An Argument against Marriage

Abstract

This paper considers an obvious argument against marriage; (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. I consider various ways of attacking this argument, and try to show that it may be worth taking more seriously than most people seem inclined.