Should Marriage Be Our Ultimate Goal?

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It's quite wonderful that many of us on the spectrum excel in our field of interest. We're among the best sportsmen, artists and scientists there are.

But I wonder sometimes - is that enough? Should we also try to cap our illustrious, sometimes empty, lives with marriage and kids, you know, normal stuff?

Be a kind decent human being. Having kids is only 1 way to help.
Yes it is enough to do well.

I agree; contributing to society and bettering the world has no correlation to marriage and reproduction. Now, there are many people who do contribute great things to society who do happen to have spouses and children, and, yes, these loved ones can help inspire and support those who do great things, but having such a family is not "required." Some people are happier and more fulfilled with a lover and possibility children, whilst some are not; those who do desire such a family has every right to pursue such, while those who do not can and often do live a perfectly happy and productive life without ever engaging in the "normality" of intimate social bonds.

As the saying goes, "To each their own."

How is having kids helping anyone?

I would love to have a partner who was with me for the rest of my life. Marriage wouldn't have to prove it. I think spending such huge amounts of money on a celebration for one day is a very crazy (and stupid) idea. Why not add that money for payment towards a house? I can't for the life of me understand why people spend so much money. All for show, but each to their own I suppose.

Anyway. I really wouldn't go so far as to say that we're all geniuses at some sort of special interest.

Happiness, and therefore your (real) ultimate goal, comes from within, it should not be decided by any external people. If you let them, you're basically not much more than an ant in a swarm.
That is not to say marriage is bad, lots of people genuinely wish to get married, but there is an important difference between them and those who think that marrying and raising a family is some sort of duty.

The idea that the point of life is to reproduce is really kind of a biology fail. It totally ignores the nature of human beings: We're a social species. I don't mean social as in chitchat and parties (though we do that too); I mean social as in people who live in groups and contribute to each others' welfare. For example, did you grow the food you ate today? Did you build the house you live in? That's interdependence. Human beings have a higher degree of interdependence than any species on the planet. You might get help from someone who lives on the opposite side of the globe. It's made possible by our abstract thinking and communication skills.

In a community of humans, all the tasks can be divided up. One person runs a grocery store, another person sweeps the street, and yet another person raises children. Someone without any job at all can contribute just by existing--by being a living symbol of the community's ability to care for those who do not work in the traditional sense. In such communities, people are free to contribute without worrying constantly about taking care of their own basic needs. (That gets balanced by competition and the need to improve oneself. So a healthy community will have a balance of "taking care of each other" and "taking care of myself"--extreme communism or extreme capitalism are both detrimental to a community.)

People who don't reproduce--gays, asexuals, people who are infertile, and people who don't want children--contribute to their community too. Without children, their efforts are given to the community at large. When they contribute, their community's prosperity increases. And because their genes are floating around in that community--whether in siblings, parents, or more distant relatives--their non-reproduction genetics get passed on. That extra contribution makes their communities more viable than the communities which eject those who do not reproduce. Not reproducing can be a survival advantage. Think of bees as the extreme example: Most bees don't reproduce, but their contributions help pass on their mother's genes. With human communities, that effect is smaller because one person can't have thousands of offspring, and only a minority of humans do not reproduce. As time goes on, the community balances the number of reproducing and non-reproducing members for the optimal combination, just enough to take advantage of their extra contributions without lowering the birth rate to non-sustainable levels.

Last edited by Callista on 30 Jul 2013, 11:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

I can't see me getting married any time soon.

Yes, what's up with that? I can understand with Indian families they all like to stick together and look after each other, so it would make sense to marry well. Otherwise...I've heard some people say it's selfish not to have children. Why is that?

I heard that in church too that i no longer attend. My view is that they are trying to guilt you into having children so then can add new members but certain members believe that whatever is said in church is the absolute truth that they will have the same feelings and thus hold those without children in contempt.

Personally, my brother also left that church then eventually became a preacher in a fundamentalist Christian church and has claimed that i had shamed the family name by never getting married and having children.

Traditionally, the Catholic church has made it a sacrament to either marry or go into full-time religious service of some sort. But that is traditionally--it's not really enforced that much in modern days. It dates back to medieval times, when marriage was the foundation of society and you had as many children as you could in the hopes that some would survive. Women couldn't even leave home until they married; men less so, but any man who didn't have children was considered quite unlucky... In any case, things have changed since then. Having children isn't nearly as important as it used to be. Now we can have two children on average per couple and be pretty sure of them surviving to adulthood. And there are more ways to serve your community than to become a monk or a nun or a priest.

The church now tends more toward statements like, "It is essential that a Christian should serve others, either by raising a family or by contributing to his community, or both." Life is more complex now than it used to be when it depended on whether or not the wheat harvest was successful.

Someday marriage will be obsolete.

Highly unlikely. It's biologically wired into humans that we pair off and raise children.

Now, if you are talking about the legalities of marriage--whether marriage will always be a legal construct--then that's anybody's guess. It depends on the government and the culture.

But long-term partnerships, both for child-raising and for companionship, are natural for humans. If your "someday" is far, far in the future when humans have changed genetically so that they are effectively another species, then it's anybody's guess, but for now--humans pair-bond. With offspring that are born extremely vulnerable and have long childhoods, it's an evolutionary advantage to have more than one person in charge of raising them.

Pair bonding is not an efficient way to raise children. Children can be raised collectively.

There's more to it than efficiency. Have you studied attachment theory? A young child needs to bond to a small number of caretakers. Without that, he'll be psychologically unhealthy, often coming away with reactive attachment disorder. Sure, you can provide for children's physical needs effectively by putting them all in a big building and having professional caretakers keep them fed, warm, and healthy; but the psychological needs of childhood won't be met if a child can't bond with a trusted adult.

Now, it doesn't have to be a biological parent. It can be a grandparent, an adoptive parent, even an older sibling. It can be one person or five (though two or three are ideal). It's even possible for a child to have that sort of a bond growing up in an orphanage, with one special caretaker. But it is absolutely necessary for a child to grow up psychologically healthy, and there are limits to the number of people a person can bond with. The best arrangement is a small number of children, plus a small number of adults, living together in the long-term. And we call that a family.

No

Looking at myself and my relationships. I would say striving for independence and self sufficiency should be #1 priority. After that, possibly marriage. Sometimes life doesn't turn out that way, but I certainly don't think marriage is the main thing everyone should strive for. I think some people are better off not being married.