The Definition of Marriage Is Relative - Essay Example

In modern Western society this basis for marriage is the most common, but still we cannot exclude the fact of arranged marriages, which were more popular earlier. Recent studies showed that even hundred years ago the most common marriage was the arranged one, when spouses were supposed to be from the same social class, so families usually arranged marriages between their children to combine their capitals. But since the beginning of 20th century this tendency started reducing, when Western-pattern society became more liberal and new young generations didn’t allow their parents to arrange their lives (Ghimire at al. n.pag).

This Western liberal pattern of marriage is based on the kind of Western society where law principles are predominant in defining some social acts as acceptable or not. These law fundamentals of the society have reduced a significance of religious rituals in recognition of social acts as legal or not. This means that it’s not enough just to be connected with some religious ritual to be considered as married, spouses must to support their promises to each other with the legal act. Besides, the significant feature of marriage is presence of gender roles within it.

First of all, it is difficult to argue that marriage is a sort of social institution that requires bringing population growth into society. As far as liberal Western society started to allow people to marry for any reason they want, this caused several social problems. First of all, gender roles within family have changed; there are no special behavioral standards for man and woman anymore, so this caused increase in maternity age among women, because emancipated women put their careers before family (Nock, 14).

Another problem of Western liberal social pattern is the allowance of single-sex marriage. This topic is a hot point of discussions within worldwide societies. The conflict’s point is that making society extremely liberal Western countries (Europe, USA) have leveled the basic social foundations of marriage like population growth purposes and moral and religious standard of heterosexual couples.