by Cindy Tovar
Taking the plunge. Tied down. Tying the knot. Getting hitched. The old ball and chain. We’ve all heard these phrases that are supposed to define marriage or the act of getting married. If aliens were listening to us, they’d be convinced that marriage is a terrible thing, and they’d wonder why we do it at all. What’s happening? Why are we so jaded?
Perhaps it’s because every time we turn on the television, we’re bombarded with what has now become the stereotype of a married couple: a lazy, incompetent, uncaring husband and a nagging, sex-denying, overspending wife. This is how the media depicts married life, but the only reason it keeps these shows on the air is because we like to watch them. They make us laugh, but after the laughter dies down, I wonder when and why we began to embrace the dysfunction.
The first time I noticed that something “felt wrong” was when I started watching Married with Children. I must have been about eight years old, and I remember feeling completely out of my comfort zone, but I didn’t know why. I realize now what it was: I wasn’t used to seeing family members, let alone a husband and wife, speaking so rudely to one another. I was used to the wholesome, family-oriented shows – like Growing Pains, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and Full House- where everyone respected each other and the PDA was plentiful. I could relate to that.
Married with Children was a success, so obviously for others, the dysfunction didn’t bother them. It’s funny. The end. Maybe I’m just a prude. Or maybe, for some people at least, they saw a resemblance to their own less than perfect familial situations and relationships. For some, this dysfunction was relatable. Their parents did speak that way to each other, and they spoke that way to the kids, too.
Since then, these shows, as well as movies, depicting unhappy marriages have only increased. Apparently, happy is boring. Unhappy is funny and interesting. Is the media just reflecting what’s happening in our society? Perhaps.
And what about our kids, who are on the receiving end of these negative messages? Unless they come from an unbroken home, which is becoming rare nowadays, they’ll have no idea what a strong, solid marriage even looks like. How can they model, or want, what they’ve never seen or experienced?
As time passes, I have no doubt that the divorce rate will only climb higher than it already is. As long as the media continues to depict marriage in a negative way, and as long as we keep feeding into it with our cynicism, marriage in our culture is doomed.
To learn more about Cindy, visit Dagny’s Dichotomy.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.
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About Cindy Tovar
I always thought Married with Children was funny it was just comedy I think you’re reading a little too much into it. everyone has problems and no one has the picture perfect life at home
I don’t think TV shows have anything to do with the divorce rate rising. I think that there are too many people that are getting married for the wrong reasons and that is why there are so many divorces in this country.
Wow. Wonder full insight!
This absolutely reeks of conservative “family values”-based ideology and a lack of historical contextualization. To partly get at your question of why at least some of us are “jaded” in regards to marriage, perhaps it’s useful to think about the institution’s long history of bolstering RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA, and PATRIARCHY.
Maybe being “jaded” has something to do with the fact that African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans have historically been negatively affected by anti-miscegination legislation (see “The Anti-Miscegination History of the American Southwest, 1837 to 1970″ by Martha Menchaca of the University of Texas at Austin). Legal restrictions on who people of color could marry, if they could even marry at all (i.e., slaves), for a long time supported a racist regime of power that largely benefitted white people.
Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the institution of marriage has historically treated women as property of men. Through marriage, women have for ages been transferred from a patriarchal father/owner to a patriarchal husband/owner. It’s difficult to go against the argument that women have had very little personal, economic, and sexual autonomy in arrangements of marriage in US history (see the large amount of literature on this topic ranging from The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels to the groundbreaking literature and research by both white and of color feminists).
Or maybe being “jaded” comes from the ways in which LGBTQ folks are systematically excluded from the institution of marriage because of bull crap “family values,” oppressive religious ideology, homophobia, heteronormativity, etc (see the groundbreaking works of queer theorists and other LGBTQ scholars like Jose Esteban Munoz, Michael Warner, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan, etc.).
I actually think it’s quite unfortunate that you long for “positive” media representations of marriage and want to romanticize the institution while COMPLETELY ignoring the ways in which marriage has been used to violate, oppress, and discriminate against many groups of people– Latina/os being one of them. Maybe looking deeper into the history of marriage and the unfair power relations it has supported, and still does, will get at the topic of why some of us are “jaded” about such.