Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  "Can we just do that?"

  "Darling!" Felipe said, and he took my face between his hands with a sudden, frustrated urgency. "When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want."

  Can we, though?

  I prayed that Felipe was right, but I wasn't sure. My deepest fear about marriage, when I dug right down to the very bottom of it, was that matrimony would end up shaping us far more than we could ever possibly shape it. All my months of studying marriage had only caused me to fear this potentiality more than ever. I had come to believe that matrimony as an institution was impressively powerful. It was certainly far bigger and older and deeper and more complicated than Felipe or I could ever possibly be. No matter how modern and sophisticated Felipe and I might feel, I feared we would step onto the assembly line of marriage and soon enough find ourselves molded into spouses-- crammed into some deeply conventional shape that benefited society, even if it did not entirely benefit us.

  All this was disquieting because, as annoying as it may sound, I do like to think of myself as vaguely bohemian. I'm not an anarchist or anything, but it does comfort me to regard my life in terms of a certain instinctive resistance to conformity. Felipe, to be honest, likes to think of himself in much the same way. Okay, let's all be truthful here and admit that most of us probably like to think of ourselves in these terms, right? It's charming, after all, to imagine oneself as an eccentric nonconformist, even when one has just purchased a coffeepot. So maybe the whole idea of bending under the convention of marriage stung a bit for me--stung at that stubborn old level of anti-authoritarian Greek pride. Honestly, I wasn't sure I would ever get around that issue.

  That is, until I discovered Ferdinand Mount.

  Pawing through the Web one day for further clues on marriage, I stumbled on a curious-looking academic work titled The Subversive Family by a British author named Ferdinand Mount. I promptly ordered the book and had my sister ship it to me in Bali. I loved the title and was certain this text would relay inspiring stories of couples who had somehow figured out ways to beat the system and undermine social authority, keeping true to their rebel roots, all within the institution of marriage. Perhaps I would find my role models here!

  Indeed, subversion was the topic of this book, but not at all in the manner I'd expected. This was hardly a seditious manifesto, which shouldn't have been surprising given that it turns out Ferdinand Mount (beg pardon--make that Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet) is a conservative columnist for the London Sunday Times. I can honestly say that I never would have ordered this book had I known that fact in advance. But I'm happy that I did find it, because sometimes salvation comes to us in the most unlikely of forms, and Sir Mount (surmount?) did provide me with a sort of rescue, offering up an idea about matrimony that was radically different from anything I'd unearthed before.

  Mount--I'll eschew his title from here on out--suggests that all marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority. (All nonarranged marriages, that is. Which is to say all nontribal, nonclannish, non-property-based marriages. Which is to say Western marriage.) The families that grow out of such willful and personal unions are subversive units, too. As Mount puts it: "The family is a subversive organization. In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, bishops and commissars but also humble parish priests and cafe intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming up against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last."

  Now that is some seriously strong language, but Mount builds a compelling case. He suggests that because couples in nonarranged marriages join together for such deeply private reasons, and because those couples create such secret lives for themselves within their union, they are innately threatening to anybody who wants to rule the world. The first goal of any given authoritarian body is to inflict control on any given population, through coercion, indoctrination, intimidation, or propaganda. But authority figures, much to their frustration, have never been able to entirely control, or even monitor, the most secret intimacies that pass between two people who sleep together on a regular basis.

  Even the Stasi of communist East Germany--the most effective totalitarian police force the world has ever known--could not listen in on every single private conversation in every single private household at three o'clock in the morning. Nobody has ever been able to do this. No matter how modest or trivial or serious the pillow talk, such hushed hours belong exclusively to the two people who are sharing them with each other. What passes between a couple alone in the dark is the very definition of the word "privacy." And I'm talking not just about sex here but about its far more subversive aspect: intimacy. Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two--creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else can be privy.

  Emily Dickinson wrote, "Of all the Souls that stand create--/ I have elected--One." That right there--the idea that, for our own private reasons, many of us do end up electing one person to love and defend above all others--is a situation that has exasperated family, friends, religious institutions, political movements, immigration officials, and military bodies forever. That selection, that narrowness of intimacy is maddening to anyone who longs to control you. Why do you think American slaves were never legally permitted to marry? Because it was far too dangerous for slave owners to even consider allowing a person held in captivity to experience the wide range of emotional freedom and innate secrecy that marriage can cultivate. Marriage represented a kind of liberty of the heart, and none of that business could be tolerated within an enslaved population.

