But divorce statistics tell only part of the story. One of the main features of the more liberal consensus in the West has been the rise and rise of cohabitation, particularly in Europe, since the 1970s. The end of cohabitation doesn’t register in the tally of divorce rates, of course, and such unions can arguably be as stable or unstable as legally sanctioned marriages. Americans today, however, still value marriage itself–far more so than Europeans. They engage in it earlier and re-engage in it after divorce, even after several divorces. Perhaps because of greater geographical and job mobility, perhaps because of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the country’s ‘restless temperament’, Americans have the highest divorce, romantic break-up and remarriage rates in the world: 10 per cent of American women–a far greater proportion than their European sisters–will have lived with three or more husbands or domestic partners by the age of thirty-five. But now, it seems, cohabitation is on the rise in the US too, in part as a result of divorce rulings and custody settlements which favour women.
In February 2010, the latest figures for England and Wales noted that marriage had dropped to its lowest point since records began in 1862. A similar fall is visible in the rest of affluent Europe. Yet researchers tell us that marriage makes men, though not always women, live longer and more happily, as well as both parties richer and their children more successful. A 2002 study by Warwick University showed that in material terms ‘a happy marriage was equivalent to an annual income of £70,000’, and its impact on health was equivalent to giving up smoking. For women, who paradoxically wish for marriage more than men, the marriage benefits are not so great: compared to single or divorced women bolstered by friends, divorced men seem to suffer more from depression and their careers are less successful.
Those who do make the choice of engaging in marriage as a public ritual, researchers also say, are more committed to staying together than those who cohabit. Recent research conducted by the University of York shows that couples who cohabit are two and a half times more likely to split up than the married: what keeps the married together is not the certificate, but their understanding of their commitment and their fundamental attitude to the union.
And if in much of Europe official marriage is on the decrease, royal weddings continue to excite our fantasy. Meanwhile Americans still seem to love matrimony itself–with or without that useful tool of a prenuptial agreement. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers in New Jersey has also pointed out: ‘More than 90% of women have married eventually in every generation for which records exist, going back to the mid-1800s. Even the most extreme predictions for the current generation of women say that at least 4 in 5 will marry.’
Today’s Unsettled Unions
While it would seem that we want marriage, long-term unions and now civil partnerships as much as we ever did, and that we value them as an ideal and as public rituals, we find it more difficult to make up our minds to settle or stay in them. This is the case for women as well as men. Interestingly, in the cities of the newly flourishing nations such as China and India, the age of first marriage for women has risen sharply in the last years and is now around thirty, matching the West. Women’s education and financial independence simply mean later marriage, whatever the culture.
In the West, the desire for security and the desire for desire seem particularly embattled in our uncertain and overtly sexualized times. Against the background of our speedy, mobile, impatient yet risk-averse consumerist culture of equality, where everyone bears an entitlement to peaks of happiness, the decision to marry requires financial guarantees, a determination to fidelity on the part of both partners and a sense of certainty that life and love can rarely provide. The decision to stay together despite the inevitable harassments of everyday life, meanwhile, needs a devotion to the original wish and a realistic confrontation of the downs that any life brings.
If conjugality marks the union of the sexual with the social under the banner of love, it also entails the moment when we move from being children into being adults. Adults in our world have a less than good reputation. As parents they may have behaved erratically or irresponsibly, put a cachet on self-interest, and hardly hidden that behaviour from their children. These last decades have emphasized the value of youth, its freedoms, passions and excesses, far above any more measured maturity. Our icons could not be further removed from the serenely hatted middle-aged men and matronly women of the fifties. Our old, too, aspire to the lifestyle of youth, as ageing rock-stars tripping the boards have recently exemplified. So it is hardly surprising that the step into ‘adult’ versions of love should be delayed by the children of the long baby-boomer generation who made a virtue of behaving badly or rebelliously. Too much, it might seem, needs to be given up, particularly since marriage, and even long-term cohabitation, now once more carry a decided onus of monogamy. The sixties parental generation was more relaxed about the vow of fidelity.
The French art critic and writer, Catherine Millet, in her autobiographical The Sexual Life of Catherine M pinpoints a rather extreme instance of this casual relationship to fidelity. A sixties self-styled ‘suffragette for the libertine life’, she engages in adventurous and plentiful sexual exploits. It comes as something of a surprise in the midst of her cool, precise narrative to find that throughout she has also lived a conjugal life–in her twenties with one man and since her thirties with another, to whom she is married. The sheer number of her extramarital partners may outstrip most, but what is common is that the generation of the so-called sexual revolution had a rather more ambivalent and differently weighted sense of the very value of faithful monogamy from their children. This was evidently in part because they rebelled against the freighted époque of the conventional fifties of their parents. In turn, their children, too, have rebelled, if in complicated ways.
