apathetic, ne’er-?do-?well, heterosexual deadbeats like me?
In any case, whatever happens with gay marriage, and whenever it happens, I can also assure you that future generations will someday find it ridiculous to the point of comedy that we ever debated this topic at all, much the same way that it seems absurd today that it was once strictly illegal for an English peasant to marry outside of his class, or for a white American citizen to marry someone of “the Malay race.” Which brings us to the final reason that gay marriage is coming: because marriage in the Western world over the last several centuries has been moving-slowly but inexorably-in the direction of ever more personal privacy, ever more fairness, ever more respect for the two individuals involved, and ever more freedom of choice.
You can chart the beginning of the “marital freedom movement,” as we might call it, from sometime around the mideighteenth century. The world was changing, liberal democracies were on the rise, and all over western Europe and the Americas came a massive social push for more freedom, more privacy, more opportunities for individuals to pursue their own personal happiness regardless of other people’s wishes. Men and women alike began to express ever more vocally their desire for choice. They wanted to choose their own leaders, choose their own religions, choose their own destinies, and-yes-even choose their own spouses.
Moreover, with the advancements of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in personal earnings, couples could now afford to purchase their own homes rather than live forever with extended family-and we cannot overestimate how much that social transformation affected marriage. Because along with all those new private homes came… well, privacy. Private thoughts and private time, which led to private desires and private ideas. Once the doors of your house were closed, your life belonged to you. You could be the master of your own destiny, the captain of your emotional ship. You could seek your own paradise and find your own happiness-not in heaven but right there in downtown Pittsburgh, for instance, with your own lovely wife (whom you had personally selected, by the way, not because it was an economically advantageous choice, or because your family had arranged the match, but because you liked her laugh).
One of my personal hero-?couples of the marital freedom movement were a pair named Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker, of the great state of Kansas circa 1887. Lillian was a suffragette and the daughter of a noted anarchist; Edwin was a progressive journalist and feminist sympathizer. They were made for each other. When they fell in love and decided to seal their relationship, they visited neither minister nor judge, but entered instead into what they called an “autonomistic marriage.” They created their own wedding vows, speaking during the ceremony about the absolute privacy of their union, and swearing that Edwin would not dominate his wife in any way, nor would she take his name. Moreover, Lillian refused to swear eternal loyalty to Edwin, but stated firmly that she would “make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate.”
It goes without saying that Lillian and Edwin were arrested for this flouting of convention-and on their wedding night, no less. (What is it about arresting people in their beds that always signals a new era in marriage history?) The pair were charged with failure to respect license and ceremony, with one judge stating that “the union between E.C. Walker and Lillian Harman is no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them.”
But the toothpaste was already out of the tube. Because what Lillian and Edwin wanted was not all that different from what their contemporaries wanted: the freedom to enter into or dissolve their own unions, on their own terms, for private reasons, entirely free from meddling interference by church, law, or family. They wanted parity with each other and fairness within their marriage. But mostly what they wanted was the liberty to define their own relationship based on their own personal interpretation of love.
Of course, there was resistance to these radical notions. Even as early as the mid-1800s, you start to see prim, fussy, social conservatives suggesting that this trend toward expressive individualism in marriage would spell out the very breakdown of society. What these conservatives specifically predicted was that allowing couples to make life matches based purely on love and the whims of personal affection would promptly lead to astronomical divorce rates and a host of bitterly broken homes.
Which all seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it?
Except that they were kind of right.
Divorce, which had once been vanishingly rare in Western society, did begin to increase by the midnineteenth century-almost as soon as people began choosing their own partners for reasons of mere love. And divorce rates have only been growing higher since as marriage becomes ever less “institutional” (based on the needs of the larger society) and ever more “expressively individualistic” (based on the needs of… you).
Which is somewhat hazardous, as it turns out. Because here comes the single most interesting fact I’ve learned about the entire history of marriage: Everywhere, in every single society, all across the world, all across time, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket. You can set your clock to it. (It’s happening in India right now, for instance, even as we speak.)
About five minutes after people start clamoring for the right to choose their own spouses based on love, they will begin clamoring for the right to divorce those spouses once that love has died. Moreover, the courts will start permitting people to divorce, on the grounds that forcing a couple who once loved each other to stay together now that they detest each other is a form of wanton cruelty. (”Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them,” protested George Bernard Shaw, “but don’t send them back to perpetual wedlock.”) As love becomes the currency of the institution, judges become more sympathetic to miserable spouses-possibly because they, too, know from personal experience just how painful ruined love can become. In 1849, a Connecticut court ruled that spouses should be allowed to legally leave their marriages not only for reasons of abuse, neglect, or adultery, but also because of simple unhappiness. “Any such conduct as permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner,” the judge declared, “defeats the purpose of the marriage relation.”
This was a truly radical statement. To infer that the purpose of marriage is to create a state of happiness had never before been an assumption in human history. This notion led, inevitably you could say, to the rise of something the matrimonial researcher Barbara Whitehead has called “expressive divorces”-cases of people leaving their marriages merely because their love has died. In such cases, nothing else is wrong with the relationship. Nobody has beaten or betrayed anyone, but the feeling of the love story has changed and divorce becomes the expression of that most intimate disappointment.
I know exactly what Whitehead is talking about when it comes to expressive divorce; my exit from my first marriage was precisely that. Of course, when a situation is making you truly miserable, it’s difficult to say that you are “merely” unhappy. There seems to be nothing “mere,” for instance, about crying for months on end, or feeling that you are being buried alive within your own home. But yes, in all fairness, I must admit that I left my ex-? husband merely because my life with him had become miserable, and this gesture marked me as a very expressively modern wife indeed.
So this transformation of marriage from a business deal to a badge of emotional affection has weakened the institution considerably over time-because marriages based on love are, as it turns out, just as fragile as love itself. Just consider my relationship with Felipe and the gossamer thread that holds us together. To put it simply, I do not need this man in almost any of the ways that women have needed men over the centuries. I do not need him to protect me physically, because I live in one of the safest societies on earth. I do not need him to provide for me financially, because I have always been the winner of my own bread. I do not need him to extend my circle of kinship, because I have a rich community of friends and neighbors and family all on my own. I do not need him to give me the critical social status of “married woman,” because my culture offers respect to unmarried women. I do not need him to father my children, because I have chosen not to become a mother-and even if I did want children, technology and the permissiveness of a liberal society would permit me to secure babies through other means, and to raise them alone.
So where does that leave us? Why do I need this man at all? I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend’s grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” The same goes for Felipe: He needs me only for my companionship as well. Seems like a lot, but it isn’t much at all; it is only love. And a love-? based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-?based marriage or an asset-?based marriage; it cannot. By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later-again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly
