The terminology “Marriage 2.0″ has entered the public discourse as a way of talking about the very real and significant differences between what our parents or grandparents would have considered “marriage” and what is practiced today. I believe that most people who read any blogs like this are software-savvy enough to get the reference to major revisions of computer software which get released every few years or months. Some few may even be old enough to remember when major revisions – those ending in “dot oh” (.0) – were followed by minor, but still significant, revisions indicated by incrementing the number after the decimal point. For example, DOS 3.0 was not followed by DOS 4.0, but rather by DOS 3.1 and eventually DOS 3.2.
I thought it might be useful to address in the dialogue what some of the minor revisions to marriage were, and when they happened. What follows is mostly a bit of semi-whimsical thinking about a very serious subject. I know that there will be many who will quibble with my selected milestones, but discussion is the name of the game, so quibble away.
Marriage 0.1 – 1.0 – origins lost in history up to 1945 CE
Marriage 1.1 released – 1945 – The Baby Boom Begins
Marriage 1.1 was almost identical to Marriage 1.0 except for a couple of key features which made it more popular. Veterans returning from WWII and going to college on the GI Bill, combined with explosive markets for manufactured goods necessary for the rebuilding of war-devastated Europe and SE Asia, fueled a massive expansion of the middle class, the managerial class, and the Baby Boom. Marriage was more affordable for the average man, and therefor more accessible for the average woman. The years up to 1960, which covered most of the baby boom, coincide with “Peak Marriage.” The percentages of four main demographics – blacks and whites of both sexes – which currently participate in the version of marriage currently available have been falling since 1960.
Marriage 1.2 released – 1960 – The Pill
While the advent of the Birth Control Pill (or just “The Pill”) had significant effects for unmarried people – allowing non-marital sexual activity with less risk of unwanted parenthood – it also had a HUGE effect on marriage itself. The concept of “Family Planning” became widely familiar, and the ability of married couples to have as much sex as they felt like without incurring the burdens on their time and finances which additional children would bring subtly changed the dynamics of a lot of marriages.
Marriage 1.3 released – 1970 – No Fault Divorce
Probably more accurately called “no real reason other than I’m tired of you” divorce. Where all previous versions of marriage were considered “durable goods” and were expected to last a lifetime, Marriage V1.3 and all versions after were disposable items, to be thrown away and replaced when they started to show signs of wear.
Marriage 1.3 was an instant and automatic upgrade which could be installed over any previous version without the user’s consent.
Marriage 1.4 released – 1973 – Legalized Abortion
While originally intended as an enhancement to SingleGirl 2.0 and Liberated Woman 1.0, enough married women users demanded this feature be added to their marriages as an update that it became broadly available. It was sort of a hidden revision, in that it didn’t actually show as a change in the version number. Many men who thought they were still running V1.0-V1.3 and had some sort of veto rights over the termination of their children were totally surprised and shocked when they first encountered the blue screen of death. Like V1.3 before it, V1.4 could be installed with the consent of only one user of the system, regardless of what the other wanted – “Her body, her choice, him – no choice.”
Marriage 1.5 released – 1974~1975 – Egalitarian Marriage
The release date for Marriage1.5 is a bit fuzzy because it spent so long in Beta testing (double meaning intended), and there were so many pre-release candidates which differed significantly from each other. One of the first visible features of Marriage1.5 was the Hyphenated-Lastname. I believe that this kernel of Marriage1.5 came out of the Santa Cruz Operation, at least I’m fairly sure that it originated in Kalifornia.
I’m not going to bother documenting versions 1.6 through 1.9 because they were not so much actual revisions as they were competing versions of Marriage1.5. There was Red Hat Marriage1.5 (practiced in NY, to go along with their red stockings), Ubuntu Marriage1.5 (first distributed as a tarball and required compiling your own traditions and vows), and dozens of other lesser-known versions.
One thing was definite, however – Marriage had become open-source, and anyone and everyone felt entitled to tinker around with it.
Marriage 2.0 – 1975~1993 – Spousal/Marital Rape
This was not a revision – it was a fundamental change to the kernel and the underlying code. It’s roll out took some time – 18 years between when the first state passed a marital rape law until the last one did – but the gooey interface was just so attractive to feminists, White Knights, and Manginas. It fundamentally did away with any concept of any sort of marital obligation on the part of the wife, and with the ever shifting definition of “rayyyyppppe” put the full power of law enforcement on the woman’s side if she felt a need to either punish her husband, or get rid of him entirely so she could keep his assets – as William Hetherington’s wife did.
Now, I’m not going to go into an in-depth accounting of all the revisions of Marriage 2.0, because there were literally thousands – Marriage 2.0.1, Marriage 2.0.1.1, etc. However, there were two major revisions which are exceptionally noteworthy.
Marriage 2.2 – 1993 – Lorena Bobbit establishes the right of a woman to castrate her husband for being a “selfish lover.”
Marriage 2.5 – 2006 – Building on the pioneer work of Lorena Bobbit, Mary Winkler establishes the right of a woman to execute her husband for wanting to have sex with her.
Marriage 3.0 – 2010 - Autogamy (HT: Eman, the Desperate Houseboy for coining the word.)
Autogamy was the natural, predictable, and inevitable result of the direction of successive revisions to Marriage 2.0. Marriage was no longer about being married, it was all and only about getting married. Coupled with the bloated egos and sense of entitlement of post-feminist women, its development was inevitable. Fortunately, it runs fine on older hardware, this giving a few more years of life to the wedding industry. However, since Marriage 3.0 has gone “groomless”, suppliers of divorce products are likely to see their sales fall a bit. They hope to minimize their losses due both to falling popularity and sales of any version of Marriage 2.x and being cut out of any market for users of Marriage 3.0, by pushing for the adoption of
Marriage 4.0 – same-sex marriage – 2004
It is an anomaly of the fragmentation of the marriage market that Marriage 4.0 was actually released before Marriage 3.0, but its release got bogged down in court battles, limited market acceptance, and a very high return rate due to excessive bugs. If someone were into splitting hairs (an activity which I am sure none of the spearhead readership would waste their time on), autogamy might actually be more precisely termed Marriage 2.9 as it is a natural outgrowth of the Bridezilla feature of Marriage 2.x. However, since it is a true innovation allowing the use of Marriage by a woman totally without a hard drive of any kind, it probably deserves its own major revision number. All previous versions had required either a real or simulated hard drive, and autogamy was the first version to be able to run entirely on its own without any sort of supporting hardware.
What new versions of of Marriage does the future hold? Hard to say. With the history of innovation over the past 65 years, the sky is probably the limit. Marriage 5.0 may allow people to marry their pets. Marriage 6.0 may extend marriage to inanimate objects or even pastimes which are not objects at all – we have, after all, heard for years about people being married to their jobs. “Do you, John, take this cubicle to be your lawfully wedded (um, well I’m sure someone will come up with a word for it)?”
