I’ve always held a deep loathing for marriage. During the National Day holiday I went to my sister’s wedding, and it really was an “eye-opener” — at the banquet there were roughly four or five hundred guests, people not seen in decades, relatives barely related at all, all dragged in by a single marriage, even people who were merely acquaintances by name got pulled in too. Sitting in the middle of it all, I felt an indescribable discomfort, like watching a pyramid scheme unfold, or some shoddy private school running a recruitment drive.

I couldn’t understand it — what was the point of all these so-called old acquaintances sitting at the tables, exchanging pleasantries, squeezing out expressions that were neither warm nor cold, neither sweet nor bitter? Back in the summer I’d already heard my mother mention that weddings cost a lot but also bring in income, and that sending out invitations far and wide was a major part of that income. Even granting that parents mean well — swallowing their pride to invite people just to scrape together funds for their children — it’s still nauseating that even this so-called “lifelong matter” requires such personal hustling.

Looking deeper, I feel the institution of marriage has already rotted to the core (even if current circumstances don’t show it outright). This institution has nothing to do with love at all — it’s merely a kind of economic transaction between clans. This view has nothing to do with my own family situation; the underlying harmony there doesn’t lessen my contempt for the marriage system, because we are all being pushed into this terrifying chain of love-marriage-reproduction-death.

In his essay on the vanity of existence, Schopenhauer pointed out that the (passion of marriage or love, etc.) depends on an illusion that makes something of value only to the species appear beneficial to the individual, an illusion that vanishes once the species’s purpose has been achieved. From Jung’s perspective, the existence of this chain is a kind of collective unconscious. I can understand a person being infected by the collective and acting a certain way before they have sufficient awareness; but for someone to go on enacting this chain after reaching full maturity as an individual — that I cannot accept. Must we spend our whole lives living inside this illusion of consciousness?

Whether it’s marriage or reproduction, their existence benefits our species, not the individual. Some will say marriage is the fruit of love and reproduction the continuation of life, that we thereby gain a sense of eternity — which is laughable, because whether we’re the “producers” or the eventual “product,” we all face the same thing: death. From this angle, death is far more eternal than life, yet we fear and flee from death all the same — which shows that the continuation of life is merely consciousness lurking in our cells, not something of real use to the individual.

Perhaps it’s too early for those of us still “children” to discuss such things (though plenty of people get engaged at this age). Perhaps the views above aren’t entirely correct (though there’s no such thing as “correct” here either). But pondering whether there’s a flaw in our consciousness, whether we’re being driven by something latent within us, is a capacity we absolutely need when facing the choices of life. Either way, monogamous marriage is still a fairly absurd arrangement — can it really guarantee that one will never develop feelings for anyone besides one’s spouse for an entire lifetime?