Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (11 page)

Of course, social conservatives may still believe that homosexual marriage is wrong because the purpose of matrimony is to create children, but infertile and childless and postmenopausal heterosexual couples get married all the time and nobody protests. (The archconservative political commentator Pat Buchanan and his wife are childless, just as one example, and nobody suggests that their marital privileges should be revoked for failure to propagate biological offspring.) And as for the notion that same-sex marriage will somehow corrupt the community at large, nobody has ever been able to prove this in a court of law. On the contrary, hundreds of scientific and social organizations--from the American Academy of Family Physicians, to the American Psychological Association, to the Child Welfare League of America--have publicly endorsed both gay marriage and gay adoption.

But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody's legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse--or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither
required
for legal marriage in America nor does it
constitute
legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it's that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America's courts, not America's churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled.

Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it's quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony. And I say this as someone who is--I think we can all agree by now--admittedly suspicious of marriage. Yet it's true. Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community. I'm not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual
within
the relationship, but that's another question altogether. There is no doubt--not even within my rebellious mind--that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children.
¹

If I were a social conservative, then--that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy--I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married. I would want as many of
every
kind of couple as possible to get married. I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to
save
marriage. Think of it! Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world. People are getting married later in life, if they're getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility. We don't trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk. We don't get it. We're not at all convinced that we need it. We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever. All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.

But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institution will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included! Indeed, pleading to be included! Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many--like me--find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.

It might seem ironic that homosexuals--who have, over the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society--want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition. Certainly not everyone understands this urge to assimilate, not even within the gay community. The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn't have to join the military and he didn't have to get married. Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League-coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of 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.