What Is the Point of Marriage?

All these gay people getting married made me ask myself, what is the point of marriage?

I grew up dreaming of the day I would fall in love with a fair damsel and sing and dance at my own wedding. I never thought about the rationale behind marriage. I was told about marriage. I was told that marriage makes falling in love ok, it is what you do if you ever fall in love, it is what you do when your parents find you a girl to fall in love with, it is the night you drink milk and sleep on rose petals, it is the event that comes before a "honey moon", it is the first step towards having children, it is the thing you do when you are rich and famous and loved by your parents.

But what caused people to get together and invent marriage? Imagine you were a caveman and you spent the day hunting and gathering and returned to your cave at night all alone. Since you didn't have a TV or a game boy you probably wanted to engage in some baby making. So you picked up your club and went hunting for a man with breasts. Once you found the chesty babe you hit her on the head with your club, grabbed her hair and dragged her to your cave. Then you went about exploring the features of your new toy all night long. In the morning it was time to go hunting again.

While you were out hunting your Lazy Neighbor was also feeling the urge to make babies. But instead of finding his own baby-maker he goes and grabs your baby by the hair and drags her to his cave. When you return you find your toy gone! Your property vanished! Your man with breasts missing! You search and search till you hear noises next door and find Lazy Ass on top of her in the cave next door. You go ape shit and kill your neighbor like tomorrow's meal.

The next day you go hunting and another neighbor steals your baby machine. Now you are really upset. You don’t know if your Neanderthal mind can take any more of this killing and stealing over a pair of breasts! What do you have to do to safeguard your property? Put a chain lock around your baby maker’s control panel? Hide her somewhere within the four walls of your cave? Maybe hide her in a big black cloth to prevent her from tempting the neighborhood? What do you do?

So you call your friend and start crying. You tell him that your neighbors won’t stop stealing your she-man. You explain that you would have killed neighbor 2.0 but you are tired of killing animals that don't look like elephants.

Your friend sympathizes and he calls his friends and they form a tribal gathering and everyone is told, "Look! Don’t steal our friend Mr. Caveman's toys again!"

But the thieving neighbor objects with, “Why?”

In response the elders define the theory of private property, "Well, finders keepers and our friend the Caveman found her first so back off!"

Mr. Lazy Neighbor 2.0 asks, "What if I don't give her back?" and the elders say, "We will all pick up a stone and hit you with it".

The thief next door goes "Why would you stone me? Why would you be so cruel?"

The tribal elder answers, "Because what you did is what we call umm a bad, bad thing and umm which we shall later call by a name that is more formal sounding like ‘sin’ or umm ‘adultery’".

The treacherous neighbor however displays his lawyer gene and persists, "But I can play with the she-man better than any other caveman! I really like this she-man and I think she likes me!"

"We will stone you!" the elders warn.

"Why?" asks the baby-maker-snatcher.

"Err, because that big shining thing in the sky, which we all look up to will be upset with us and will abandon us like our mothers did"

Fortunately for the elders, this argument worked so well with everyone that from that day onwards people began to use it towards anyone and everyone who dared to steal someone else's soft-cuddly-she-thing, which they decided to call a “wife”, and her keeper they named the wife's “husband”. The moment a man and a woman became husband and wife all were informed that from now on “Thou shalt not trespass” and just to be doubly sure they were also told “Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s” and then they topped it off with “Thou shalt not commit adultery” The tribe also decided to collectively punish anyone who defied the union. This led to the Greeks stoning the people of Troy and many Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot and King Arthur love triangles until one day Romeo met Juliet.

When Romeo and Juliet fell in love they chose death over living apart. This made people feel that two people ought to be allowed to cuddle with each other if they wanted to irrespective of the will of the tribe(s). This was convenient because in those days it would be much better to have Romeos and Juliets working to expand the vision of the Vatican than to have them drink poison and die. Dead people would leave the Pope with no one to order around.

All went well until people began to fall in love with anyone and everyone. White people fell in love with black people; Jews fell in love with Jews, Muslims with their cousins, the residents of the South with their siblings. This really upset some people like Hitler who said "You no fall in love in Germany unless you a good Catholic boy like me!" And he sent everyone and anyone who didn't look like his neighbors in Austria to become fuel in his home's heating system (it gets really, really cold in Germany).

The Pope was confused too and he said, "I don't understand! Why art thou man and woman holding hands if thou dost not want to have babies? What is the point of doing ‘that’ if no babies planned in the future? And thou two! Thou two are men and still holding hands! How can two men have babies? If thou men try to make babies thou two will end up wasting the life of God’s sperm! The same goes for thou two women! Oh it is not natural! Oh I am in so much pain! I hereby agree to a Nazi-Vatican concordant that all unnatural people like Jews, Gays, Gypsies, Communists, Britons etc. will be gassed by our prodigal son Adolph Hitler!”

Thank goodness, most of us know what happened to Hitler and his friends. Thank you Winston, thank you Mr. Alan Turing … thank you Mr. Soldier from the Second World War.

So I ask the people of this world. No I urge them. When two people wish to fall in love and wish for society's blessings, just give it to them! It is not likely to affect your relationship with the big bright shining thing in the sky nor will your mothers abandon you nor will civilization, as we know it will fall apart.

Civilization is made up of people and if the lovers go the Juliet way then civilization will fall apart. When people wish to hold each other’s hands either because its cold and they can't afford gloves or because they want to tell that coveting neighbor to piss off, let them hold hands! Beating them with baseball bats will not improve your game.