Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  At a time when banks and laws and governments were still enormously unstable, marriage became the single most important business arrangement most people would ever make in their lives. (Still is, some might argue. Even today, very few people have the power to influence your financial standing--for better or worse--quite so deeply as your spouse.) But marriage in the Middle Ages was certainly the safest and smoothest means of passing wealth, livestock, heirs, or property from one generation to the next. Great wealthy families stabilized their fortunes through marriages much the same way that great multinational corporations today stabilize their fortunes through careful mergers and acquisitions. (Great wealthy families back then essentially were great multinational corporations.) Wealthy European children with titles or inheritance became chattel, to be traded and manipulated like investment stocks. Not just the girls, mind you, but the boys, too. A child of rank could find himself engaged and then unengaged to seven or eight potential wives before he reached the age of puberty and all the families and their lawyers reached a final decision.

  Even among the common classes, economic considerations weighed heavily on both sexes. Landing a good spouse back then was sort of like getting into a good college, or earning tenure, or securing a job at the post office; it insured a certain future stability. Of course people did have their personal affections for each other, and of course tender-hearted parents did try to arrange emotionally satisfying unions for their children, but marriages during the Middle Ages were more often than not openly opportunistic. As just one example: A great wave of matrimonial fever swept across medieval Europe right after the Black Death had killed off seventy-five million people. For the survivors, there were suddenly unprecedented avenues for social advancement through marriage. After all, there were thousands of brand-new widows and widowers floating around Europe with a considerable amount of valuable property waiting to be redistributed, and perhaps no more living heirs. What followed, then, was a kind of matrimonial gold rush, a land grab of the highest order. Court records from this era are suspiciously filled with cases of twenty-year-old men marrying elderly women. They weren't idiots, these guys. They saw their window--or widow--of opportunity, and they leapt.

  Reflecting this general lack of sentimentality toward matrimony, it's not surprising that European Christians married privately, in their own homes, in their everyday clothing. The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as "traditional" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century--not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of style since. Before that, though, your average European wedding day wasn't all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage--a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. The reason the courts were involved at all was only in the interest of upholding a certain degree of social order. As the historian Nancy Cott has put it, "marriage prescribed duties and dispensed privileges," distributing clear roles and responsibilities among the citizenry.

  For the most part, this is still true in modern Western society. Even today, pretty much the only things the law cares about when it comes to your marriage are your money, your property, and your offspring. Granted, your priest, your rabbi, your neighbors, or your parents may have other ideas about marriage, but in the eyes of modern secular law, the only reason marriage matters is that two people have come together and produced something in their union (children, assets, businesses, debts), and these things all need to be managed so that civil society can proceed in a methodical fashion and governments will not be stuck with the messy business of raising abandoned babies or supporting bankrupted ex-spouses.

  When I began divorce proceedings in 2002, for instance, the judge had no interest whatsoever in myself or my then-husband as emotional or moral beings. She didn't care about our sentimental grievances or our shattered hearts or any holy vows that may or may not have been broken. She certainly didn't care about our mortal souls. What she cared about was the deed to our house and who was going to hold it. She cared about our taxes. She cared about the six months remaining on our car's lease, and who would be obligated to make the monthly payments. She cared about who had the rights to my future book royalties. If we'd had any children together (which we did not have, mercifully), the judge would've cared very much about who was obligated to provide for their schooling and medical care and housing and babysitting. Thus--through the power invested in her by the State of New York--she kept our little corner of civil society tidy and organized. In so doing, that judge in the year 2002 was hearkening back to a medieval understanding of marriage: namely, that this is a civil/secular affair, not a religious/moral one. Her rulings would not have been out of place in a tenth-century European courtroom.

  To me, though, the most striking feature of these early European marriages (and divorces, I should add) was their looseness. People got married for economic and personal reasons, but they also separated for economic and personal reasons--and fairly easily, compared to what would soon come. Civil society back then seemed to understand that, while human hearts make many promises, human minds can change. And business deals can change, too. In medieval Germany, the courts even went so far as to create two different kinds of legal marriage: Muntehe, a heavily binding permanent life contract, and Friedelehe, which basically translates as "marriage-lite"--a more casual living arrangement between two consenting adults which took no account whatsoever of dowry requirements or inheritance law, and which could be dissolved by either party at any time.

  By the thirteenth century, though, all that looseness was about to change because the church got involved in the business of matrimony again--or rather, for the first time. The utopian dreams of early Christianity were long over. Church fathers were no longer monkish scholars intent on re-creating heaven on earth, but were now mighty political figures very much invested in controlling their growing empire. One of the biggest administrative challenges the church now faced was managing the European royalty, whose marriages and divorces often made and broke political alliances in ways that were not always agreeable to various popes.

