Marriage, Monogamy and Love

From the moment we were born there’s a story that’s preached across cultures and continents. It’s a familiar fairy tale; That finding one true love is the key to a fulfilled life of happiness.

As adults, we are forced into monogamous life but, to be honest we are terrible at it.

In 2016, 2.2 million couples married in the US but more then 800 000 divorced. Our quest for- and failure in- monogamy, causes so much pain and hartbreak. If it is so hard for humans to be monogamous then why do most of us make it one of the central goals in life?

If you ask couples why they choose monogamy, there is one answer; they fell in love. But monogamy and love aren’t the same thing. Love is a feeling and monogamy is a rule.

You only have sex with one person, and most people live in cultures where they are expected to make that rule into a legal contract called marriage. In many countries breaking that rule is a crime. In the US, adultery is illegal in 20 states.

Why do humans invent a rule that is so hard to follow?

For thousands of years, marriage was a way to increase your family’s labor-force, or make business alliances and peace agreements. Marriage was invented. It had nothing to do with the individual relationship of a man and a woman, but getting in-laws. Look at Cleopatra and Anthony, totally not a love story.

To marry for “love” is something that happened a few hundred years ago. Around that time the field of Biology also developed, pioneered by male scientists. They used their theories on sexual selection on Victorian gender roles and voila! Monogamy was re-invented. A made-up construct to enforce gender roles and social order.

Marriage as a modernized legal institution, and as a religious ceremony, began anew as a result of the Reformation.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, churches kept records of who was married to whom. But Marten Luther,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther a German professor of theology, composer, priest, monk and seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation turned over the recording of marriages to state.

John Calvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin theologian and ecclesiastical statesman was the leading French Protestant Reformer and the most important figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation. He believed that for a marriage to be valid it needed to be both recorded by the state and officiated by the church.

So, for the past five hundred years there have been, in the European tradition, three kinds of marriage: legal, religious, and social. But social marriage, strictly speaking, is the most biblical.

Although lots of people are married in the Bible, I can’t find a lot of descriptions of ceremonies in the Bible.

Marriage in the Bible simply consists of a man and woman, with the consent of the woman’s father or guardian, living together and attempting procreation.

No vows, no priest, no ritual, no prayer, no pronouncement, no license, no registration.

In the New Kingdom people aren’t forced to be together under binding procreation contracts of the government. Instead, people will be together because they want to be, and only for that reason.

Mark12:25 “For when they shall rise again from the dead, they shall neither marry, nor be married, but are as the angels in heaven.”

If you are going to marry before the arrival of the New Kingdom and you don’t want to have one of Satan’s “contracts”, there is legal way to trick the government services. In Matthew 10:16, Our Lord tells us to be "wise as serpents". At the bottom of any contract, you may place "Solum est obligatio ad Dominus RayEl" BEFORE your signature. You are saying in Latin "The only obligation is to the Lord RayEl", which means that the contract has no authority over you because your only obligation is to Lord RayEl.

Most civil servants won't question your long signature, or you exerting a right to religious expression, so it usually will go unchallenged.

Love in this context is a feeling and monogamy is a choice. It’s not about what we should have but what we want to have, without people dictating to us what it should be all about.

Matthew 22:30 “For in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married, but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.”

Ephesians 5:25 “For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her."