On an unusually cold spring day in April of 2004, I received a weird-ass phone call from my close friend in which he revealed two major announcements in the span of 10 minutes. Announcement number one was that his longtime girlfriend was pregnant, and announcement number two was that he wanted me to be the best man in his upcoming wedding. We were both 21 at the time, so those proclamations were incredibly jarring coming from the immature friend I was just playing video games with the night before without a care in the world. Although he never said it to me, and as much as I know he will take this truism to his grave, the reason he was getting married was because he messed up and got his girl pregnant and both of their parents demanded they marry.
While I was browsing Twitter yesterday and I found out that Idris Elba and his girflriend Naiyana Garth just welcomed their first child together, a boy they named Winston. I was happy as hell for them, but very pissed off at the reactionary response by many stating that he must put a ring on her. If you think having a baby is a good reason to marry someone, then you need to keep your ignorant opinion to yourself, because any poor soul who listens to you could end up damaging his/her life in an irreparable manner.
Marriage is not something anyone should consider entering into on a whim. In our modern Western society, marriage is not just a contract, as many of you pro-marriage people constantly state, it’s a lifelong covenant of love between two people who are emotionally, spiritually, and physically committed to each other. The idea that having a baby with someone should automatically supplant those necessities and result in emotional indentured servitude is ludicrous. If there is one thing I know about family structures, it’s that children are acutely aware of the health of their parents’ relationship. When a marriage is built from pressure or obligation, instead of passionate commitment, then one party is eventually going to become resentful. And when that relationship starts to decline, it will be the child who notices it more than anything else. Even worse, it will be that very same child who embodies the emotional dysfunction they witness, and it will mark how they carry on their own relationships. Truth be told, I think there is nothing better for a child than to grow up in a healthy family system with two loving and married parents, but I also believe there is nothing more damaging than seeing their parents struggling to live a bitter lie of love.
If in your perfect world, people would only have sex in relationships, conceive babies after marriage, and commit to one another long-term before deciding to build a family, that’s GREAT — but please understand that our world is far from perfect, which means that sometimes the best we can do is manage the situation we are in. I don’t know how Idris feels about Naiyana, but as long as he’s committed to being a loving and involved father, nothing more needs to be said on my (or your) part.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.