if they are unequally yoked, or incompatible, or at different levels of evolution, one partner’s illness or frailty causes the other to draw away. This is the unmistakeable sign of true commitment. That a partner wants to stay, in sickness and in health, and the best of them, if asked, would say there is nowhere else they would rather be.

Marriage is a marvellous melding of multiple undertakings: to care, to protect, to provide for, to nurture, to give as well as take, to find joy and belonging in a mutual flow of feeling and action. It sets a high bar, and is a test many people fail. If we enter it, we should be better prepared and more realistic and open-minded than we currently are, if we want better results. It is a life changing decision, whatever the outcome.

Day dreams and soft focus romantic fantasies will not prepare us for the consequences.