Postmodern marriage

“Marriage is a great institution - but who wants to spend his life in an institution?” 
- Groucho Marx


Marriage is the locus (when it works!) of our deepest and most trusting relationships. But marriage today, increasingly unmoored from traditional constraints, is very hard to sustain. It is possible to achieve a successful and lasting relationship of deep trust without sticking to convention, crossing wide differences of background and worldview -- but you have to work at it. And it often fails.

In most past societies, it was not necessarily easier to be married, but it was certainly easier to stay married: everyone knew the right way to act, without much question, and the right way did not include the possibility of ending the relation. The initial choice of mate was tightly constrained by the need to the community “in order” by class, status, tribe, familial nexus. Once the knot was tied, the community, normally acting through some form of church, maintained that stability by making sure it could not be untied.

The role of the community has slowly weakened over the past few centuries, and the space for individual choice has grown. Still, even a half century ago the vast majority of people in the industrial democracies married within their close circles of region and status, and followed traditional ceremonies in which the community witnessed and took responsibility for their vows of permanent fidelity. Divorce remained rare.

Something really “broke” within scarcely more than the last half century. Today when one goes to a wedding, it is very often constructed as a personal statement, a reflection of the couple’s world view, rather than as an affirmation by an existing church. In my recent book, Trust in a Complex World, I tell of a wedding I attended in a Calvinist church just outside of Geneva – the site, in Calvin’s time, of one of the the most extreme forms of community-dominated marriage. Yet here we had a female Calvinist minister standing aside and letting the couple pronounce vows they had written themselves, after readings from Martin Luther King and French poets, while friends performed music by the altar. They pledged their love, but there was no assumption that they were locked in: the witnesses all “knew” that people can grow in different ways, and we would never think of imposing a judgment that they must stay together if they themselves did not continue to feel it.

And that kind of marriage, as everyone knows, takes continual and deliberate work. Researchers have confirmed this: Galena Rhoades, for example, finds that “Couples who slide through their relationship transitions have poorer marital quality than those who make intentional decisions about major milestones.”  

Most important: this is not just an elite phenomenon. Cosmopolitan elites have tinkered with marriage for almost all of human history, but they have not encouraged the rest of society to join in. Men and women have largely suffered in silence, the men in bars and the women in the home. Now self-help books by the hundreds are sold in pharmacies in small towns and discussed among friends, with the consistent message that partners should open up, discuss issues with each other, work things through as equals. Another set advises on divorce: how to get free of a bad marriage, how to navigate the emotional challenges. Even reality TV has adopted the message: shows like “Married at First Sight,” “Surviving Marriage,” and “Neighbors With Benefits” bring couples’ struggles and discussions into the open for all to see and comment on.

This is historically new. The current sensibility, now spread quite widely: that marriage is a relation constructed by those who enter into it, not defined by an outside group; and if it is to last and reach its full value, they must work on it seriously and continuously. They undertake that work, rather than simply choosing a predefined path.

There is great promise in this for liberation of the human spirit. But there is also great danger and trouble as we learn to navigate the new territory. One student of the field finds, “The average marriage today is weaker than the average marriage of yore, in terms of both satisfaction and divorce rate, but the best marriages today are much stronger, in terms of both satisfaction and personal well-being.”

Marriage is, in this sense, a paradigm for all community life. Old communities are weakening everywhere, causing enormous distress, fragmentation, and conflict. But new relations are also emerging – based on more diverse relations, wider choice, more equality. But they we have a lot to learn before they become true forms of community that we can count on.

(image: http://goo.gl/uUKgVF)