For many of the young today, a stream of love and sex relations is common. The sex itself may feel more like a duty one is driven to perform for ‘health’ and self-image reasons, than a desirable transgression. Sex, after all, no longer has an altogether positive mystique surrounding it, tainted as it is by ideas of abuse, infection and inequality. Then, suddenly, when a ‘serious’ relationship is on the cards, fidelity and monogamy become crucial to the twosome (whether heterosexual or gay), as do equal and sometimes opposing rights to satisfaction.
One of my interviewees, an attractive film-maker in his thirties, provided a vivid insight into the relational morality of the young. He remarked that the parental generation had been in many respects much freer than his. Having come of age under the shadow of Aids, when sex might mean death for both if either partner strayed, fidelity was a given for his generation. No ‘serious’ union could be engaged in without that commitment to faithfulness being in play. And since that commitment came hand in hand with the decision to have children, it was difficult for both partners, not only the male, to undertake. Everyone knew that once children came on the scene, sex went out of the window and life became a matter of acquiring cribs and prams, the right house or flat, the right school–a consumerist progression that didn’t stop for twenty years, at least. Bye-bye pleasure. Even if you wanted children, as he had in his last ‘serious’ twosome, the woman might not be ready. She, too, had a career to consider and had to make choices. Now, since he wasn’t yet ready to engage again, when he met a woman in her thirties to whom he was attracted, he checked to see that she wasn’t after a ‘serious’ relationship. It wouldn’t be fair not to, since she might feel her biological clock was ticking away.
Given our culture’s stress on rational decision-making, even in an area where reason is rarely at the forefront, little wonder that so-called commitment phobia is rife. Though the term is most vocally applied by women to criticize men, women, too, have their apprehensions about the symbolic rite of passage that marriage is. Another of my informants, a woman of thirty-eight, said she had only now agreed to marry her ‘serious’ partner of six years, though he had often asked. After all, she had her work, her fl
at, her sense of independence. It was only the thought that there might be children on the horizon that had convinced her the man she had long been living with might just be Mr Right-enough to warrant marriage.
Some of the young men I talked to gave another reason for delaying any commitment to marriage or monogamous fidelity. They didn’t want to repeat the sins of the fathers and inflict the pain of separation on partners, so it was best to keep things casual. But of course, while postponing the moment of cohabitation or marriage, with its contemporary onus of fidelity, they had already in some instances enacted what they feared, and inflicted pain on a string of earlier partners. Meanwhile, adamantly independent young women, refusing what might be the maternal model, were partly taking revenge on long-suffering mother and unfaithful father by abruptly cutting off relationships with their own mates.
Marriage carries centuries of social baggage, alongside familial hauntings. In our risk-averse society, where economic independence for both partners is often the norm, it’s hard to decide to take the plunge and harder still to feel buoyed by the everyday fact of it once the inevitable difficulties set in.
Back in 1918, the American humorist H.L. Mencken quipped that a husband was an indentured servant–all duties pertained to him, all privileges to the woman. With the undoubted benefits that have accrued from the growth of women’s equality, it is too often forgotten amidst the sometimes noisy backlash that it has also benefited men. Liberated from the discipline of a social model that marked responsibility and the altar as the underpinnings of mature masculinity, men were freed to engage in serial or multiple relations with no stigma attached. They were also freed from being breadwinners and supporting a wife. In the fifties, when the average age at which a man married in the US was twenty-three, to be a bachelor was an indication of deviance. Even a successful writer like John Cheever, whose diaries show him to be self-avowedly attracted to men–a passion only irregularly indulged–sings the praises of the beneficial ideal of marriage and suburban home life to which he is tortuously committed. Now, for men, though still far less for women, there is no stigma attached to singledom. Nor, conversely, are there those old-fashioned rewards from dependants for being a good provider.
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that the heterosexual bond depends on a firm division of labour. A woman does X, a man Y–and they are branded female and male activity and considered a fair exchange. Over these last decades, when both men and women do a proportion of X and Y, the division of labour within the heterosexual bond, along with the bond itself and the constituents of what can be branded male and female, have had to be negotiated at each step.
