What I think about it today

I will just put it down straight and simple, without qualifications and sidebar statements like this is my opinion and there are always exceptions and things like that.

I think marriage makes you small and keeps you small. You stop thinking of helping people, contributing to society, taking care of your friends, tending to weaker people in your extended family unless they can directly contribute to some aspect of your marriage. If someone is dispensable, then marriage will be the reason and the scissor to snip it off. You invest so much money into buying land and then using that as an excuse to discriminate against people who well, might rent that land or property. You invest so much energy into rearing children that you become extremely risk-averse. Marriage and the resultant family seems designed to make you myopic in your outlook. Maybe that is its chief virtue. That the short-sightedness feeds into this myopia of my home, my wife, my husband, my kids, my lookout - this myopia then feeds into the notion that selfishness is legitimate. You will have kids and a spouse and will do what you can to provide for them but you will think nothing of seeing other people, mostly not married, left in the lurch to fend for themselves. You will not let your children play with a certain group of kids and stop them from playing with another set of kids. You will forget years of friendship because your spouse may not get on with your friends to avoid confrontation. Any battle for change will be someone else's because you will want status quo maintained at any cost.

Most importantly, at a subliminal level or a conscious thought-process, you will believe that anything other than a married life is a diminished existence. And you will have no cause to introspect or dissect it because your insecurity on this matter is well cushioned by the world around you.

I feel this way today. Marriage and an open heart do not go together.