  For this reason, as Mount argues, powerful entities across the ages have always tried to undercut natural human bonds in order to increase their own power. Whenever a new revolutionary movement or cult or religion comes to town, the game always begins the same way: with an effort to separate you--the individual--from your preexisting loyalties. You must swear a blood oath of utter allegiance to your new overlords, masters, dogma, godhead, or nation. As Mount writes, "You are to renounce all other worldly goods and attachments and follow the Flag or the Cross or the Crescent or the Hammer and Sickle." In short, you must disown your real family and swear that we are your family now. In addition, you must embrace the new, externally mandated, family-like arrangements that have been imposed on you (like the monastery, the kibbutz, the party cadre, the commune, the platoon, the gang, etc.). And if you choose to honor your wife or husband or lover above the collective, you have somehow failed and betrayed the movement, and you shall be denounced as selfish, backwards, or even treasonous.

  But people keep doing it anyhow. They keep on resisting the collective and electing one person among the masses to love. We saw this happen in the early days of Christianity--remember? The early church fathers instructed quite clearly that people were now to choose celibacy over marriage. That was to be the new social construct. While it's true that some early converts did become celibate, most decidedly did not. Eventually the Christian leadership had to cave and accept that marriage was not going away. The Marxists encountered the same problem when they tried to create a new world order in which children would be raised in communal nurseries, and where there would be no particular attachments whatsoever between couples. But the communists didn't have any more luck enforcing that idea than the early Christians had. The fascists didn't have any luck with it either. They influenced the shape of marriage, but they couldn't eliminate marriage.

  Nor could the feminists, I must admit in all fairness. Early on in the feminist revolution, some of the more radical activists shared a utopian dream in which, given the choice, liberated women would forever
select bonds of sisterhood and solidarity over the repressive institution of marriage. Some of those activists, like the feminist separatist Barbara Lipschutz, went so far as to suggest that women should quit having sex altogether--not only with men, but also with other women--because sex was always going to be a demeaning and oppressive act. Celibacy and friendship, therefore, would be the new models for female relationships. "Nobody Needs to Get Fucked" was the title of Lipschutz's infamous essay--which is not exactly how Saint Paul might have phrased it, but essentially came down to the exact same principles: that carnal encounters are always tarnishing, and that romantic partners, at the very least, distract us from our loftier and more honorable destinies. But Lipschutz and her followers didn't have any more luck eradicating the desire for private sexual intimacy than the early Christians, or the communists or the fascists. A lot of women--even very smart and liberated women--ended up choosing private partnerships with men anyhow. And what are today's most activist feminist lesbians fighting for? The right to get married. The right to become parents, to create families, to have access to legally binding unions. They want to be inside matrimony, shaping its history from within, not standing outside the thing throwing stones at its grotty old facade.

  Even Gloria Steinem, the very face of the American feminist movement, decided to get married for the first time in the year 2000. She was sixty-six years old on her wedding day and just as brilliant as ever; one has to assume she knew exactly what she was doing. To some of her followers, though, it felt like a betrayal, as though a saint had fallen from grace. But it's important to note that Steinem herself saw her marriage as a celebration of feminism's victories. As she explained, had she gotten married back in the 1950s, back when she was "supposed to," she would have effectively become her husband's chattel--or at the very most his clever helpmeet, like Phyllis the math whiz. By the year 2000, though, thanks in no small part to her own tireless efforts, marriage in America had evolved to the point where a woman could be both a wife and a human being, with all her civil rights and liberties intact. But Steinem's decision still disappointed a lot of passionate feminists, who could not get over the stinging insult that their fearless leader had chosen a man over the collective sisterhood. Of all the souls in creation, even Gloria had elected one--and that decision left everybody else out.

  But you cannot stop people from wanting what they want, and a lot of people, as it turns out, want intimacy with one special person. And since there is no such thing as intimacy without privacy, people tend to push back very hard against anybody or anything that interferes with the simple desire to be left alone with a loved one. Although authoritarian figures throughout history have tried to curb this desire, they can't get us to quit it. We just keep insisting on the right to link ourselves up to another soul legally, emotionally, physically, materially. We just keep on trying, again and again, no matter how ill-advised it may be, to recreate Aristophanes' two-headed, eight-limbed figure of seamless human union.