Equality today is understood as the due of both partners. Each is entitled to emotional and sexual fulfilment and the space in which to actualize their potential. Each must have the freedom to pursue work or a profession in a world of increased job mobility where employers most often set the rules. Partners in the adventure of coupledom, both now also share responsibility for all facets of existence from decision-making to nappy-changing, stocking the refrigerator, keeping up the social contacts, building each other’s self-esteem, while at least intermittently engaging in erotic play and providing satisfaction.
It is no wonder that commitment to the bond is an arduous step; and once made, difficult to hold on to. Never an institution that was free of them, these new strains have made the path of marriage a thorny one to navigate. In what the great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called our ‘liquid age’, where we are ever in pursuit of the next tantalizing product, it’s onerous indeed not to cast one relationship aside with the lure of another and better in view.
Yet the motor of love is powerful, and people do commit. At first at least, they ride blindly and blithely enough along. But the road of experience is full of stumblings and wrong turns. It is when the potholes gape, the abysses appear on either side, that the real challenges emerge. And that is where we have to test our understanding of what it means for two beings to carry on loving each other–happily enough ever after, or thereabouts.
Happily Ever After
What is it that we value about marriage and long-term cohabitation, value so much that they rank high amongst our pursuits of happiness? This union with another constitutes a major step into the wider social world. It is the space from which we undertake the projects of life, provide hospitality, find meaning. From here, too, we give new life, nurture new existence, extend ourselves beyond mortality. The homes we make with partners provide a shield against the ups and downs of the wider world, a place of belonging. Where else is there to feel safe, to put to rest that core helplessness that trails us from early childhood and which we once looked to mother or father to assuage? Where else is there to debrief, to construct a narrative of who we are and what we do, to put our feet up, to chat and exchange, to row and trust we can make up, to cry, to play, to laugh; to buoy the oft harried, lonely self, to refuel? Behind the frequently scoffed-at, sentimentalized Victorian version of home, there is after all what seems to be a fundamental human desire for an at-homeness in the world, as potent as that sexualized desire for the other, for the sublime rapture of passion. The home we create with another, create imaginatively out of love, is our best shot at it.
Our mate is the one ‘other’ on whom we can depend in times of crisis or illness, our comfort against ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’, our most intimate, trusted and cherished friend. To put power relations aside as best we can and for as long as we can is an abiding desire in a conflict-ridden world. Agape, that thoughtful and respectful form of affection, rather than flighty Eros with his youthful promise of bliss and short-lived ecstasy, governs many of the goods of marriage. These include facets of life which might find a place in that old word ‘character’ and are rarely voiced in our desire-driven world. Several of my younger interviewees mentioned the satisfactions of ‘taking responsibility’ for others, of ‘serving’ partners and children, of a mutual shaping. We are, after all, not only striving individualists, but also social beings for whom the sense of good character, of kindliness to our kindred, brings inner rewards and, yes, joy.
As for whether equality between partners in marriage has hampered the possibility of happiness, I would wager that the problem here is less with equality than with contemporary notions of happiness. Too often these last contain a slippage from mood states, the time-stopped ‘highs’ of drugs or the ecstasy of extraordinary moments. Gauging the ‘happiness’ of a partnership that unfolds through the peaks and pitfalls that time brings may bear more of a kinship with determining what makes up a good life with its inevitable highs and lows, its achievements and failures, than with a mood or gratification chart. An equal devotion to the life of the partnership, a valuing of each partner’s talents, needs and necessarily changing role within it, may be more important than negotiations about strict equality in housework or childcare hours, however central these may sometimes loom. Compromise, which may be more of a virtue of the older than of the younger, rules the marital sphere. Which is why marriage, for many, may feel better second time round.
Many of the phrases in the old Christian marriage vows still maintain their resonance: to have and to hold, from this day forward; for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish–even if the divorce statistics put in question ‘until death do us part’.
Against the liquidity of our age, it’s good, when thinking of marriage, to remember Shakespeare’s evocation of its ultimate existential basis:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s f
ool, 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.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Contemporary literature, like the media, is far richer in evocations of the battlefield of marriage, its routs, betrayals and humiliations, its psychosexual droughts and bitter endings, than in portraits of loving, settled states. Fiction feeds on conflict and extreme emotion even more voraciously than does life. Meanwhile, therapeutic manuals necessarily focus only on problems: every couple emerges as a suitable case for treatment, harried by the conflicts between trusting intimacy and the unruliness of desire.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 22
