The Mystery of Marriage

My father never made much money but he was a man of grand gestures. I remember gazing wide-eyed when he put on Ella Fitzgerald and took my mother’s hand and danced her around the living room. The year he worked in New York, he sent her flowers every Friday. Often he came home bearing shiny packages with stylish outfits for her to wear. My mother, in turn, made a point of looking effortlessly beautiful, revered him as the man of the house, and made a loving home.

My parents’ marriage, in its heyday, remains for me the single most compelling model of a loving partnership that I know. It is a template—a precious jewel in my consciousness, which I take out to gaze at from time to time.

I have been thinking a lot about their marriage lately, mining it for clues. It worked in part, I think, because their roles were clearer and the avenues of exit not so freely available. But that is not the whole story. Whatever their private dissatisfactions, they seemed to view them as insignificant compared to their commitment to the grand experiment of their marriage and the task of raising their family. They parented with grace, but they did not make my sisters and me the obsessive focus of their lives. Children were expected to aspire to the grown-ups’ world, not the other way around, the way it seems today. Adult time was separate, sacrosanct. The boundaries were clearer.

This is important, I think, because, although they had a great capacity for playful enthusiasms, my parents were adult in a way that seems strangely foreign today. There was a gravitas about their marriage, which is not a word I would use to describe many marriages I see today. No doubt they had their grievances and resentments just like every other couple. But I never had the feeling (as I do so often today) that they viewed their marriage as diminishing of themselves. It seemed to both elevate them as individuals, and serve as an anchor mooring them to something larger than themselves.

Sometimes when the pressures of modern life grind us down, we tend to feel nostalgic for a time when marriage looked easier. But while marriages lasted longer once, they weren’t necessarily less gruelling. Indeed, we have always had a prurient interest in the miseries of marriage, and literature is full of horrendous accounts of unions gone sour. “Throughout most of literary history, marriage—particularly happy marriage—might as well be one of those empty spots on old maps inscribed with the words, ‘Here be monsters,’ ” writes Gary Kamiya on salon.com. “For every Kitty and Levin, the lovingly observed couple in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who find grace as they work their way together through life, there are hundreds of Kareninas, Madame Bovarys and Casaubons . . . . Some of this void can be attributed to the uninspiring historic reality of marriage, which until fairly recently could be summed up as a business deal with bad sex . . . .”

I once asked a friend who married young, built a life with the accoutrements of success, and has managed to stay happily married for thirty-odd years, to tell me why her marriage made it through. “Who knows why?” she shrugged, in a way that suggested she’d asked herself the same question many times. “I married my drug dealer, for Christ’s sake.”

Indeed, one doesn’t have to look far to conclude that an enduring marriage is often a serendipitous accident. But even today, when we have spawned a culture of drive-by marriages and serial marriages, when the nuclear family has become an alternative lifestyle, when each new publishing season brings yet another avalanche of save-your-marriage manuals, the mythology of the storybook marriage remains an astonishingly potent force in our lives.

We can’t seem to let go of believing that marriage is the route to salvation. Marriage is a tenacious idea for many reasons, not only because the desire for intimate connection is profoundly human, or because, for many, marriage is a matter of consecration and faith, but because marriage is the glue that holds us together as a society. When marriage falters, the social fabric begins to unravel. This is not an argument against divorce, merely an acknowledgment that a huge and compelling body of social-science research points unequivocally to the conclusion that, in almost every way, divorce is bad for children and society.

And so, married couples, as well as governments and religious institutions, have a great deal invested in shoring up the myth of marriage—something that anyone who has lived through a divorce has experienced, often painfully. Whatever the state of their own marriages, perhaps because of it, couples find it deeply threatening when a marriage in their circle ends. It is like a cancer that must be contained before it metastasizes.

These two powerful pressures are at work all the time in our culture, subtly and not-so-subtly punishing and ostracizing those who remain unmarried by choice or destiny and those who choose to leave an unfulfilling marriage. But what if the chief enemy of modern marriage isn’t the detritus of feminism or the killing stresses of modern life or our obsessive need for self-actualization—although each, no doubt, takes a toll. What if our problem is the pervasive mythology of marriage itself? Could it be, I wonder, that so many of us are failing at marriage because expecting to live happily with one person for the rest of our lives is an absurd idea?