Marriage

Beginning about the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Enlightenment Europeans slowly began to invest more emotion and legal sanction into the relationship. The notion of courtly love, for instance, gradually percolated downward into the merchant classes, which were percolating up in the social hierarchy. At some point in the latter 18th century, the notion of marrying for love became broadly established, but by no means completely and by no means restricted to any given stratum of society. The wealthy had power and wealth considerations attached to all their marriage relationships, where as the dirt poor quite often fell into alliances to insure their survival, as "two can live as cheaply as one" has very often been true. And, of course, there has been romantic attraction for a long, long time.

Nowadays marriage is observed by virtually all of western and eastern and tribal civilizations, but in the 20th century a major change began—the huge increase in divorce for reasons of "mutual incompatability" or other emotion-based reasons. The situation today in the United States is that half of the people in their first marriage will divorce and half or more of them will remarry, expecting something more rewarding from the next than the last marriage.

So, divorce usually boils down to what we expected from marriage and did not get. For males the object was to have steady sex, a home, a partner to help with decisions, a mother for children, perhaps, a helpmate in business or with one's scaling the corporate ladder, a whole variety of providing and helping things. For females the object was to have steady sex (but without as much admission of this), a provider and protector for the time of maternity and nursery, a companion, a helpmate with household jobs, a partner in business, but generally a more dependent relationship with the male than the male has with the female. Gay marriage has all of these things, except giving birth to one's own children.

One of the things that happens with many married couples is a kind of bonding, which could be looked at as a deliberate exclusion of others for a deeper relationship with the spouse, a kind of new consciousness of oneself as part of a pair that acts and thinks and laughs and cries alike. Many married couples report (or exhibit) these bonded relationships and currently society puts a high value on successfully attaining this bonded state. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, among the very openly polyamorous citizens of Hollywood, seem to have establish a strong and lasting bond despite the odds that their colleagues fail to conquer. The interesting thing about this couple is that both have careers and both have interests they pursue, but they stick together.

One wonders whether marriage is or provides the basis for a different kind of consciousness. I am sure there are "best friends" all over the world who have bonded relationships, some of them better friendships than marriages. Clearly one of the problems of marriage in modern society is the "dependency relationship," real or expected or imagined, and the strain it puts on the respective partners. Another topic within marriage is the disappointment with sex after the initial flurry of activity. The approaches to this subject are widely different according to gender and the terms of discussion often quite alien to one another. Maturity is a time of reconsideration and assessment, and often marriages fall apart during this stage. Finally, there is the problem of death and its effect on the surviving partner.