Love and Marriage(?)

Love and Marriage. This is the topic that has been circling the class this week. Learning about different cultures and their different ideas of marriage has truly been an interesting journey to set upon. Growing up in the American culture, I learned that when a person falls in love they get married, move away from their parents, buy a house and start a family; this is what we call the “American dream”. Our goal is to move away from our loved ones and start living independently so that we can be considered normal Americans that don’t live with their parents until they’re thirty or so. To us this is a great thing; to become independent and move away from our old lives so that we can pursue our own dreams and aspirations. But what about the family left behind? Many other cultures take this into consideration and have been using marriage as a way to keep the family close and property in each other’s hands.

The readings this week have talked about many different styles of marriages and what other cultures consider to be a good marriage. Some involve a woman marrying into a family of brothers in order to keep property within the family and avoid confrontation when having to divide lands; other marriages are arranged by the parents who are more experienced in the ways of love and matching up couples. The more I read what other cultures believe is the way to go for marriage, really made me rethink what our culture calls a typical marriage. Step 1: Find love. Our culture is constantly saying (even without knowing) that in order to live a happy life, you have to find that “one “person to be with and live the rest of your life with that person. If you don’t find someone to share your life’s experiences with, then you are either called a spinster or are just truly considered an outsider within your community. Step 2: Get married and move away. This is an interesting step because when learning about other cultures this week, they get married in order to make the family closer quite literally in some cases. Families move into each other’s houses in order to keep each other safe, keep themselves company, and to be able to share the workload. I’m sure my mother wouldn’t mind having a little more help around the house these days, and as they say, many hands make light work!

Since I already mixed step 3 (start your own life) with step 2, this just leaves me time to ponder about how our society decided to deal with marriage? I know there are many people out there who are truly against the idea of marriage and all that is has to offer (or not offer), but to some, marriage is the dream they always wish to grab. To me, marriage is about love and finding that someone special but it also has to be about communication and family. Of course I think this because I’ve been raised in a culture where love is the underlying factor when deciding to get married, but in other cultures this could seem completely mad. The basic idea of this week was to open our eyes to the idea of marriage and see how other cultures treat marriage and the bond between people (or land). Marriage is what you make it, whether it’s for family or sustainability, or just to have that extra support when you go home after a long day, marriage is something that each culture takes into consideration when planning out their future and their children’s future.

Learning through Culture

In our society, culture is established birth when the doctor says, “It’s a _____”. We are told that a child has to be either (a) or (b) in order to leave the hospital and start living to their culture’s expectations. This weeks readings have talked about how gender is different in every culture and that we categorize ‘male’ and ‘female’ differently. The ideas and realizations of gender that we come to understand start at a very early age. When watching the commercial from Fischer Price I was again amazed at how different the narrator and the children acted towards each separate toy. The boys were very aggressive and wanted to continue moving the cars and racing as fast as they could while the narrator was also speaking in a more aggressive tone. When the panned over to the girl, the music changed to a less intense theme and more of a fairy like tune. It was such a dramatic change that it made me ask, “wait… did that really happen?”, and sure enough it did. Our culture has become so caught in the idea that gender can only fit into these two categories and if you’re not part of either of them, than you’re either cast out or forced to change.

In order to get a different idea of gender, I just simply typed in ‘gender’ on youtube. I got a whole array of videos but one was of a man interviewing little children on what they think gender is. The children (boys and girls) agreed that boys have to dress like boys, and girls have to dress like girls and if either of them switched clothes than that “wouldn’t be okay”. We aren’t able to allow gender stereotypes to be reserved because we just don’t feel alright with it; in order to feel comfortable with someone, we have to put them in one category first and then go from there. The fact that we have to put someone into a category in order to be able to communicate with him or her on some level is ridiculous in itself, or the fact that we have to put ourselves in a category in order to do anything in society is also a cultural idea. We put these gender forms into people’s minds at such a young age because that’s what is considered ‘normal’ in our society to do. At a young age I remember being told to wear more dresses or hear the saying “little girls don’t behave like that “ ( I was a rambunctious child), and my idea of gender was constructed over and over again. Growing up watching my sister’s put on make-up and doing their hair made me think that this must be what “girls” do and that I was only allowed to do things in the ‘girl’ category. My culture supported the idea that this what normal girls and boys do and if you don’t match up to your gender then you have to change.

It’s amazing to see how much our idea of gender affects everyone in his or her lives everyday. We see it when younger children play with one another and the girls play with dolls while the boys play with action figures or mud because that’s more ‘boy’ like. In considering the question, “how do humans learn culture”, it can be seen that humans learn culture by being taught at a young age what their gender is and how their culture treats that gender. What would happen if people stop caring about gender and just accept what people feel like and take time to understand that individual? We try too hard to put people into categories that we forget how those categories started in the first place.