  I see this urge playing out everywhere around me, and sometimes in the most surprising forms. Some of the most unconventional, heavily tattooed, antiestablishmentarian, and socially rebellious people I know get married. Some of the most sexually promiscuous people I know get married (often to disastrous effect--but still, they do try). Some of the most misanthropic people I know get married, despite what appears to be their equal-opportunity distaste for humanity. In fact, I know of very few people who haven't attempted a long-term monogamous partnership at least once in their lives, in one form or another--even if they never legally or officially sealed those vows inside a church or a judge's chambers. In fact, most people I know have experimented with long-term monogamous partnerships several times over--even if their hearts may have been utterly destroyed by this effort before.

  Even Felipe and I--two dodgy survivors of divorce who prided ourselves on a certain degree of bohemian autonomy--had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved. Before we'd ever heard of Officer Tom, we had been living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship--and what do you call that, if not marriage? We'd even had a ceremony to seal our fidelity. (Hell, we'd had two!) We were shaping our lives in that particular form of partnership because we yearned for something. As so many of us do. We yearn for private intimacy even though it's emotionally risky. We yearn for private intimacy even when we suck at it. We yearn for private intimacy even when it's illegal for us to love the person we love. We yearn for private intimacy even when we are told that we should yearn for something else, something finer, something nobler. We just keep on yearning for private intimacy, and for our own deeply personal set of reasons. Nobody has ever been able to completely sort out that mystery, and nobody has ever been able to stop us from wanting it.

  As Ferdinand Mount writes, "Despite all official efforts to downgrade the family, to reduce its role and even to stamp it out, men and women obstinately continue not merely to mate and produce children but to insist on living in pairs together." (And I would add to this thought, by the way, that men and men also keep insisting on living in pairs together. And that women and women also keep insisting on living in pairs together. All of which just drives the authorities crazier still.)

  Faced with this reality, repressive authorities always eventually surrender in the end, bowing at last to the inevitability of human partnership. But they don't go down without a fight, those pesky powers-that-be. There is a pattern to their surrender, a pattern that Mount suggests is consistent across Western history. First, the authorities slowly glean that they are unable to stop people from choosing loyalty to a partner over allegiance to some higher cause, and that marriage is therefore not going away. But once they have given up trying to eliminate marriage, the authorities now attempt to control it by establishing all sorts of restrictive laws and limits around the custom. When the church fathers finally surrendered to matrimony's existence in the Middle Ages, for instance, they immediately heaped on the institution a giant pile of tough new conditions: There would be no divorce; marriage would now be an inviolable holy sacrament; nobody would be allowed to marry outside of a priest's purview; women must bow to the laws of coverture; etc. And then the church went a little crazy, trying to enforce all this control over marriage, right down to the most intimate level of private marital sexuality.

  In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. "Sexual activity," Brother Cherubino instructed, "should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation." The wife could look at her husband's private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and "never allow yourself, woman, to be seen in the nude by your husband." And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not anywhere! "The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife," Brother Cherubino lamented. "He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment . . ."

  Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once the lovemaking was over--and this was perhaps the mo
st threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression.

  In the end, the couples tend to win.

  Once the authorities have failed at eliminating marriage, and once they have failed at controlling marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. (Amusingly, Ferdinand Mount calls this the signing of a "one-sided peace treaty.") But then comes an even more curious stage: Like clockwork, the powers-that-be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the Western world for several centuries now--acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values.

  This is the pattern that happened with the Soviets and with the twentieth-century Chinese, too. First, the communists tried to eliminate marriage; then they tried to control marriage; then they fabricated an entirely new mythology claiming that "the family" had always been the backbone of good communistic society anyhow, don't you know.

  Meanwhile, throughout all this contorted history, throughout all the thrashing and frothing of dictators and despots and priests and bullies, people just keep on getting married--or whatever you want to call it at any given time. Dysfunctional and disruptive and ill-advised though their unions may be--or even secret, illegal, unnamed, and renamed--people continue to insist on merging with each other on their own terms. They cope with all the changing laws and work around all the limiting restrictions of the day in order to get what they want. Or they flat-out ignore all the limiting restrictions of the day! As one Anglican minister in the American colony of Maryland complained in 1750, if he had been forced to recognize as "married" only those couples who had legally sealed their vows in a church, he would have had to "bastardize nine-tenths of the People in this County."