January, May and December are known in Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), Region 1 and elsewhere in the Philippines as the “marryingest months,” while the months of July, August and November are often avoided in tying the knot.
Those who wanted to be wed, no longer seemed to prefer the month of June.
But here’s the hitch: fewer Filipino couples are getting married and the number of registered marriages declining, according to the “Sexy Statistics” of the National Statistical Coordination Board.
Very surprisingly, there’s a rise in the number of “live-in” couples and drop of marriage as an institution.
The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, CAR and CARAGA, had the least number of registered marriages.
Many Filipino couples in CAR and Region 1 regard marriage as an option, rather than a requirement, in starting families.
Whether marriage is going out of fashion, we can only speculate, debate and quarrel on, but the crux of the matter is, nowadays, many couples just “live in” and decide to get married later after bearing children.
Cohabitation and out-of-wedlock fertility are increasingly acceptable, making you wonder whether this is a dramatic shift in norms towards progressiveness and individualism.
Talking about such a shift, maybe live-in couples refuse to enter the institution of marriage because marriage, after all, is no bed of roses and, for the women, finding that special person they can annoy badger or nag for the rest of their lives is no easy task at all.
All know about the great philosopher Plato. And you know of his famous statement, “Love is a mental disease.” Interpreting Plato, he was trying to inform us is that marriage is love and marriage is an institution. But love is blind. Therefore, marriage is an institution for the blind.
The culture of wedding and marriage seem to be changing. Ah Kong opines that partners who co-habit postpone marriage with the farfetched notion that when the cohabitation goes berserk like incessant quarreling or think they aren’t fit for each other, they can wiggle out from the “live-in” condition.
Add to the fact that a lot of Filipino males are afflicted with the “macho image,” described by Ah Kong as a manly disease of bloated ego by any afflicted Filipino male who thinks he’s handsome, adorable and desirable to the fairer sex, when in fact he isn’t.
Male Filipinos are known to impress a macho image, much so that depriving them of this image is like stripping them of liberty to horse around and chase whomever they want to chase while in a live-in condition.
That being the case, for a Cordilleran in a live-in situation, he’s a man without a wife and incomplete. After getting into marriage, he is finished. And he’ll always pine for the days when he says, “You know what I did before I married? There were these times when I was horsing around. . .”
The newly-married woman, on the other hand, with a satisfied smile and smug look on her face will continually murmur to her husband, “Macho image, my foot! This time there is no chance of horsing around, damn you, my dear husband!”
Ah Kong refuses to believe his co-Cordilleran male counterparts are cowards, when it comes to marriage, knowing that marriage is a sentence. . . A life sentence. That marriage is life; they also say life ain’t fair.
Op kors, they are not cowards, even if they know that marriage is like a prison. Even for good behavior, the can never be paroled out of the marriage.
Maybe some men out there thinking of marriage are contemplating that in the first year of marriage, the husband speaks and the wife listens. In the second year, the wife speaks and the husband listens. In the third year, they both speak and all the neighbors listen, eh?
In marriage, a man can have words with his wife, but a woman can have paragraphs with her husband.
And because neighbors have listened, both the live-in partners try to drown their sorrows in spirits. Spirits? Aahh! Alcohol. The perfect solvent. It dissolves careers, families, live-ins, marriages, etc.
Nonetheless, Ah Kong is comforted by the fact that “living-in” is a propensity to marry later, because after all, marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night.
And in sleeping legally together, they become soul mates, never mind if they become cellmates, trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.
After all, marriage is a legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to disagree with each other for as long it takes, even when one snores and the other one does not hear it.
In so doing, chains do not hold the mates together, instead threads, thousands of threads, which sew people through the years in a relationship which may not be sunshine, but where two persons can share an umbrella and survive the storm together.
