What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  A thousand years after the birth of Christ, one pope decided to insist that the rules had changed. When a powerful French noble, Jourdain, married off his daughter against her vehement objections, the pope annulled the marriage—a decision as shocking and urgent in its time as, say, Loving v. Virginia. The pope won. Within two centuries, the Church had turned the standard wedding ceremony topsy-turvy. Now the girl, and not her father, had to say—out loud—“I do.” Now it was she, and not her father, who gave away the rights in herself: he might still walk her down the aisle, but he no longer literally placed her hand in her husband’s; she did that herself. As one theologian explained, “where there is to be union of bodies there ought to be union of spirits.” After reading about centuries in which men traded off their daughters’ wombs like cattle—and often for cattle—you want to give three big cheers for the Church.

  In practice, among the late medieval and early premodern upper classes, the children’s consent was still assumed: it would have taken extraordinary willfulness for a twelve-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy to stand up against her or his parents (without, remember, school pals or MTV to cheer on her rebellion). One thirteenth-century English archbishop outlawed adolescent marriages, but since local bishops gave dispensations freely—or rather, for a reasonable price—who cared?

  When the sixteenth-century Protestants sided with the parents, outlawing secret marriages and requiring parental consent, it was because they refused the idea that marriage was a private affair. Everyone’s interests had to be consulted, with parents and “friends” (sibs, uncles, godparents, interested others) proposing, and with marriageable adults thinking seriously about the suggestions of those who cared about their welfare. Oh, the Protestants did believe that, at a certain age—between, say, twenty-two and twenty-five—you were old enough to marry without your parents’ consent. But until then it was common sense that your parents knew better than you did, that marriage based on “such ephemeral factors as sexual attraction or romantic love was if anything less likely to produce lasting happiness than one arranged by more prudent and mature heads.” Consider the first marriage of Hermann von Weinsberg of Cologne, a sixteenth-century burgher whose “parents suggested he consider marrying his neighbor Weisgin Ripgin, the proprietor of a wool and yarn shop, recently widowed after sixteen years of marriage.” His response: “Because you and my mother so advise me, and because I know her well and trust God, I shall be a happy man if the woman also desires me.” Hermann’s father proposed and within a week: married! Sure, both Hermann and Weisgin each had the opportunity to say no—but the philosophy they were following was closer to reasonable, responsible, appropriate, duty than to our era’s profound training in passion, delight, uniqueness, love.

  And yet, as we saw in Dissent, despite themselves the Protestants’ emphasis on “holy matrimony,” combined with the Catholics’ insistence on consent, eventually exploded into today’s emphasis on love. The startling concept of “holy matrimony” exploited a contradiction in Catholic theology: if consent and the individual will were so spiritually important, wasn’t the marriage bond itself—its inner life—holy as well? Of course, some of the preaching about “holy matrimony” was done by now-married priests who had to justify to their consciences and congregations their own fall from celibacy. But things also worked the other way around: with the preacher-men now married, they started to see marriage, that difficult and daily attempt to treat each other well, could be a spiritual act that pleased God.

  Following the law of unintended consequences, the meaning of the phrase “holy matrimony” grew larger and more explosive as time went on. At first, it encompassed the idea that Hermann and Weisgin, in fulfilling their duty by marrying, were doing a holy thing. But over the centuries “holy matrimony” expanded to mean that marriage’s inner life was actually more important than its forms—that the souls must meet before marriage, that the inner life must guide you to your spouse. Where once you had only veto power—your parents would nominate, and you would say yes or no—your feelings now could nominate and run the entire spousal election process.

  Exactly when things switched from consent to choice is impossible to pinpoint, since the history of the inner life is notoriously hard to trace. But diaries, letters, and literature suggest to historians and literary scholars that some fairly large earthquake in marriage attitudes sent tremors across the eighteenth century. By then even the propertied classes, the ones who traditionally gave their children the least control, began to think that the children should have a say in who they married. The new romantic theories began surfacing in novels like Richardson’s weeper Clarissa, in which parents’ heedlessness of their daughter’s heart leads to her ruin and death, or Fielding’s Tom Jones, in which two young people’s apparently mismatched love turns out to be just right. One French traveler to upper-class eighteenth-century England was startled enough by the rise of this remarkable idea of conjugal affection to write home that English girls and boys had an extraordinarily free opportunity to get to know each other before marriage; that “three marriages out of four are based on affection”; and that, even after marriage,

  husband and wife are always together and share the same society. It is the rarest thing to meet the one without the other. The very richest people do not keep more than four or six carriage-horses, since they pay all their visits together. It would be more ridiculous to do otherwise in England than it would be to go everywhere with your wife in Paris. . . . the Englishman would rather have the love of the woman he loves than the love of his parents.

  Imagine!

