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17 June 2009 3:00 PM
The Idea of Marriage: Till Death Do Us Part?
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh offers this advice: "avoid marriage--or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the
humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense,
of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as
demonstrably fleeting as love."
She is speaking from personal experience:
Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don't generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day--literally during a five o'clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks--when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized ... no. Heart-shattering as this moment was--a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history--I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family's domestic construct back together. In women's-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to "work on" falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.The always sharp Kerry Howley dissents, though her rebuttal is hardly an endorsement of traditional marriage:
I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It's not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will--"a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history"--rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone's time. Tsing Loh thinks we're deluded, but perhaps we've adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than "does/does not last forever"? Tsing Loh asks "why we still believe in marriage," but I'd like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you're in when you die.
Ms. Howley is correct that 20 happy years and two well-loved children aren't adequately described by the word failure. I'd even go so far as to say that lots of marriages are both meaningful and end in divorce. I do not think, however, that soceity should rethink its norms such that marriage is entered into as a temporary arrangement--unions that end before death aren't merely failures, but they are rightly regarded as partial failures in most instances of marriage.
Why?
The norm of "till death do us part" gives married people a valuable
sense of security, and often times security itself; it allows people to
plan for the future as couples and families; and in general it puts its
cohabitants in the mindset of a team, rather than a free agent. The
sports analogy is actually instructive. NBA fans are familiar with what
happens when certain players reach a contract year: there is less
perfect alignment than usual between their incentives as individual
players, and their incentive as team members whose primary goal is group
victory.
It isn't difficult to see how the same mentality might make a
marriage and the parties to it significantly less happy -- will I work
while you attend graduate school? Or go into debt to finance a
marginally better treatment for your arthritis? Or sacrifice my career
advancement for the sake of the kids? Or relocate to a city where
you'll have a more fulfilling job? Well sure, I'll do those things,
assuming the plan is "till death do us part." If the real plan is,
"till I get tired of you," those sacrifices are going to impose a
higher than expected cost more frequently than is now the case.
None of us knows what is going to happen as we grow older. The fact of committing to someone for life despite that uncertainty, "for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health," does two things: it affords peace of mind, insofar as it is a norm that gets kept, and it enhances the union that two people are joining by raising the stakes of the adventure both are embarking upon. Whether judged on sentimental grounds, or by examining the utility of the incentives it creates, "till death do us part" seems like a wise norm indeed, even if an unfortunate number of couples aren't able to fulfill it.
Comments (6)
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In that one excerpt, Tsing Loh has told us that she's married but doesn't like men; that she's a romantic adulteress (the worst kind), and that she abandoned her marriage because she's lazy. Add on the purple prose and the melodrama, complete with images of tombstones, and it's hard to understand why anyone would think the author is rational about her own experiences, let alone equipped to generalize.
Kerry Howley's dissent is based on the idea of marriage as some kind of project that one starts and can declare "complete". It's not so. Even adult children are seriously affected by the *failure* of their parents to maintain devotion to each other. It almost invariably instills in them both personal insecurity and cynicism toward all human relationships (I say "almost" out of rational humility although I have not noted any aberrations).
Tsing Loh and her husband have, at least to some degree, undermined what she probably considers to be the most important projects of her life: her children. There are circumstances where a divorce is truly the only option, but when children are involved it is always a tragedy. In that case, it should be entered into only after weighing the palpable damage done by divorce with the genuine harm anticipated in staying together, even if only formally. A desire for Love and Romance is not a good enough reason.
"avoid marriage--or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love."
She gave up on her marriage, and so asks why should anyone marry and risk the disruption and heartache that its failure cause. She discovered a downside to marriage.
Well, she’s right in there with Hugh Hefner and Madonna as people that have outgrown the limitations of marital life. It wasn’t for her. Too much work, and not nearly as exciting as gazing into the eyes of the new guy. I believe people who choose to discard key life long commitments will find unanticipated costs in the life choices they make.
Hugh Hefner is a fine example. His first marriage didn’t work out, so he took life by the horns, drank deep of all the good things it had to offer, savored his women as a connoisseur savors fine wine, and was always ready to move on to the finest vintage available. He was Solomon-like in his pursuit of human pleasure, but without the wisdom, for at the end of it all there was no realization of the emptiness and vanity of it all.
In my view, he appears a very empty, lonely man, without any of the really great joys that life could have offered. The twenty-year-olds that he spends his nights with can have little to share with him in any meaningful way, and their own willingness appears highly self-interested. However great Mr. Hefner’s situation may appear from the world’s perspective, his life would be a living a nightmare to me. Will Mrs. Tsing Loh be any more successful than Mr. Hefner?
I doubt it.
Of course, the wife that leaves is the least obvious person suffering loss in the events described in the article and comments above. The most obvious would be the children, whose world is destabilized. This topic is the subject of significant debate, but it must be noted that even in the best of circumstances they largely experience the loss of a parent. That is a hardship to them that a loving parent would not burden their children with lightly.
The last group to be mentioned would be the group I have the most intimate familiarity with, the fathers. They are presumed to be less significant, and for a variety of reasons can easily be painted as threatening and dangerous to their own children by a woman adequetly motivated to do so. The result is separation from their children, with significant financial burdens required for them to attempt to disprove what never happened in the first place. The court’s need to attempt to protect the children results in fathers shrinking to a sort of second class citizen. The reverse is sometimes true, but in the vast majority of the cases it is the father who is placed in the dock and who is required to prove his fitness to continue his contact with his own children. The legal landscape is significantly worse in the more feminized culture of Canada, where David Warren’s excellent piece on this subject can be found here.
How about here.
Thank you Conor for starting this topic of a week and a half ago, and since then with the "Tribal Approach" added by hotmail of what Sandra calls for the meeting place for the boyfriend or husband*, and so not really the end to marriage, as for the latter*, but just a different way of doing things. Case in point of that artist couple in Maine who were profiled on "Bill Green's Maine" WCSH6 dot com the other day who have not only separate bedrooms, but each with a separate house, just down the same road, and so plenty of their own "space" for freedom without having to play musical rooms is what I'd call it like that "Musical Chairs" game, or having to step aside here and there for inter-mingling during the day, but instead for a rendezvous only when they want to. Call it the "guest-house" being put to better use. The female members of the "tribe" of the neighborhood taking care of the "brood", and might I add like the "Amazonians" of old, i.e. today's female-bodybuilders for an example, like in an Olympic Village daring the male locals to take them on, if they dare! (;-) and the resulting family of any such "conquest", well....for to be brought up by the "dominant" ones (;-) See Diana The Valkryie's "How to make a man feel helpless in your arms" (;-) and also with that bending of the horseshoe story for "Mythbusters". Her motto of: "A Hard Man is good to beat"! (;-) Anyway turning what was once a "Muscle Beach" in the sand out west, into a permanent institution ONE STEP BEYOND a Hugh Hefner mansion, to an on-going affair that can last forever: a new type of marriage based on strength! The man as the head of the household of course by biblical standards, but the hold of his part of the house or new harem being that of a share of where his wife and child(ren) do grow up, and then to get into stage 2 later, as not to plan for what's next in this "experiment" of like not growing vegetables in a Biosphere, but human "beans". (;-). A "Survival of the Fittest" taken to the next level of human evolution, back to our roots, but in the process producing the bold and beautiful flowers, in "The Garden of Sandra." (;-)