marriage

Ceremonies of Regard

By in fresh hell, marriage

One of the things Nietzsche despised in Socrates was the latter’s confidence that whatever mattered in life ought to be rendered fully conscious, fully explicit, fully defensible. Reason at any price. Whatever could not survive cross-examination in the bright glare of dialectic was made to look shabby or confused. But a lot of ordinary moral knowledge exists first as caution, custom, proverb, and taboo. It is condensed experience before it becomes explicit theory. Only later, if pressed by some bright interrogator, does someone try to unpack the logic hiding inside it. And sometimes the unpacking is clumsy. That doesn’t mean the intuition was empty. There is something shallow in the dialectical move that says, “Aha, you cannot define or justify this cleanly, therefore you do not really know it.” No. Very often the average person knows the shape of a danger before the intellectual has finished naming it.

Which brings us to our featured tweet. Pace Rob Henderson, who lamented this as another example of an undying “luxury belief,” I see this as reason for good cheer. It seems that prestigious media outlets are backing away from their enthusiastic advocacy of polyamory in recent years to something more modest: unrequited crushes on other people. You might say they’re microdosing polyamory now. Sure, they’re still self-centered boors (and bores) who can’t tolerate any restraints on their endlessly fascinating self-expression, but at least they’re being a little more passive about it now.

Of course, merely noticing other attractive people is banal. Almost everyone with functioning eyes already knows that. What makes this genre irritating is the way it tries to inflate that ordinary fact into a badge of enlightened sophistication. The point is not, “married people are still human.” The point is, “we are the kind of evolved couple who can metabolize this with chic candor.” That’s where the faint whiff of poly ideology lingers. Not full polyamory, just the moral vanity of wanting to seem less possessive, less bourgeois, less square than the rubes. It is polyamory for people who want the aesthetic of sexual adventurousness without the administrative burden, jealousy spiral, and wreckage.

The average married couple has already worked out, without an essay in a prestige outlet, that attraction doesn’t cease at the altar. They have also usually worked out something else obvious to those not blinded by ideology: where attention goes, feeling often follows. Some subjects are better handled with discretion than with performative openness. Not because they are Victorians, but because they are adults. Nobody is scandalized by incidental perception, as opposed to cultivated attention. You see an attractive person; you register it; life goes on. What raises eyebrows is when someone starts lingering over it, discussing it, theorizing it, and then publicizing that whole process as a mark of health or honesty. At that point, the issue is: why are you feeding this? Why are you watering this plant?

Ordinary people’s suspicion is often wiser than the essayist’s self-exoneration. They understand that not everything dangerous begins with an overt act. A lot of it begins with permission, rehearsal, indulgence, and narrative self-flattery. People know, even if they cannot state it in therapeutic jargon, that attention is not neutral. Attention is investment. Repeated attention is cultivation.

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.

— Pablo Neruda, “The Queen”

What self-centered candor misses is that many of the things holding ordinary life together are not strict factual disclosures but small ceremonial acts of respect. A husband who does not feel obliged to narrate every passing attraction to his wife is not being “dishonest” in any meaningful sense. When he calls his wife gorgeous even though she looks disheveled at that moment, he is performing a tiny courtesy, a way of signaling where his loyalties and priorities lie. Social life is full of such gestures. We say “sorry” when someone bumps into us in the grocery store not because we are confessing guilt, but because it’s a graceful way of acknowledging the awkwardness and smoothing it over. In the same way, a tactful silence in marriage is not repression but consideration: a way of saying, without pedantic explanation, that other people may exist, and they may even be beautiful, but they are not important here. Self-centered candor, by contrast, is crude rather than brave. It dissolves these little ceremonies of regard in the acid of explicitness, and then wonders why the world feels flatter, colder, and less loved.

Married, Buried, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

By in marriage, ohferfucksake

Heather Havrilesky:

Do I hate my husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely. I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept. A spouse is a blessing and a curse wrapped into one. How could it be otherwise? How is hatred not the natural outcome of sleeping so close to another human for years?

Unless you plug a propofol drip into your arm every single night, how do you encounter those unwelcome grunts and gravelly snores as anything but oppressive? Unless you spend most of your waking hours daydreaming, how do you tolerate this meddling presence, rearranging stuff but never actually putting it away, opening bills but never actually paying them, shedding his tissues and his dirty socks all over your otherwise pristine habitat?

