Until Emotions Do Us Part

Hege Brækhus, law professor at the University of Tromsø, recently suggested in Norwegian daily Aftenposten that the marital rituals should omit the part where man and wife promise each other everlasting faithfulness, for good and for worse until death do they part.

-"I'm not sure whether it's ethically defensible to demand such a promise from people", Ms./Mrs. Brækhus mused (I haven't been able to verify her marital status). -"The relationship is emotional, and you can't dominate your emotions by pure will" (Quotes are freely translated; regrettably, the article's only available in Norwegian).

Furthermore, the professor builds her argument on the empirical fact that fewer and fewer marriages are "everlasting", while arguing that several couples that actually stay together do so due to factors more trivial than love, such as economical considerations.

While Ms./Mrs. Brækhus' statements and indeed her conception of ethics surely are worthy of discussion (or perhaps one can't expect other from professors of Law), I'd like to elevate the underlying dilemma, and a recurrent one in debates on institutions, of ideals vs. empirical observations: Should institutions be adjusted in comfort with societal developments, or should they uphold ideals worthy of being pursued? Personally, I incline towards the latter. If we should heed the the former, wouldn't society slowly degenerate into a hedonistic anarchy?

The line of argument could be made much longer, but I'll conclude by expressing my support for retaining the line "Until Death Do Us Part", thus upholding a worthy ideal in an age of self-interest maximizers.