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Marriage

July 05, 2009

Speaking of declarations of (in)dependence, I saw this headline on AlterNet the other day: "For Many, Marriage Is Sexless, Boring and Oppressive: Time to Rethink the Institution?" When I stopped sputtering -- someone thinks this is news?? -- I read the article. It was about one Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer whose 20-year marriage had just ended, in part because she had had an affair. This apparently led her to the conclusion that the institution of marriage was problematic. She said this in writing, then was astonished at the invective directed against her. I was so astonished that I wrote the following.

Reading this article I got the feeling that the women's liberation movement never happened -- that it never raised any questions about marriage as an institution: its history, its purpose, its assumptions about male and female roles. I remember those questions, and I also remember the defensiveness with which mainstream feminists tended to react to the critiques of radical feminists, socialist feminists, and lesbian feminists. The Betty Friedans et al. took every critique of marriage (and of institutionalized heterosexuality in general) as an attack on their personal choices. The defensive reaction to Sandra Tsing Loh's writing about marriage is nothing new. Neither is Tsing Loh's story. Maybe if she'd paid more attention to earlier feminist critiques of marriage, she wouldn't have been so shocked by either her divorce or the reaction to her writing about it.

Marriage is a contract. When one party or another reneges on a particular contract, do we immediately question the existence of contracts in general? No, we don't. We look at the particular contract, the circumstances under which it was signed, the behavior of the two parties, their interpretation of the contract, and their expectations of each other. (If you think any of this is cut-and-dried, take a look at all the case law that's been devoted to contracts since the founding of the republic.)

The history, conventions, and laws about marriage are out there for all to see. The huge trouble is that plenty of people don't want to see them. I don't think Tsing Loh sees them very clearly, even now; if she did, her heart wouldn't "lift" at the sight of her daughters' Tiffany-blue wedding invitations -- she'd be bummed out. Plenty of people, even feminists and politically savvy women and men, manage to willfully suspend what they know (or at least deeply suspect) to be true: that marriage is a very problematic institution, and it's strong enough to shape its participants even when they're determined to "have it their way."

Sure, I've known a few married couples over the years who've managed to survive and thrive, both as individuals and as a couple, but they've also worked like hell to do it -- and quite a few of these marriages are second ones for one or both parties. But the successful marriages of a few, or even many, couples shouldn't limit our critique of the institution.

Marriage is the default setting in this society. It's not surprising that most people get married: they're expected to get married, and not getting married (especially for women) takes a lot of courage and determination. What's surprising is how many people who understand the history and nature of the institution and who are privileged enough to have alternatives keep sleep-walking into it, and celebrating when their friends and their kids do likewise. If Sandra Tsing Loh would address that perplexing question, they'd be making a real contribution.

I believe that the limiting of personal options is one thing that makes marriage attractive to so many people. Getting married, like having children, sets one's course for a long time. In the old days it was pretty much the only big choice a middle-class woman had to make: pick a husband and (if you made a good choice) you didn't have to decide what to do with your life. This abdication of responsibility spawned the "problem with no name" among women of my mother's generation (those who were raising children in the Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best years) that Betty Friedan wrote about so memorably in The Feminine Mystique.

Whether we grew up in dysfunctional families or not (I sure did!), we've all grown up in a dysfunctional society -- and as far as I can tell, the "off-the-rack" mentality has gotten worse in recent decades. The idea that you have to practice something -- a skill, an art, a relationship -- to get good at it seems to escape a lot of people. At the first, or second, or third sign of frustration, they're outta there.

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