All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (27 page)

By the fifties, such popular big-screen films as
His Girl Friday
or
The Philadelphia Story
had given way to television series such as
Father Knows Best
. The programme had begun its media life on radio in 1949, when a terminal question mark was part of the title. It then ran on various networks from 1954 to 1960 and went into repeats until 1964, spanning the whole of the period’s ideal marriage. Robert Young played Jim Anderson, a mid-West, middle-class insurance salesman, married to Jane Wyatt’s Margaret, everyone’s hard-pressed mom. Their three children present the sitcom issues that the couple need to deal with. The occasionally irascible father doesn’t always know better than his level-headed wife, but between them the family allows the illusion to be good-humouredly maintained. If Dad is infantilized in more than one episode, this good-enough family permitted America both to laugh at itself and learn the values that underpinned the epoch.

Yet the fifties media ideal of marriage was often hard to achieve. The pressure on husbands to attain promotion at work and earn enough to maintain their families in required style was high. The pressure on wives to achieve familial perfection alongside personal and sexual satisfaction, equally so. This was the era of ‘mother’s little helper’, those ‘happy pills’, Miltown and later Valium. To help them get through, mothers, if they could afford it, resorted to a shrink or to sedation, which induced a state not all that different from its satirized image in the 1974 film
The Stepford Wives
, in which perfect wifehood is achieved through robotic implants. Needless to say, men too took the pills or the drink that kept the sufferings of reality at a sufficient distance to allow the dream of happiness to roll on, at least for a few more years.

The television series
Mad Men
wittily portrays, with full period detail, the lifestyle of those ‘hidden persuaders’ of affluent America, the ad men who purveyed the happiness and glamour that could purportedly be bought into by the purchase of any and all commodities. It is 1960 in the all-drinking, all-smoking offices of Stirling Cooper, the fictional ad agency of the series. Sexism is as rife as it can get. Secretaries, preferably pretty, big-bosomed and ever-helpful, are rampantly pursued by a mostly married male cohort of ambitious creatives, whose come-ons are as crude as their rivalry. Meanwhile, the principal wish of the secretaries is to marry, leave work and take up the superior position of wives. Only Peggy hovers on the cusp of the old and the new, and rises to the position of copywriter.

Our hero Don Draper, rather more subtle and troubled than his mates and all the more seductive for it, tells an attractive client and potential conquest, who owns a Fifth Avenue department store in need of a make-over, that ‘romantic love was invented by people like me’. While he pursues an affair with a Greenwich Village bohemian, his university graduate wife Betty, mother of two, has been languishing in the suburbs and suffering from growing isolation in her superficially ideal life. She develops nervous tremors with no organic cause. Don finally agrees that she can see a psychiatrist–though shrinks, he underlines, are supposed to be only for the unhappy. In this male world, the psychiatrist dutifully reports back to Don the content of his sessions with Betty. And while Betty lies on the analyst’s couch, Don, not much happier than she, lies on his mistress’s and ponders Freud’s hoary question, ‘What Do Women Want?’ The answer, it seems, is ‘any excuse to get closer’–not so mad as all that, given that Don barely manages to engage in any sort of conversation with his wife. But the insight is, of course, in the first instance only a copy-line for the firm’s latest product, a male deodorant in that handy new invention, the aerosol can.

Richard Yates’s fine novel
Revolutionary Road
, made into a film in 2008 but originally published in 1961, speaks of the time’s malaise from within it. Yates subtly illuminates the cancer eating away at the suburban family dream. Ambitious, self-regarding Frank Wheeler, husband of April, father of two darling blond children and with an unwanted third secretly on the way, can fulfil neither his own once hoped-for potential nor his increasingly bored and fraying wife. Nor can the couple escape to their dreamlife of Paris, with tragic consequences for April.

By the mid-sixties the perfect fifties mom had grown into the sexually voracious, alcohol-fuelled, terminally bored Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who in the film
The Graduate
(1967) seduces a young Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), struck by anomie after returning home from East Coast academe. Suburbia has become a land where grimacing adults can only offer the word ‘plastics’ to convey a vision of the future the young refuse. Husbands are disappointed and hard-drinking, or dull providers of material comfort. Everything is swathed in swimming-pool torpor and numbness of habit: ‘People talk without speaking’, as the Paul Simon song which sets the tone of the film has it. Even a conversation with one’s mistress is an insurmountable feat. The sprightly fast-paced talk of forties comedies, which held up sexual and verbal exchange as a way of negotiating past and future, is several Grand Canyons away. Grim eater of young men and of her own blossoming daughter, self-avowedly ‘neurotic’, Mrs Robinson, like all those around her, is ripe for feminism and a different vision of marriage or at least of coupledom.

Urged to date the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine by her own guileless father and his parents, Benjamin at first refuses, only eventually to fall in love with the one common spirit she provides. But when Elaine learns of his ‘rape’ of her mother, she storms off back to Berkeley. Soon she is engaged to be married. Learning of this, Benjamin sets off to stop her. He arrives at the church at the very moment the couple are about to consolidate their vows in a kiss. Perched Christ-like in a gallery on high, he screams her name and offers salvation from a frozen version of adult marriage and affluent suburban life. ‘It’s too late,’ Mrs Robinson says to her daughter. ‘Not for me,’ Elaine lashes back, racing towards Benjamin. In the film’s last scene, the two young people are pictured on an ordinary bus as they flee into an unknown future of undefined coupledom.

The continuing interrogation of gender roles by the women’s and gay movements and an increasingly more permissive cultural consensus, which by the seventies had also introduced no-fault divorce in most Western countries, undermined the mid-century marital settlement. As women increasingly entered the labour market and became independent consumers, the centuries-old conjugal economy, dividing work in and out of the home along sexual lines, crumbled for the middle classes. The shift, perhaps suggesting long-pent-up problems internal to that earlier marriage settlement, saw an exceptionally high number of divorces during the late sixties and seventies, particularly in the US where the divorce rate doubled.

Despite the impression sometimes given by the press and by conservative politicians engaged in shouting the breakdown of marriage over the last thirty years, the number of divorces per thousand people in fact peaked in 1981, falling from that high point of 22.8 divorces per 1000 married couples to 16.7 per 1000 in 2005 in the US, and to 11.5 in the UK. (Interestingly, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the US, it is women who filed for just over two-thirds of all divorces.) The conventional hearsay, however, that one out of every two marriages ends in divorce, holds: 48 per cent of marriages entered into in the 1970s did dissolve within twenty-five years. For first marriages entered into in the eighties and even more so in the nineties, however, the proportion dissolved by each anniversary has been consistently lower. Scholars sifting the statistics contend, perhaps surprisingly, that it was the fifties and early sixties which bucked an earlier trend in length of marriage, to which we have now returned. Only in couples over fifty have divorces of late increased. These late divorces tell a many-layered tale. The one-time old now stay young, and certainly have an aspiration to stay young longer. If sixty is the new forty, then there’s time for a second or even third partnered life, particularly for men, whose ability to start new families usually stays intact. In this the contemporary male is not so different from his Victorian equivalent, though then the wife’s death in childbirth, rather than divorce, occasioned the new union.

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.