The Marriage Book (50 page)

Relaxing his stance, Zooey took a folded linen handkerchief from his hip pocket, flipped it open, then used it to blow his nose once, twice, three times. He put away the handkerchief, saying, “I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.”

PHILIP ROTH

PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT
, 1969

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Philip Roth (1933–) has published many novels exploring secular Jewish life in suburban twentieth-century America. But it was
Portnoy’s Complaint
, with its graphic language and memorable images of both solitary and promiscuous sexual acts, that established Roth’s fame.

The entire book takes the form of a monologue in the voice of Alexander Portnoy as he addresses a psychoanalyst.

Please, let us not bullshit one another about “love” and its duration. Which is why I ask: how can I marry someone I “love” knowing full well that five, six, seven years hence I am going to be out on the streets hunting down the fresh new pussy—all the while my devoted wife, who has made me such a lovely home, et cetera, bravely suffers her loneliness and rejection? How could I face her terrible tears? I couldn’t.

LARRY DAVID

“THE ENGAGEMENT,”
SEINFELD
, 1995

The television series known as “the show about nothing” was in fact about four unrepentantly self-centered Manhattanites who talked, worked, dated, and spent an inexplicable number of hours in a coffee shop, all while dissecting the minutiae of 1990s manners.
Seinfeld
, which starred the comedian Jerry Seinfeld playing a comedian named Jerry Seinfeld, ran from 1989 to 1998. Sixty-two of its 180 episodes, including “The Engagement,” were written by head writer, executive producer, and co-creator Larry David (1947–).

Kramer, played by Michael Richards, is Jerry’s idiosyncratic, iconoclastic next-door neighbor, referred to at one point in the series as a “hipster doofus.” George is Jerry’s oldest friend.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

EAT, PRAY, LOVE
, 2006

One of the biggest bestsellers of the early twenty-first century,
Eat, Pray, Love
was, as the subtitle put it, “one woman’s search for everything.” A successful freelance writer who had been married for six years, Elizabeth Gilbert (1969–) left her husband, traveled the world, and, through her travelogue—and its subsequent film adaptation starring Julia Roberts—became a kind of beacon of female independence. Some critics found her troubles rarefied, and her reasons for wanting divorce obscure, but millions of readers enjoyed her writing style and reveled vicariously in her quest.

Gilbert married again in 2007 and subsequently wrote
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
.

I don’t want to be married anymore.

I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.

I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby.

But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six—had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop . . . I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didn’t happen. . . .

I don’t want to be married anymore.

In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at night it would consume me. What a catastrophe. How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage, only to leave it? We’d only just bought this house a year ago. Hadn’t I wanted this nice house? Hadn’t I loved it? So why was I haunting its halls every night now, howling like Medea? Wasn’t I proud of all we’d accumulated—the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan,
the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life—so why did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and the wife and the soon-to-be mother, and—somewhere in my stolen moments—a writer?

I don’t want to be married anymore.

ONENESS

PLATO

THE SYMPOSIUM
, CIRCA 385 BC

In his dialogue
The Symposium
, Plato described a party at which a number of his fellow philosophers gathered for the purpose of discussing the mystery of love and the sexes. Seven of those present made long speeches, but when it came to Aristophanes, he got the hiccups and passed his turn. Eventually the conversation moved back around to him. Whether his statements were satire—or, for that matter, whether Plato was offering up some comic relief—have remained sources of debate. Yet the idea of the missing half is often ascribed to Plato as a sincere one.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. . . .

. . . Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, “What do you people want of one another?” they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?”—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And
the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

PLUTARCH

ADVICE TO THE BRIDE AND GROOM
, 1ST CENTURY

For Plutarch, see also
In-laws
.

Philosophers distinguish three classes of bodies: those made up of separate units, like a fleet or an army; those made of units connected together, like a house or a ship; and those which have a natural unity, such as animals have. A marriage between lovers has this natural unity; a marriage for money or children is made of units connected together; a marriage based simply on the pleasure of sleeping together is made of separate units, and should be called cohabitation rather than a shared life.

Scientists tell us that liquids mix completely: so should the bodies, resources, friends, and connections of a married couple. The Roman lawgiver forbade married couples to give or receive presents from each other. This was not to stop them sharing, but to make them think everything their common property.

HONORIUS OF AUTUN

SERMON, 12TH CENTURY

As a theologian, he was apparently quite popular because he offered his sermons and many of his writings in accessible prose. But few biographical details have been discovered about Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–1154), except that he may have come from Autun in France. What has become clear to scholars is that in emphasizing mutual love as a happy condition for marriage, he was well ahead of his time.

Let husbands love their wives with tender affection; let them keep faith with them in all things. . . . In the same way, women should love their husbands deeply, fear them, and keep faith with a pure heart. Let them agree in everything good, like a pair of eyes.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

“THE PRINCESS,” 1847

“The Princess” (subtitled “A Medley”) tells the story of Ida, betrothed to a prince since childhood but now self-exiled to an all-women’s college and determined to live a life without men. Bent on fulfilling his destiny, the prince and two friends enter the school disguised as women, gradually learning a new point of view. The following verses are spoken by the prince, near the poem’s climax.

For background on Tennyson, see
Beginnings
.

Seeing either sex alone

Is half itself, and in true marriage lies

Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils

Defect in each, and always thought in thought,

Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,

The single pure and perfect animal,

The two-cell’d heart beating, with one full stroke,

Life.

EDWARD CARPENTER

LOVE’S COMING OF AGE
, 1896

An English author and maverick social activist, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) argued that civilization was the enemy of true humanity. He was in favor of socialism, rural craftsmanship, a return to nature, vegetarianism, women’s rights, and uncloseted homosexuality.
Love’s Coming of Age
portrayed success in marriage as a near impossibility but one that, if attempted at all, could only be based on what he called “an amalgamated personality.”

Despite the punishing Victorian era—and the contemporaneous trial and arrest of Oscar Wilde—Carpenter managed to sustain a homosexual relationship with a man named George Merrill from roughly 1891, when they met, until Merrill’s death in 1928.

That there should exist one other person in the world towards whom all openness of interchange should establish itself, from whom there should be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, in every part, as one’s own; with whom there should be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or possession; into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a new illumination; and between whom and oneself there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul. It is obvious, however, that this state of affairs cannot be reached at a single leap, but must be the gradual result of years of intertwined memory and affection. For such a union Love must lay the foundation, but patience and gentle consideration and self-control must work unremittingly to perfect the structure. . . . There falls a sweet, an irresistible, trust over their relation to each other, which consecrates as it were the double life, making both feel that nothing can now divide; and robbing each of all desire to remain, when death has indeed (or at least in outer semblance) removed the other.