  In the year 1215, then, the church took control of matrimony forever, laying down rigid new edicts about what would henceforth constitute legitimate marriage. Before 1215, a spoken vow between two consenting adults had always been considered contract enough in the eyes of the law, but the church now insisted that this was unacceptable. The new dogma declared: "We absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages." (Translation: We absolutely prohibit any marriage that takes place behind our backs.) Any prince or aristocrat who now dared to marry against the wishes of the church could suddenly find himself excommunicated, and those restrictions trickled down to the common classes as well. Just to further tighten controls, Pope Innocent III now forbade divorce under any circumstances--except in cases of church-sanctioned annulments, which were often used as tools of empire building or empire busting.

  Marriage, once a secular institution monitored by families and civil courts, now became a stringently religious affair, monitored by celibate priests. Moreover, the church's strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence--something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. And divorce remained illegal in Europe until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII brought back the custom in grand style. But for about two centuries there--and for much longer in countries that remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation--unhappy couples no longer had any legal escape from their marriages should things go wrong.

  In the end, it must be said that these limitations made life far more difficult for women than for men. At least men were allowed to look for love or sex outside their marriages, but ladies had no such sociall
y condoned outlet. Women of rank were especially locked into their nuptial vows, expected to make do with whatever and whoever had been foisted upon them. (Peasants could both select and abandon their spouses with a little more freedom, but in the upper classes--with so much wealth at stake--there was simply no room for any give.) Girls from important families could find themselves shipped off in midadolescence to countries where they might not even speak the language, left there forever to wither in the domain of some random husband. One such English teenager, describing the plans for her upcoming arranged marriage, wrote mournfully about making "daily preparations for my journey to Hell."

  To further enforce controls over wealth management and stabilization, courts all across Europe were now seriously upholding the legal notion of coverture--that is, the belief that a woman's individual civil existence is erased the moment she marries. Under this system, a wife effectively becomes "covered" by her husband and no longer has any legal rights of her own, nor can she hold any personal property. Coverture was initially a French legal notion, but it spread handily across Europe and soon became entrenched deep in English Common Law. Even as late as the nineteenth century, the British judge Lord William Blackstone was still defending the essence of coverture in his courtroom, insisting that a married woman did not really exist as a legal entity. "The very being of the woman," Blackstone wrote, "is suspended during marriage." For that reason, Blackstone ruled, a husband cannot share assets with his wife even if he wanted to--not even if those assets were once technically the woman's property. A man cannot grant anything to his wife, for doing so would presuppose "her separate existence" from him--and such a thing was clearly impossible.

  Coverture, then, was not so much a blending of two individuals as a spooky and almost voodoo-like "twicing" of the man, wherein his powers doubled and his wife's evaporated completely. Combined with the strict new antidivorce policies of the church, marriage became, by the thirteenth century, an institution that entombed and then erased its female victims--particularly among the gentry. One can only imagine how lonely the lives of those women must have become once they were so thoroughly eradicated as humans. How on earth did they fill their days? Over the course of their paralyzing marriages, as Balzac wrote of such unfortunate ladies, "Boredom overtakes them, and they give themselves up to religion, or cats, or little dogs, or other manias which are offensive only to God."

  If there is one word, by the way, that triggers all the inherent terrors I have ever felt about the institution of marriage, it is coverture. This is exactly what the dancer Isadora Duncan was talking about when she wrote that "any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it deserves all the consequences."

  My aversion is not entirely irrational either. The legacy of coverture lingered in Western civilization for many more centuries than it ought to have, clinging to life in the margins of dusty old law books, and always linked to conservative assumptions about the proper role of a wife. It wasn't until the year 1975, for instance, that the married women of Connecticut--including my own mother--were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. It wasn't until 1984 that the state of New York overturned an ugly legal notion called "the marital rape exemption," which had previously permitted a man to do anything he liked sexually to his wife, no matter how violent or coercive, since her body belonged to him--since, in effect, she was him.

