The Mystery of Marriage

This business of expectations interests me because a marriage is always laced through with expectation, whether consciously expressed or not. And those expectations are implicit from the moment people marry or enter into an arrangement that they consider a marriage, even though they may not have formalized that arrangement legally.

We have come to think of marriage as a private matter between two people in love, but marriage has never been a private matter. It is a public institution imbued with a motherlode of assumptions and expectations. Marriage and government have long been in bed together, entwined over property rights, welfare issues, taxation laws, and civil rights—a reality the same-sex marriage debate has highlighted, but not something most of us think about much.

One of the more fascinating books to enter the public discourse on this subject recently is Nancy Cott’s Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cott, a marriage historian and professor of American history at Harvard University, argues that in the US the institution itself is a metaphor for citizenship, steeped as both traditions are in notions of vow-making and dewy-eyed idealism. When we marry, we grow up, get real, take our place in the nation-state.

Cott argues that legal authorities have always fashioned models of marriage finely calibrated to political ideals, and even though in Canada history took a different path, in both places cumulative associations to marriage models reverberate in the collective unconscious. In America, for instance, the founding fathers viewed monogamy as an alluring concept because they saw neat parallels between the idea of monogamous marriage between two consenting adults and republican government by and for the people. Over the years, governments have used marriage as a handy tool with which to restrict or exclude certain groups (forbidding slaves and homosexuals to marry, for instance), and ideas about the definition of marriage have shifted according to the body politic. By the end of the last century, marriage came to be seen purely as a private matter between two consenting adults. Now, when we are less likely to marry than ever before, and more miserable and divorce-prone when we do, marriage remains very much a part of both the American and Canadian dreams, although our definition of marriage seems to have morphed into the seductive, albeit paradoxical, view that marriage is a cozy haven of emotional and economic security where avenues for “personal growth” continue to abound.

The result is that we are all carrying around this ideological freight, at once internalizing a profound belief in the moral rightness of marriage and being propelled into marriage by many symbolic cultural incentives and attractive economic ones, while remaining deeply skeptical of the marriages we observe and clearly conflicted about our own.

What is even more confounding is that just as the institution is in the process of imploding, it is being hailed as a panacea. We are in the midst of a huge marriage-is-good-for-you moment right now, so much so that to governments interested in staying in power, marriage is the new opiate of the masses. Marriage boosters are either defending the institution against the latest alleged attacks on its integrity (“the gay assault”) or they are promoting its benefits as better for your health than a trip to Canyon Ranch (“married men live longer”). In an election-year initiative to promote marriage, President Bush and the Republicans floated a proposal to ask Congress for $1.5 billion (US) to help low-income couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain healthy marriages (which raises the question of what the middle class and filthy rich are to do about their plate-throwing).

What’s more, it is impossible to turn around these days without reading a study about how marriage is better for you than omega fatty acids. One of the more fear-mongering treatises on the transformative powers of the institution is Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage, which makes anyone who isn’t married, or soon planning to wed, feel like a total loser. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and Gallagher, director of the Marriage Program at the Institute of American Values, are like two industrious little marriage actuaries, reducing the subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Marry and you’ll boost your mutual funds! Marry and your kids will join the Ivy League! Marry and you’ll ward off heart disease! Resisting the impulse to marry is portrayed as such a dumb choice, one almost expects to see a picture of a blackened lung on the cover. But if marriage is such a hot deal, then why are so many people fleeing?

At what point my parents’ marriage began to unravel I do not know, but, at seventy, my mother suffered a debilitating depression, moved into my sister’s home for a while to recover, and decided she wasn’t going back. She could have remarried, I suspect—she was a woman of many charms—but she always brushed off such suggestions laughingly, with a wave of her hand. “What do I need it for?” she’d say.

My mother was philosophical about her marriage. She mourned its loss but did not see it as a personal failure, and, as far as I know, she never regretted it. Whatever her marital burdens, I never heard her speak ill of my father. She died last year and is buried beside him. All the ingredients were there for her marriage to have worked, but forces conspired against it. To her, its ending was her destiny, a part of her story.

My marriage is over now too, at least the marriage I have known. I have moved out, rented an apartment. Still, my husband and I remain deeply bound by intimacy, love, family, and history. It is still unclear whether our marriage will metamorphose. Certainly there’s no going back to what was. But the door remains open—to what, exactly, I do not know. We are making this up as we go along.