  We’re still not looking at anything like the standards of today’s marriages. One historian writes that “A popular 1779 treatise described the ideal marriage as ‘a union of mind and sympathy of mutual esteem and friendship for each other.’ ” One eighteenth-century Salem schoolteacher told her diary she preferred to “remain in ‘single blessedness’ than to enter those sacred indissoluble bonds from mere motives of interest.” And yet her standards for a suitor would strike us as astonishingly low: “Never have I rejected an individual whose presence gave me equal pleasure to that of his absence.” It’s not so hard for me to imagine marrying a man if that were my measuring stick: Don’t care whether or not he’s here.

  By the late nineteenth century, young people began and managed their own courting, only afterwards allowing their parents a veto—a process that speeded up dramatically in the 1920s, as courtship moved from front porch to backseat.

  In other words, for the past four hundred years, young people have steadily moved out from under their parents’ thumbs, until today we would be a bit shocked if adults did not select spouses for themselves. And since the middle ages, girls and women have steadily been moving forward on the question of my body, my right to choose: to choose to marry someone her father proposed; to choose a suitor; to choose whether or not to expose herself to pregnancy every time she had sex; to choose even whether to love a woman or a man.

  Or to quote again that twelfth-century theologian, “[W]here there is to be union of bodies there ought to be union of spirits.” It is that union of spirits, that insistence on active consent and personal choice, that now rules our marriage ideology—and my own home life. Which brings me, finally, to offer a glimpse of the love story behind this book.

  One day in 1991, almost against my will, I knew Madeline and I were going to stand up in front of the people we loved and commit ourselves to each other. Of course, it’s ridiculous to say that it was against my will. I decided. Madeline, being distinctly private, wanted just to exchange rings. But an insular suburban life had strangled my childhood and my parents’ marriage, so I recoiled: something inside me insisted on a ritual moment in full community view. It took awhile to write a ceremony that meant enough, but not too much. In our dearest friends’ living room, we would say a few Jewish prayers, recite four favorite poems, exchange rings, speak our declarations, and, of course, kiss.

  All of which
we did, semicircles of family’s and friends’ eyes on us like lamps.

  How can I describe what came next? It was nearly a delirium: by accident we’d spilled into something sacred. In that backyard in (yes) June, we kissed madly, actually forgetting we were lesbians, forgetting that the neighbors might be shocked. Madeline forgot to eat or drink. I would have kissed the letter carrier had he walked through. My dryly sarcastic brother cried so hard while making his toast that he could barely complete his sentences. My stepfather, who once squirmed at hearing I was queer, announced his pride in me and my friends. My mother led the blessings, cut the challah, and charmed all my friends. To poke fun at the ceremony’s earnestness, we brought out a cake topped with two brides—laughing so hard that we brought down the house. To our utter surprise, the ceremony did bring us closer, pulling an invisible cloak around us that has warmed us during difficult times. We’d thought ourselves as committed as any couple could be: how else could we have exposed ourselves to the world’s ridicule? But now even the most subtle traces of doubt dissolve instantly, chased away by the memory of that day when we made our declarations so publicly, placing our love in the hands of God and everyone we knew.

  Today, after nearly a dozen years together, each morning when I wake up and find Madeline beside me, I still feel—if you’ll excuse me for lapsing into poetry—surprised by joy: “and then my state / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate.” I am one of those former lit majors who has whispered the “westron wind” quatrain to my love over the phone when far away. In front of that roomful of family and friends, before vowing to care for her lifelong, I spoke to her that most famous Shakespearean sonnet, that determined lifetime promise—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.” And I’ve repeated it to her, alone at home, when one or another of us is disconsolate, as age slowly creeps up on us, to remind her that, “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come; / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.”

  Our marriage, in other words, has been bought and paid for with our society’s common cultural currency: love. I adore her: I want to stand by as her perfect skin mottles and browns, as her dark brown hair grays, as her sweet eyelids sag. I want to calm her panic when she’s ill, cry in her arms when my life goes wrong, and argue over our different driving styles until we’re in the grave. I cry at others’ weddings because I was so happy at—and am still so happy with— my own. With great good fortune, I was old enough—even under the French king’s age of consent rules—when I made my choice to have made the right one, one that seems an ongoing fountain of joy.

  If our society believes in letting two people choose their life’s partner from a sea of particular and unique individuals—if each of us is free to choose a spouse based on our own hopes for companionship, affection, friendship, and love—then how dare anyone tell me I have chosen wrong? If marriage is for, as Archbishop Cranmer wrote in 1547, “mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity,” Madeline and I belong.

  Conclusion

  Will marriage as we have known it survive even to the next generation? Can it survive?