  There's one particular example of coverture's legacy which--given my circumstances--touches me most of all. The fact is, I was lucky that the United States government was even considering allowing me to marry Felipe without forcing me to renounce my own nationality in the process. In 1907, a law was passed by the United States Congress stating that any natural-born American woman who married a foreign-born man would have to surrender her American citizenship upon her marriage and automatically become a citizen of her husband's nation--whether she wanted to or not. Though the courts conceded that this was unpleasant, they maintained for many years that it was necessary. As the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, if you were to permit an American woman to keep her own nationality at the moment of marriage to a foreigner, you would essentially be allowing the wife's citizenship to trump the husband's citizenship. In so doing, you would be suggesting that the woman was in possession of something that rendered her superior to her husband--in even one small regard--and this was obviously unconscionable, as one American judge explained, since it undermined "the ancient principle" of the marital contract, which existed in order "to merge their identity (man and wife) and give dominance to the husband." (Strictly speaking, of course, that's not a merger; that's a takeover. But you get the point.)

  Needless to say, the law did not hold the reverse to be true. If a natural-born American man married a foreign-born woman, the husband was certainly allowed to keep his citizenship, and his bride (covered by him, after all) would certainly be allowed to become an American citizen herself--that is, so long as she met the official naturalization requirements for foreign-born wives (which is to say, so long as she was not a Negro, a mulatto, a member of "the Malay race," or any other kind of creature that the United States of America expressly deemed undesirable).

  This brings us to another subject I find disturbing about matrimony's legacy: the racism that one encounters all over marriage law--even in very recent American history. One of the more sinister characters in the American matrimonial saga was a fellow named Paul Popenoe, an avocado farmer from California who opened a eugenics clinic in Los Angeles in the 1930s called "The Human Betterment Foundation." Inspired by his attempts to cultivate better avocados, he devoted his clinic to the work of cultivating better (read: whiter) Americans. Popenoe was concerned that white women--who had lately started attending college and delaying marriage--weren't breeding quickly or copiously enough, while all the wrong-colored people were breeding in dangerous numbers. He also nursed deep concerns about marriage and breeding among the "unfit," and so his clinic's first priority was to sterilize all those whom Popenoe judged unworthy to reproduce. If any of this sounds distressingly familiar, it's only because the Nazis were impressed by Popenoe's work, which they quoted often in their own writings. Indeed, the Nazis really ran with his ideas. While Germany eventually sterilized over 400,000 people, American states--following Popenoe's programs--managed to get only about 60,000 citizens sterilized.

  It's also chilling to learn that Popenoe used his clinic as the base from which to launch the very first marriage-counseling center in America. The intention of this counseling center was to encourage marriage and breeding among "fit" couples (white, Protestant couples of northern European descent). More chilling still is the fact that Popenoe, the father of American eugenics, also went on to launch the famous Ladies' Home Journal column "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" His intention with the advice column was identical to that of the counseling center: to keep all those white American couples together so they could produce more white American babies.

  But racial discrimination has always shaped marriage in America. Slaves in the antebellum South, not surprisingly, were never allowed to marry. The argument against slaves' marrying, simply put, was this: It's impossible. Marriage in Western society is supposed to be a contract based on mutual consent, and a slave--by very definition--does not possess his own consent. His every move is controlled by his master and therefore he cannot willfully enter into any contract with another human being. To allow a slave to enter into a consensual marriage, then, would be to assume that a slave can make even one small promise of his own, and this is obviously impossible. Therefore, slaves could not marry. A tidy line of reasoning, this argument (and the brutal policies that enforced it) effectively destroyed the institution of marriage within the African American community for generations to come--a disgraceful legacy that haunts society to this day.

  Then there is the question of interracial marriage, which was illegal in the United States until fairly recently. For most of Ame
rican history, falling in love with a person of the wrong color could land you in jail, or worse. All this changed in 1967, with the case of a rural Virginia couple named--poetically enough--the Lovings. Richard Loving was white; his wife, Mildred--whom he had adored since he was seventeen years old--was black. When they decided to marry in 1958, interracial unions were still illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia as well as in fifteen other American states. So the young couple sealed their vows in Washington, D.C., instead. But when they returned home after their honeymoon, they were swiftly apprehended by local police, who broke into the Lovings' bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them. (The police had hoped to find the couple having sex, so they could also charge them with the crime of interracial intercourse, but no luck; the Lovings were only sleeping.) Still, the fact that they had married each other at all rendered the couple guilty enough to haul off to jail. Richard and Mildred petitioned the courts for the right to uphold their District of Columbia marriage, but a Virginia state judge struck down their wedding vows, helpfully explaining in his ruling that "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix."

  Good to know.

  The Lovings moved to Washington, D.C., with the understanding that if they ever again returned to Virginia, they would face a jail sentence. Their story might have ended there, but for a letter that Mildred wrote to the NAACP in 1963, asking if the organization might help find a way for the couple to return home to Virginia, even if only for a short visit. "We know we can't live there," Mrs. Loving wrote with a devastating humility, "but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families & friends."