Imagery
Emotional depth
Absurdism
Imagine this: you wake up one morning, and the world has changed. Not catastrophically — no explosions, fires, or aliens. It's just that the institution of marriage has disappeared. Like an old photograph left in the sun too long — it has faded, dissolved, evaporated, along with the smell of yesterday's coffee.
What remains? What happens to the family — that strange, warm-blooded creature that has been held together for centuries by legal staples, church blessings, and stamps on passports?
I was thinking about this while leafing through my collection of Popular Mechanics magazines from 1955. There, on the yellowed pages, they promised that by the year 2000, every family would have a robot helper and a flying car. The family itself remained unshakable — dad, mom, two kids, a golden retriever. Just with jetpacks.
Reality turned out to be far more absurd and interesting.
Marriage as a Skeleton: What Holds a Family Together
Marriage is a contract. Cold, legal, steeped in history and tradition. It didn't appear out of love (how naive!), but out of property, inheritance, and social order. Marriage was a way of saying: «These children are mine. This land is mine. This woman is mine.» Romance came later, like icing on a cake made of bureaucracy.
But here is what matters: marriage provided structure. It was the skeleton upon which everything else hung. Rights, duties, expectations. Who supports whom, who raises the children, who inherits the family silver. A family without marriage is like a building without a frame — or like a jellyfish. The jellyfish manages without a skeleton, but it is an entirely different creature.
If marriage disappears, the familiar architecture of the family will vanish with it. That is where the most interesting part begins.
Family as Liquid: The Fluid Ties of a New World
Without marriage, the family will become fluid. Imagine water — it takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured. A family without legal frameworks will form around what actually exists: love, affection, convenience, shared goals, children, habit.
This isn't necessarily bad. Water can be beautiful.
People will live together because they want to, not because they signed papers at twenty-three when they still believed that «forever» was real. They will separate more easily, without lawyers and the division of assets. But they will also come together more easily. Families will begin to look like communes, like tribes, like flexible coalitions.
New Configurations
Without marriage, forms that the Victorians couldn't even conceive of become possible:
- Three people raising a child together — not because of an affair, but because it is more convenient and right for them.
- Two friends living together for decades, sharing a household, care, and old age — but without romance.
- A woman with children from different fathers, where every father remains part of the family system — not an enemy, not a ghost of the past, but an accomplice.
- Communes where children grow up surrounded by a multitude of adults — as the African proverb says, «It takes a whole village».
Does this sound utopian? Maybe. But also catastrophic at the same time. Because freedom is always responsibility. And responsibility without obligations is a slippery thing.
Children: The Most Vulnerable Currency
When marriage disappears, children will become the main problem. To be honest, they were always the main problem. Marriage at least created an illusion of stability: two parents, one house, clear roles.
Without marriage, who will be responsible for the children? Who pays for college? Who stays up with a sick child at night? Who makes the decision about a surgery? Who passes on the surname and family stories?
In a world without marriage, the answer is simple and terrible: whoever wants to. Or whoever has the most resources. Or — what is even more frightening — no one.
Scenario One: A New Agreement
Perhaps a new type of agreement will emerge. Not marital, but parental. People will sign contracts regarding child-rearing — who, what, when, how much. It will be a legal document, but more flexible than marriage. It would bind adults not to each other, but to the child.
Does it sound cold? Yes. But marriage was also a cold contract; we simply got used to decorating it with flowers and promises of eternal love.
Scenario Two: The State as a Parent
If families become too fragile and unpredictable, the state will take on more functions. Free nurseries from birth, boarding schools, guaranteed basic income for mothers (or fathers, or whoever is raising the child). Children will become a public resource, not private property.
This has happened in history before — in the kibbutzim of Israel, in the communes of the Soviet Union. Sometimes it turned out quite well. Sometimes — nightmarish.
Scenario Three: The Tribal Instinct
People will return to the old ways — to extended families, to clans. Grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins — everyone together, everyone nearby. Children do not belong to a couple; they belong to the tribe. This was the norm for thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution scattered everyone across cities.
Perhaps the disappearance of marriage will return us to our roots. We will once again become social animals for whom the «family» is not a cell, but a network.
Love Without Guarantees: Romance on the Ruins
Without marriage, love will change. It will become more honest — and more terrifying.
Right now, marriage offers an illusion of eternity. «Until death do us part» is a beautiful lie we tell ourselves so we aren't so afraid. Marriage is an attempt to stop time, to freeze feelings, to turn love into a museum exhibit.
But love does not want to be a museum exhibit. It is alive, it changes, it dies and resurrects, it is unpredictable.
Without marriage, love will be honest. You are with me because you want to be with me. Not because you signed papers, not because you fear divorce, not because «that's how it's done». You are here because you choose me. Every day. Every morning.
It is romantic enough to make you shiver. And terrible enough to bring you to tears.
The End of Possession
Marriage is possession. «My husband», «my wife» — we speak of them as things. Without marriage, possession will vanish. People will cease to belong to anyone.
You cannot own the wind; you can only feel it touch your face and hope that it returns.
Some people will withstand this. Others will go mad from the uncertainty. A third group will invent new ways to hold onto love — not with stamps, but with something else. With rituals, promises, joint projects, tattoos, oaths taken before friends.
Marriage will disappear, but the need for symbols will remain. People will devise their own ways to say: «You are important to me. You are not just a passerby in my life».
