540. Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

540.   Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

The rational choice of a partner for a relationship is based upon long-term cost-benefit calculations with the result of the deal being advantageous for both partners.   Such cost-benefit calculations use consent and realistic knowledge concerning costs and benefits not only for oneself but also for the partner to be.

Given sufficient intelligence, wisdom and maturity to accept the golden rule and the tit-for-tat principle, this implies to have accepted the costs as obligations, before deciding to start profiting from available benefits.   

Any attempts to get long-term benefits while refusing to accept obligations are doomed.  Accepting obligations and feeling bound by them once and for good is a part of what defines genuine commitment.  Such obligations are an indispensable requirement for making a relationship a safe haven of reliability, predictability and trustworthiness for each other.  
 

Unfortunately, there are substantial differences between the subjective definition of commitment and especially the perception of when it starts.  

Serious emotional disaster for women is caused by the unfortunate instinctive difference concerning the emotional impact of the first act of physical intimacy or the lack thereof.   

Some men, who are not jerks by feeling entitled to objectify women, are nevertheless caught by their need for homeostasis in the trap of the fallacy, that their being triggered to copulate with female bodies without emotional attachment were based upon the reciprocity of mere objectification not creating commitment.
Many women get emotionally attached and committed automatically by physical intimacy and their fallacy is to assume the automatic commitment to be reciprocal.  

 

1.   Commitment by agreement

Commitment by agreement is the reciprocal acceptance of obligations which starts, as soon as a couple agrees to be committed.   It is based upon both partners' full awareness of both fallacies and of the hazard of women's risk to be harmed and men's risk to be the one causing harm.    

While this is the only viable basis for a long term relationship, it can only work given full consent and awareness about what creates and constitutes commitment in the experience of the partner.   

Commitment by agreement is intrinsic commitment, the obligations accepted are to the partner as someone, whose needs are an expression of the individual personality.          

2.   Commitment by legal marriage

The signature at the town hall as the act of legal marriage is also an act of implicitly accepting obligations.   But these obligations are based upon the marriage laws of the country.    Legal marriage means accepting standard obligations, which are not a conscious choice based upon the recognition of the partner's real and individual needs. 
  

Commitment by legal marriage is extrinsic commitment.

3.   Comparing both commitments

Commitment by agreement is a deal between two persons.   While it is based upon the real needs of both partners, it depends entirely on their deliberate choice to continue to fulfill the obligations.   The partners have no legal power over each other.  (Any use of usurped power by physical or situational advantages is a transgression and breaking the agreement of two equals.)  The only power they have is leaving, when the other fails or commits transgressions.  

Commitment by legal marriage is a twofold deal with society as represented by the country's laws.   

It is a deal between each partner and society, and the focus of the legal obligations are financial and they do not matter, unless they are claimed and backed up by the power of the enforcing law.   Therefore legal marriage has the most impact not when there is harmony, but when there is failure.  
Commitment by legal marriage is also a deal between both partners and society as a power to give practical benefits, when being together is otherwise as problem, because both partners do not share the same citizenship.  


4.   Which commitment for whom?

4.1.   When a couple is compatible, bonded by the shared need for intellectual intimacy and companionship and their focus is upon the immaterial benefits of being each other's safe haven, then commitment by agreement and cohabitation are all they need.    Legal marriage brings no further benefits to the quality of their commitment.  

4.2.  In the case, that both partners are not from the same country then sometimes legal marriage is needed to enable being together.    But in this case, legal marriage cannot be a substitute for having been bound first by the agreed obligations of commitment.  

5.  The refusal to accept obligations without legal marriage indicates commodification

Some men consider legal marriage as the only possible and binding form of commitment.   They do not feel any obligations to a woman until marriage, while they do not hesitate to use her body at their convenience.    This is big red flag of commodification.  

Commitment by agreement as a deal with a woman requires the perception of her being significant as a partner with a mind.    A man, for whom a woman is a commodity or utility, is unable to perceive her as a person to make a deal with.

  
No man makes a deal with car about how to use it.   If a man makes a deal about the car, it is with the owner as how to use it and for what costs.   
When a man refuses to accept any obligations other than by legal marriage, he is like someone leasing the woman from society.   Legal marriage is such a man's deal with society for the goal of getting control over the commodified woman.

What the commodified woman wants and needs herself does not matter and is insignificant.  Such a man accepts as a price, whatever social norms, gender roles, religion or the political system behind the marriage laws in his country demand.   In his mind, he deals with society, which supplies a woman to him for the purpose of homeostasis and for other services, and he accepts the price demanded by society as his due.  
 

It is not enough to rely on a man's claims of wanting commitment, it is a fallacy to mistake a man's willingness to get married as an expression of commitment.   If there can be any valid indication of a man's attitude towards women, this can only be his acceptance and recognition of explicitly described and defined obligations.   

A wise woman never allows a man to touch her unless he accepts that this is the begin of commitment and of having obligations.   

A wise woman never marries a man, unless his behavior before marriage is very unequivocally guided and restricted by his acceptance of and full compliance with agreed upon obligations.

If a man cannot commit in his behavior without marriage, it cannot be expected that he will agree upon any obligations beyond those imposed by the marriage laws.    He will not behave any better after being married than before.