“Well, speak for yourself. I don’t hate my husband,” one of you holier-than-thou marrieds might announce, folding your hands primly in your lap. Do you think I can’t see your left eye twitching ever so slightly, as you resolve to never let each little irritation add up and move into your conscious mind like a plastic bag floating out to sea and then joining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

…Marriage requires amnesia, a mute button, a filter on the lens, a damper, some blinders, some bumpers, some ear plugs, a nap. You need to erase these stories, misplace this tape, zoom out, slowly dissolve to black. I start to spend more time in my head. I start to daydream more.

Surviving a marriage requires self-care, time alone, time away, meditation, escape, selfishness.

I find it hilariously ironic that, in this entire pathetic spectacle of therapeutic oversharing posing as an op-ed in the Paper of Record, the only revealing insight is an unwitting one: “I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true! Maybe, just maybe, you and your social circle are simply shallow, unpleasant people who would find well-adjusted happiness boring. Sucks to be you, I suppose, but maybe you could at least refrain from projecting your petty indignity onto the rest of us.

From What Stars Have We Fallen Together Here?

By in books, marriage, montaigne, nietzsche

Though Montaigne had some affection for his wife, Françoise de la Chassaigne, he did not ultimately judge that he was right to have married her. Though common people with “simple plebeian souls” might be suited for marriage, “men with unruly humors like me, who hate any sort of bond or obligation, are not so fit for it.” The problem is not that he chose a bad wife, but that he married at all. Looking back, he writes: “Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself, if she had wanted me.” Regarding the possibility of a bon mariage, the sentence which contains that phrase’s final occurrence in “On Some Verses of Vergil” summarizes Montaigne’s verdict: “That man knew what it was all about, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage was one made between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”  True friendship or good sex—do not expect that marriage will furnish either. Moreover, as the image of the deaf husband suggests, do not expect good conversation from marriage.

To grasp the depth of the contrast with Nietzsche, consider this stunning aphorism from Human, All Too Human:

Marriage as a long conversation. When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.

By itself, this aphorism does not establish that Nietzsche believes in the possibility of a good marriage. But when read in conjunction with the aphorism holding that “the best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship,” it seems difficult to deny that for Nietzsche, unlike Montaigne, “good marriage” names a genuine (if not frequently instantiated) human possibility. Whereas Montaigne does not think that the highest friendship is possible with a woman at all, let alone in marriage, Nietzsche does not hesitate to speak of “the higher conception of marriage as the soul-friendship of two people of differing sex.”

— Robert Miner, Nietzsche and Montaigne

I re-read Human, All Too Human a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised by that aphorism, among many others (the book overall was better than I remembered it). Sue Prideaux, in her recent biography of Nietzsche, provides a lovely description of a fateful climb he made with Lou Salomé up Monte Sacro in the Italian Alps a few years after writing it:

Both of them described how similarly they thought and felt about things, and how words tumbled between them. They took words, like food, from each other’s mouths. Individual command melted as they finished each other’s thoughts and completed each other’s sentences. When they came down the mountain, he said to her, quietly, “I thank you for the most exquisite dream of my life.”

It was a short-lived dream and ended badly, but the experience was no less powerful for its brief duration.

The Lady of the House and I were lengthy-email-correspondents for over a year before we ever heard each other’s voices, and phone-friends for most of another year before we ever met in person. I recall a lazy Sunday in February, not on a mountain peak, but on the phone from early morning until late evening, with words tumbling between us and individual command melting. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t say it boastfully; I only want to testify to the truth of that vision, that possibility, of a relationship as a long, fruitful conversation, extending, with any luck, into old age.

