Contemporary liberal theory, as it applies to marriage, tells us that our lives are constituted by our desires and marriage restricts our desires. The necessary conclusion is that marriage is made in hell:
Consider, for instance, the endless regulations and interdictions that provide the texture of domestic coupledom. Is there any area of married life that is not crisscrossed by rules and strictures about everything from how you load the dishwasher, to what you can say at dinner parties, to what you do on your day off, to how you drive – along with what you eat, drink, wear, make jokes about, spend your discretionary income on?
What is it about marriage that turns nice-enough people into petty dictators and household tyrants … Then there’s the fundamental premise of monogamous marriage that mutual desire can and will last throughout a lifetime. And if it doesn’t? Well apparently you’re just supposed to give up on sex, since waning desire for your mate is never an adequate defence for ‘looking elsewhere’.
Like the man said, hell is other people. Sometimes they don’t do what we want or fill our needs, and that’s intolerable. Think of how much happier people would be if the ties that bind were abolished, and everything were put on the sensible arms’-length footing of whim, money, and relative power!