Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | H | Harper's Magazine

Love or money: the matrimonial mystique.

Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz. Viking, 2005. 448 pages. $29.95.

Reading a book on the history of marriage written by a self-proclaimed happily married historian--one who holds that these days "most marriages are pretty happy"--you can't help but imagine (in Borgesian fashion, since every text has its shadow text) the as-yet-unwritten companion volume, the longue duree of marriage by the unhappily married historian, the one staying together "for the sake of the kids" or under some other neurotic pact, whose marital bickering sessions punctuate assorted social events; the one with a retinue of therapists and counselors on speed dial who learns his wife is having an affair just as he's finishing up his chapter on courtly love. How would that history of marriage get told?

For that book we will have to wait. Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage is largely an upbeat tale of a protean, continually evolving, increasingly flexible social institution, one that enhances the well-being of its participants more these days than ever before, with men and women moving closer to the egalitarian ideal, enjoying more intimacy and better sex. The hero of this cheery connubial tale is love, or, more precisely, the invention of the love-based marriage by choice. And no, the numerous upheavals undergone by the marital enterprise over the last thirty years are not plummeting us all toward imminent social decline, as the conservative set so fears. Yes, there may be a decreasing number of individuals who choose to tie that knot; and yes, divorce rates for first marriages continue to hover around 43 percent; but the upside is that the marriages that do somehow manage to survive must be exceptionally harmonious and mutually fulfilling. Or so this historian avers, apparently never having attended a dinner party like the one I was at recently, where two long-married couples spent the evening addressing their respective mates in tones of such subtle and well-honed contempt that they would have chilled Edward Albee.

Of course, the idea that marriage should provide its habitues with such benefits as personal fulfillment and mutual sexual gratification is altogether a recent invention. The premise that love is a good enough reason for embarking on marriage took grip only in the late eighteenth century, and then only in Western Europe and North America, concomitant with other sweeping political changes during the era, from the spread of a market economy and the rise of individualism to the invention of the novel. This part of the story has been told often enough; the point that Stephanie Coontz wishes to make--after leading us through a whirlwind history, a fascinating cross-cultural expedition beginning with coupledom in hunter-gatherer societies and winding up in the thickets of contemporary gay-marriage debates--is that the love marriage, regarded by so many as a happy development in human history, was also what undermined marital stability, causing untold trauma to marriage as a social institution and to all those tormented spouses whose affinity for each other proved not as eternal as they'd once so headily vowed. The soul-mate syndrome is also what sows the seeds of marital destruction.

In other words, despite Coontz's efforts to provide readers with a cheery story arc, her history of marriage is also highly conflicted and not entirely consistent, which seems only fitting these days. After all, ambivalence suffuses the subject, in addition to suffusing the nation's households, which means that any credible history of marriage rites through the ages will also be, of necessity, a history of divorce procedures through the ages. Once love marriages became the norm, those trapped in unloving ones began demanding legal egress. Arranged marriages at least had the virtue of low romantic expectations;...