The Echo That Is Love

By in marriage, the big sleep

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

— Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires”

I heard this song a few months ago while out driving. The melody did nothing for me, but the lyrics struck me immediately, especially the poignancy in the realization that a “mere” forty years can seem paltry to a couple in love. There’s also the endearingly honest weakness in the line about hoping to not be the one left alive to mourn. The next time I stopped, I looked the lyrics up on my phone, then texted the Lady of the House about them, saying that they made me think of her.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he added a reincarnation romance to the familiar story, with Gary Oldman’s Vlad Dracula furiously renouncing God after the tragic death of his wife. After 400 years of undeath, he encounters his beloved again in Victorian England and sets out to reclaim her. Later, he refrains from allowing her to join him in his vampiric state, saying that he loves her too much to condemn her. As Isbell’s lyrics recognize, the price of invulnerability is too high; it kills the very sentiment it’s meant to prolong. Cut loose from the tether of mortality, we float off into meaninglessness rather than freedom. Fantasies of afterlives or reincarnations, however understandable, are just another means of avoiding that painful reckoning.

My greatest fear, without question, is the possibility of having to survive her. Statistically, at least, that’s unlikely. But the threat of accidents and disease weighs more heavily on the mind than actuarial tables, and whatever selfish comfort I could take from the reassurances of probability is offset by the feeling that I love her too much to condemn her to years of aching grief. Would I stoically endure for her sake if I had to? I can only hope to have that much courage. I can only hope to never be called upon to demonstrate it.

If You Break These Moth-Wing Feelings

By in marriage, sex-you-all, the geist of the zeit

Emily Bobrow:

Perel wants to change the way we think about infidelity. Instead of seeing it as a pathological and immoral impulse that invariably leaves trauma and destruction in its wake, she wants us to understand that extramarital yearnings are all too natural, and that affairs are terribly, perhaps even inevitably, human. “Monogamy may not be a part of human nature but transgression surely is,” she says. “And sometimes even happy people cheat.” If, like Seth, we want to build relationships that will last, then we may need to share his realism about what such a relationship might look like, and what kind of imperfections we are willing to tolerate.

Let’s start by conceding that not all infidelities are created equal. For that matter, as Perel notes, not all of them are necessarily sexual. A monogamous yet emotionally unavailable man who often belittles his wife while furtively accruing impulsive debts which endanger their shared financial future has failed to uphold his side of the marriage, whether we call that “cheating” or not. In such circumstances, an affair on the woman’s part may be an understandable exploratory attempt to find a soft landing spot before deciding to make the perilous jump into the unknown. It’s a rationalist fantasy to insist that people should measure their relationships on ledger sheets, discarding a marriage when the math says it’s a bad investment. Lost among the trees and undergrowth of day-to-day living, it can be difficult for an unhappy spouse to gain a forest-wide perspective — am I giving up too easily? Do I expect too much? Will he change if only I stay patient and supportive? Abstract truisms about the odds of finding a better partner aren’t much comfort in times like these. The visceral experience of happiness and fulfillment with another person may be what finally provides the necessary clarity and courage to make such a drastic change.

And granted, some people simply don’t feel strongly about sexual exclusivity. Defenders of monogamy who insist that alternative arrangements are inevitably selfish or doomed might find themselves flummoxed like Friedrich Hayek was when confronted by the fact of J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor’s unconventional relationship, which, as John Gray observes, worked for them with no apparent harm to any of the involved parties. As Ben Sixsmith says, dishonesty is typically the real corrosive agent in infidelity; an honest open marriage might stand just as good a chance of success as an exclusive one.

Nonetheless, however inclined we might be to live and let live, it’s hard not to feel weary as we see this whole topic approaching us with an insolent swagger we recognize all too well. Akash Kapur wisely said that reinvented sex and a remade economy are the twin pillars of the utopian project, so whenever a progressive starts talking about either one, you know what to expect.You roll your eyes and think, oh, God, here we go, here comes polyamory, the weaponized cutting edge, the hot new fashion in virtue signaling. If it were merely a matter of different strokes for different folks, that would be one thing, but it’s inherent in the nature of progressivism to proselytize. What’s good for us must be objectively good for all. It’s progress, after all. The goal is to transcend limits, restraints, particularism, judgment, and vulnerabilities. If you object to the idea of unwanted intrusions into your marriage, you’re as benighted and pitiful as those backward bigots who feel uneasy about unassimilated immigrants.