The Economy of Decay: Who Pays the Bills
Marriage is an economic union. It always has been. Two salaries instead of one, a shared mortgage, joint savings. It's boring, but it works.
What happens when marriage vanishes?
The Individualization of Poverty
Life will become harder for people. Especially for women, especially for those with children, especially for the elderly. Surviving alone is more expensive than surviving as a pair. Loneliness is a luxury only the rich can afford.
Without marriage, the gap between the rich and the poor will deepen. The rich will be able to afford freedom — to hire a nanny, to buy convenience, to live as they please. The poor will cling to each other out of necessity, forming unions not out of love, but out of need.
Does that sound cynical? It is reality. Marriage at least leveled the odds. It was a social elevator — a poor girl could marry a wealthy man and gain access to resources. Unfair, patriarchal, but it worked.
Without marriage, this mechanism will break. And what then?
A New Economy of Care
Perhaps a new economy will emerge — an economy of care. Services will become more important than goods. Someone will buy not sex, but intimacy. Not cleaning, but coziness. Not entertainment, but meaning.
Professional partners, platonic life companions, emotional coaches who live with you. This is already happening in Japan — there, you can hire a person to hug you, listen to you, and make you feel that you matter.
Does it sound like a dystopia? Possibly. But marriage, for many, was also a transaction — love in exchange for safety, sex in exchange for status.
Old Age: Who Will Close Our Eyes
Here is what is truly scary: old age without marriage.
Right now, marriage is insurance against loneliness. You don't grow old alone. Someone will be there when you forget where the keys are. Someone will drive you to the hospital. Someone will close your eyes when the time comes.
Without marriage, old age will become a problem that everyone solves for themselves. Children? They will scatter to their own fluid families. Friends? They are aging too. The state? If you're lucky.
Old age in a world without marriage means nursing homes, automated care, robot nurses with warm silicone hands. Or — which is better, but more utopian — communes of old people taking care of each other like the last tribe surviving until dawn.
The Paradox: Will the Family Disappear at All?
Here is the question that gives me no peace: if marriage disappears, will the family disappear? Or is family something greater that exists independently of legal constructs?
Family is not a stamp on a passport. It is a connection. Sometimes by blood, sometimes chosen, sometimes accidental. Family is those with whom you share life. Not necessarily a bed, not necessarily a roof, but necessarily — time, care, memory.
I know people who have lived together for twenty years without registration and feel like a family. I know spouses who are signed on paper but are strangers to each other, like random fellow travelers on a train.
Maybe the disappearance of marriage will liberate the family. Make it real. Cleanse it of the superficial, the official, the obligatory. Leave only the essence — the connection between people who have decided to walk together.
The Beauty of Decay: What We Will Gain When We Lose Everything
I write about catastrophes. That is my specialty. But a catastrophe is not always the end. Sometimes it is the beginning.
The disappearance of marriage is a catastrophe. The familiar world, where everything is understood and structured, will collapse. A world where there are roles, rules, expectations. Where a «normal family» looks like this and that.
But in this decay, there is beauty.
The freedom to choose who you walk through life with. Honesty without obligations. Love without guarantees. Connections that are not held together by the fear of divorce, but exist because they exist.
It is frightening. But isn't everything truly alive frightening?
New Rituals
Without marriage, people will invent new rituals. New ways to say: «We are together». Maybe it will be annual promises — not for life, but for a year, with the right to renew. Maybe matching tattoos, joint travels, trees planted together.
Maybe the family of the future will celebrate not a wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of the decision to stay together. Every year — a new choice. Every year — a new «yes».
Return to the Tribe
Or maybe we will return to where we started. To tribes, clans, extended families. Not a couple in the center, but a community. Not «me and you against the world», but «all of us together».
This was the norm for the greater part of human history. The marriage-couple is an anomaly of the last centuries, a product of industrialization and urbanization. Maybe its disappearance is simply a return to the norm.
Forecast: Three Scenarios for the Future
I am not a prophet. But I can imagine how it might be.
Scenario One: Chaos
Families fall apart. Children suffer. The elderly die in loneliness. Society fragments into atoms — individual people living for themselves. Birth rates fall. People lose the meaning of existence because family was always that meaning. The era of loneliness arrives, when a connection with another human being becomes a luxury unavailable to the majority.
Scenario Two: A New Order
New institutions come to replace marriage. Parenting contracts, tribal communes, state support. The family transforms but does not disappear. It becomes more flexible, more diverse, more honest. People learn to build connections without legal staples — based on choice, trust, reciprocity. It is harder, but perhaps better.
Scenario Three: Nothing Changes
Marriage will disappear only formally. People will continue to live in pairs, raise children, grow old together. Just without stamps. Because family is not about papers. It is about something deeper, ancient, instinctive. Marriage may vanish, but the need for intimacy, for stability, for «your person» — that isn't going anywhere.
Conclusion: Family as a Jellyfish
Remember I spoke about the jellyfish? About the creature without a skeleton?
A family without marriage will be exactly that. Fragile, transparent, fluid. But alive. Maybe even more alive than now.
Jellyfish have existed for millions of years. They survived dinosaurs, ice ages, mass extinctions. They know how to adapt.
Perhaps the family knows how too.
Perhaps the disappearance of marriage will not kill the family, but force it to evolve. To become what it should have always been — not a cage, not a contract, not an obligation, but a connection. Living, real, chosen.
We will all die. Families will change. Marriage will disappear.
But this is not the end. It is a strange, anxious, thrilling beginning.
And you know what? I am almost optimistic.
