in law class today, we spent most of our hour and seventeen minutes discussing marriage contracts and those infamous pre-nups. before entering into the holy and forever promise of their hands in marriage, couples today are encouraged to establish a type of contract stating what each will get and give and what they are obligated to do when and if they are divorced.

this made me ponder the sanctity of love in its current state. how sacreligious is it to plan for the demise of your marriage as if it were inevitable? shouldn’t going into a marriage essentially scream out the fact that the two lovers are willing to spend the rest of their lives together, no ifs or buts? since the 50s, the divorce rate has sky-rocketed to an incredible 57%. over half of my graduating class will end up divorced not only once, but perhaps multiple times. this is a sad notion… to love someone so much and then decide to throw it away in a foul swoop of irreconcilable arguments. then, this means that the love, the true love, was never there to begin with.

love is too complex a structure and emotional a term to define wholly for all persons. it is always different to different people. but does this moral relativism skew our way of perceiving right from wrong? when one person thinks, “well, this is my opinion and as an individual i can do whatever i damn well please.” we, as a society attempting to be compassionate to everyone, think, “i guess they are right. it’s their perception of what is right and wrong. we shouldn’t try and tell them what to think.” this apathy to a set code of conduct works in minor cases, but when it comes to shaping our ethics, moral relativism is only chipping away at society’s gelled idea of common goodness.

i only ask these questions to both myself and whoever happens to be reading this as a means to get my point across. have our morals so regressed that we now consider love to be a conditional attribute felt for one person to the next, as it is able to be altered and diminished so easily? it seems so paradoxical to me that entering a commitment of indefinite love and trust must be bound by a contract which basically outlines its downfall.