Progressivism envisions as its ideal a Rousseauian state of detached independence, in which anything inconvenient, even family members, can be sloughed off with no lasting ill-effects. The ideal of something like lifelong monogamy can weigh heavily on progressive shoulders — why should we endure anything that’s suboptimal when we can just replace it? Why should we strive for an unreal standard of conduct if we’re likely to fail anyway? Why don’t we just abolish the idea of higher standards and revel in the leveling equality of our flawed imperfection? The cynicism that passes for wisdom among the perpetually-cool asserts that anyone who sees failure in pursuit of a difficult goal as an incentive to redouble one’s efforts, rather than a confirmation of hopelessness, is most likely in denial, or a hypocrite just waiting to be unmasked. Disapproving judgment is one vice never to be tolerated — until, perhaps, some clever conservative claims that judging other people is his sexual kink, at which point they’ll be compelled to celebrate it.

Perel predictably attacks the unreal fantasy of the soulmate who magically satisfies all of our needs, a blanket rationalization which has no doubt provided cover for many trysts in motel beds. I still wait in vain to see a progressive follow that trite insight up with the acknowledgement that many of our “needs” are nothing of the sort, merely fleeting impulses that we would do well to deny and eventually outgrow.

And I Don’t Believe What I Believe Anymore

By in foolosophy, marriage, montaigne

She paused. “All my life, I trusted that what I read in places like this was accurate; that someone had checked it out. I assumed that doctors were careful people who know a lot more than I do. Then I find these glaring errors, and who am I? I’m nobody,” she said. “How did an article that cites Sports Illustrated pass muster with a peer-review board of scientists?”

That’s an excerpt from Bronwen Dickey’s excellent book Pit Bull. In this particular chapter, a woman who worked in the records department of a sheriff’s office took it upon herself to carefully read the professional literature dealing with dog-bite fatalities, and you’ll never guess what happened next! No, you probably already have. It turned out that she, with no professional credentials but a lot of determination and savvy, exposed how astonishingly careless and slipshod the “experts” had been in constructing the narratives that dominated the conventional cultural wisdom surrounding supposedly dangerous dogs, like the unjustly-maligned breed in question. But this paragraph obviously has a lot of relevance beyond its original context.

To wit: I just recently learned about the Western European marriage pattern. A book I read happened to mention in passing that the nuclear family had been the norm for several centuries, citing statistics from England since the 1700s. After doing some sleuthing, I discovered that this was, in fact, widely accepted among historians. Since the late Middle Ages, at least, that’s been the case.

Now, as I’ve said many times, I’m not highly educated or credentialed. Whatever smarts I can be said to have are due to genetics and the sweat of my studying brow. But I think it’s fair to say that I’m inquisitive, and I read several dozen books every year, almost entirely non-fiction. It’s not difficult to get me interested enough in a topic to read a 300-page book about it on a whim. I’m pretty slutty that way. And yet, despite having been attentive to all manner of cultural and political events and ideas for a couple decades, I had never heard anything to contradict the assumption, originally picked up who knows where, that intergenerational families had been the norm pretty much everywhere, certainly in America, until the post-World War II prosperity allowed people to customize their living arrangements. For years, I heard a steady message surrounding the topics of families and marriage: talk about “the decline of the family” or “family values” is pure right-wing propaganda, nothing but nostalgia for the days when patriarchs could lord with impunity over their women and children. If anything, capitalism itself was forcing families to splinter into the smallest units for easier mobility as they tracked the skittish herds of jobs across the country. Why, only last month, we saw another rote repetition of this tendentious mythology.

But mythology is what it is. And while the precise dynamic of familial arrangements in Anglo-American history isn’t the sort of keystone that forms the foundation of an entire worldview, it’s unsettling to be reminded how often this might be the case, that much of what we think we know is just someone else’s convenient myth which we’ve never had cause or opportunity to debunk. There are so many things we just have to accept as provisionally true, because who has time to diligently investigate every single idea encountered in daily life? And the alternative of paranoid epistemological nihilism is even worse. We can try to surround ourselves with diverse perspectives to increase our collective wisdom, but how do we know what we’re missing until it bites us on the ass?

It’s a funny paradox. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I conclude that a relaxed agnosticism about damned near everything appears to be the best approach. As is so often the case, Montaigne had it right: Que sais-je? What do I know? I can’t even imagine what “facts” I’ll have to unlearn next.

