Marry for Love?

In Brad Wilcox’s new book, he recommends that people get married. It will be published within a couple of days.

One cannot, in good conscience, do anything but cheer this advice. A strong stable marriage works to the benefit of participants. A society where more people are married manifests greater social stability and cohesion. These are good things.

Unfortunately, the institution has been successfully undermined by feminist ideologues. 

Wilcox does not mention feminism in his recent Wall Street Journal essay, but clearly feminists were instrumental in undermining marriage. How many young women, attending their first Women’s Studies courses learn that marriage is a patriarchal plot designed to oppress women, to turn them into household slaves and chronic scolds.

You can try it at home. Back in the day, when I was younger and more naive, I received in consultation a certain number of successful career women who wanted to get married and have a family.

Nothing strange about that.

In each case I used to respond by asking one simple question: Do you want to be a wife? For which I would receive glaring looks that expressed the notion: What kind of girl do you think I am? So I stopped asking the question.

Speaking of liberation, back in the bad old days, a woman would not have sex until she received a public commitment, vowed before friends and family. Today’s modern woman has been liberated from such patriarchal constraints and will drop to her knees to service a cute guy she has just met. Some would call this liberating; others would say it’s cheap.

According to Wilcox the problem with modern American marriage is the expectation that  the institution expresses true romantic love. Surely, he is right. Strange to say, in today’s hookup culture, more and more young women believe that they should marry for true love.

Historically speaking, the practice called love marriage was created during the early days of the Protestant Reformation, thus, half a millennium ago.

When Martin Luther and his followers were excommunicated, they were also relieved of their vows of celibacy. They could marry, but they could not marry for the usual reasons-- property, prestige, money and family ties. Evidently, these excommunicated priests, monks and nuns did not have any social connections. The only thing that was left was to marry for love. 

Love marriage is a default. Romantic love is not and never has been the basis for the marital connection. In the past true love has normally been the province of adultery. The greatest love stories in Western literature tended to end badly. If they do not involve adultery, they connect two people who are unsuitable as mates. See Romeo and Juliet. They must be telling us something.

Of course, we Americans no longer practice arranged marriage. And yet, like it or not, marriage is something like an arrangement. It is nice to say that the two young people should fall in love, but it is a bad idea to fall in love with just anyone.

True love, Wilcox explains, will never suffice. Marriage is based on routines. These are defined, as Emile Durkheim argued, by a strict division of labor, with tasks allocated according to roles. 

Moreover, if we return to the bad old days when parents had a say in who you could and could not marry, young people were less likely to allow themselves to be swept away on a tide of sentiment. 

Parents do not consider a prospective mate in terms of looks and hotness. Parents are more likely to consider whether that person can fit within the family unit. 

Moreover, since a marriage is a social unit, prospective spouses should consider the kind of life they will have with each other. A a marriage is not a self-contained social unit. If you marry someone who is going to be rejected by your entourage, you will be losing friends and family.

Wilcox suggests, reasonably, that marrying your soulmate is a losing bargain. If passionate intensity is your game, then clearly marrying someone you should not be marrying, someone who does not fit in your group, will undermine your prospects for durable happiness.  It will feel like true love, until it does not.

We are not opposed to seeing people fall in love. And yet, marriages endure because spouses know their roles and fulfill their duties to each other. When spouses cannot rely on each other, their true love will eventually turn sour. 

When you are young you are not a very good judge of character. Your parents are normally far better at it. And yet, you should never marry someone who has no character, who is irresponsible and unreliable, who cannot be trusted. If you do, you are asking for trouble.

After all, that is implied in the notion of soulmates. Two people who complete each other's sentences are apparently relieved of the need to communication or to negotiate. 

If being soulmates means never having to say you’re sorry, that tells us that true love will blind you to the other person’s faults, flaws and foibles. Obviously, other people in the outside  world will be less charitable.

But, if your spouse garners a bad reputation out in the world, that ignominy will be shared by you and your children. See how true love feels then.

And, of course, if a spouse brings high repute to your family you will surely feel better than if he throws your family in disrepute.

Of course, Shakespeare said it best, through his great romantic heroine, Rosalind in As You Like It:

The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and all this time there was not a man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love.  Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of the age found it was Hero of Sestos.  But these are all lies.  Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

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