  —FELIX ADLER, Marriage and Divorce (1905)

  And so we return, full circle, to the question with which I began this book: What is marriage for? In one form or another, answering that question has preoccupied many a theologian and political philosopher, aristocrat and politician, church court and peasant jury. And finding the answer has never been simple, because so many competing interests have always been at stake. Even the simple question, “Is John married to Mary or to Anne (or neither, or both)” might be answered differently depending on whether you believe marriage is made by their own private consent or by a parentally approved public ceremony; whether it’s a marriage or a brothel if they have sex while trying to prevent conception; whether it’s a marriage or a barnyard if they marry across tribal lines; whether they can or cannot exit if they despise each other— to name only a few of marriage’s many conundrums. What is marriage for? turns out to be a question about many things: about which families will be allies in trade and politics, which will rise and fall in the coming generation’s economic competition; about the right use of the body and the meaning of sex; about which tribes count as political and social equals; about which child starves and which inherits a prospering farm; about sexual equality, about farm life versus urban capitalism, about feudalism, theocracy, democracy, and much, much more.

  What is marriage for, in other words—like most serious political or social questions—is a question about what it means to be fully human. Throughout this book we’ve seen arguments among the Romans, Jews, and early Christians; among the sixteenth-century Protestants and Catholics; between eighteenth-century democrats and monarchists; between the nineteenth-century purity brigade and the free-love forces; between feminists and male supremacists. The argument is always conducted by people with passionate beliefs about how to live a moral and responsible life, debating how to put the human body and spirit to good, joyous, productive use. And with such a large question behind it, the marriage battles are sometimes in the foreground, and sometimes in the background, but always with us.

  If the question of whether John is married to Mary has been fraught with so many tensions and beliefs, we can hardly expect the question of whether John is married to Martin, or whether Mary is married to Anne, to be less contentious. And yet today’s arguments about what constitutes a moral life—and a moral marriage—are treated as if they are unusually shocking, at least in what the United States calls the culture wars. As always, the conservatives want to hold onto the incarnation of marriage that won the last century’s battle, anachronistically calling that version “traditional” and “time-honored”; the progressives want to bring marriage into step with how people actually live today; the utopians want to banish marriage entirely.

  Yet marriage is a much hardier institution than either the doomsayers or the utopians ever seem to recognize. We can get a better perspective on today’s marriage debates by remembering that although each apparently revolutionary proposal to change the marriage rules has shocked the conservatives of any given era, when such proposals surface in public debate the underlying economic and social changes have already happened.

  So which side should win today’s marriage battle, and why? The reader surely knows my opinion by now. But it might still help to reprise briefly what our era has concluded marriage is for—and how the intertwined rise of capitalism and egalitarian democracy transformed it. Marriage ceased to be a way to assign clan wealth or to choose your working partner—and turned into a way to share and shore up one’s dearest companion’s well-being and inner fortunes. Marriage stopped being justified only by making babies— and became justified by enriching the couple’s happiness and intimacy. The family stopped being seen as your main work group, in which the child obeyed when her labor was assigned out—and started to be seen as a careful and nurturing nest for the vulnerable young, a nest in which men and women are equally qualified to serve as financial protector or personal nurturer or both. Making kin stopped being quite so critical to marriage, letting the pair themselves choose, free of family permission. Social order does remain one of marriage’s key purposes: the legal institution attempts to apply a just social consensus to private disputes.

  Or to put it more simply, Western marriage today is a home for the heart: entering, furnishing, and exiting that home is your business alone. Today’s marriage—from whatever angle you look—is justified by the happiness of the pair. When combined with the West’s root commitment to officially treating the sexes as equal, that marriage philosophy makes it possible—no, necessary—to recognize the marriages of two people of one sex. Our society has endorsed what some of us think of as the
most spiritual purpose of marriage, the refreshing of the individual spirit. And if we are to respect that spirit, same-sex couples belong.

  Naturally, conservatives are dragging out the rhetoric that has been hurled against every marriage change, as we’ve seen. Allowing same-sex marriage would be like allowing married women to own property, “virtually destroying the moral and social efficacy of the marriage institution.” Or it would be like legalizing contraception, which “is not what the God of nature and grace, in His Divine wisdom, ordained marriage to be; but the lustful indulgence of man and woman. . . . Religion shudders at the wild orgy of atheism and immorality the situation forebodes.” Or it would be like recognizing marriage between the races, a concept so “revolting, disgraceful, and almost bestial” that it would lead directly to “the father living with his daughter, the son with the mother, the brother with his sister, in lawful wedlock”—and bring forth children who would be “sickly, effeminate, and . . . inferior.” Or it would be like making wives the legal equals of their husbands, a proposal that “criticizes the Bible . . . degrading the holy bonds of matrimony into a mere civil contract . . . striking at the root of those divinely ordained principles upon which is built the superstructure of society.” Or it would be like allowing divorce, “tantamount to polygamy,” thereby throwing “the whole community . . . into a general prostitution,” making us all “loathsome, abandoned wretches, and the offspring of Sodom and Gomorrah.”