How does instutitionalisation prostitute love?
I would like to be enlightened Mkuu.
Love transcend institutions, the birds and the beasts do not have institutions and ceremonies, but they know love too, some of them better than we do.
Institutionalizing something as complex as love is akin to computer simulating intelligence, you can try very much, but because the rules of computer programming can never attain the level of sophistication of natural human intelligence, what you end up with is of a much inferior nature than the real thing.
When we humans try to "institutionalize" love, with unnatural rules like "ye shall forsake all others" (how pretentious !) and "till death do us part" (really, If I believed in god I would almost say this was a blasphemious disregard for the hands of providence) we are watering down a truly wonderful phenomenon into one narrow manageable track.
We are trying to come up with formulaes to create some very natural phenomena, at the end of the process instead of coming up with a sustainable product, we create the choking plastic marriage that no wonder has either horrific oppressive results if it succeeds at all or most often in current years succumb to a split within the first five years.
So institutionalizing the natural order of things to a manageable degree of chaos only give us the least common denominator, which turns out to be bland and boring for most people, hence the increase of extramarital affairs. Institutionalizing love into marriage is akin to canning food, you get some artificial benefit (the food lasts longer for example, whic cannot be said of the marriage) but you end up with some major cancers, literally.
This devaluation of the natural order of things, this dumbing down of people to sets of "married" and "unmarried", this pretentious high mindedness and self-ascribed morality, is what I call the prostitution of love.
Many have realized this, consciously or subconsciously, and are now resorting to accepting that marriage is prostituted love, and in going along, they choose to marry for money or social position, completing the prostitution to their own perceived advantage, ramming the gear into this vicious cycle of prostitution one more layer.
That's why some of us will never engage in this prostitution of love.