You Think You’re So Radical. I Think You Oughta Stop

By in marriage, ohferfucksake

Jessa Crispin:

Traister’s book has been praised for promoting a kind of revolutionary politics on the basis of single women’s power. Yet her goals are sometimes quite conservative. Singlehood is presented as merely an interlude before marriage. One of the great successes of the single women “movement,” according to Traister, is that eventual marriage is more satisfying and less likely to end in divorce. No radical societal reorganization is required if the assumption is that entry into a nuclear family will in time bring these women the stability and security they need.

If it’s “conservative” to choose tangible improvement of what already exists over a Jacobin fantasy of “radical societal reorganization,” then pass the Burke Fan Club registration paperwork over here, I guess. Crispin takes pains, however, to stress that she’s not necessarily calling for massive state intervention to save people from the vicissitudes of bad luck and bad decisions, however much her logic might seem to inevitably point in that direction — she’s inspired by having “toured” an experimental micro-housing commune in Berlin, run by architects, community organizers and artists, which seems to provide a “nurturing and secure” environment. I suppose it would likewise be conservative to suggest that we could maybe check back in a few years and see if the commune even still exists before we sit down and start redesigning American society along similar lines. Or perhaps we could simply note that history provides plenty of examples of similar visionary communities, from Robert Owen’s New Harmony to the Charles Fourier-inspired Brook Farm, that failed to prosper, let alone inspire mass movements. After a couple hundred years of such attempts, no one is obliged to take this idea seriously anymore, no matter how resilient the progressive faith that this time will be the charm, surely.

She complains about the “maldistribution of care” which requires such creative experiments as the Berlin commune, since, as far as she’s concerned, there’s no going back to extended families and durable marriages. It’s a telling image — as if “care” is a product which can be quantified and allocated by a central authority (not necessarily the state, though!), when in actuality, any “care” worthy of the name is organically grown and cultivated. Whatever facsimile of familial bonds you produce on demand will never have the roots to provide your new arrangements with longevity, no matter how many books of radical feminist theory you’ve read that insist otherwise.

We end with the reminder that the state can only do so much to replace family ties broken by neoliberalism, which leads to the exhortation to create a “cultural shift” by “redirecting this conversation from the individual to society.” “Society,” not the state, will apparently “reimagine traditional forms of care,” which reminds me that the only people who make socialist utopians seem intellectually rigorous are anarchist utopians, who expect the same result to spontaneously flower from the soil of pure human nature. The Invisible Hand is real after all, and in a radically reimagined, reorganized society, it will cup us all lovingly in its generous palm.

No Rest for the Progressive

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, marriage, ohferfucksake

Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015

Socially liberal people who recognize the equal dignity of polyamorous relationships need to develop way better anti-polygamy arguments.

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015

Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, “slow down” is a derided stance for a reason.

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015

I would assuredly hate to run afoul of the Jacobin version of Godwin’s Law, so let me merely say that even in the cutting-edge-fashion-obsessed, social-justice-oversaturated environment of social media, I haven’t seen anyone yelping about monogamous privilege or the stirrings of a burgeoning poly-rights movement, so I suspect Freddie is just bounding excitedly down the trail with the scent of seemingly-inexorable theoretical logic, rather than a practical, felt need, filling his nose. I’m especially amused by the presumptuous, almost confrontational attitude: “Hey society! I’m some asshole with a clever idea, and I say ‘Jump!'” And society’s all like, “LolWUT? You expect us to ask ‘How high?’ Burden of proof’s on YOU, buddy. YOU make the case that there’s an actual pressing need for us to rearrange this particular social institution to suit your specifications. YOU prove to US that this is in OUR interest to consider. Better yet, go spend the next few decades building a poly-rights movement, and if the fad hasn’t fizzled out by then, we’ll talk.”

When I Was an Alien, Cultures Weren’t Opinions

By in identity, marriage, samesecks, the cult of multi

Suzanna Walters:

Tolerance is not just a low bar; it actively undercuts robust integration and social belonging by allowing the warp and woof of anti-gay animus to go unchallenged. Tolerance allows us to celebrate (hysterically) the coming out of macho professional athletes as a triumphant sign of liberation rather than a sad commentary on the persistence of the closet and the hold of masculinist ideals. Tolerance allows religious “objections” to queer lives to remain in place, even as it claims that a civilized society leaves its homos alone. Tolerance pushes for marriage equality and simultaneously assures anxious allies that it won’t change their marriages or their lives.

And there you see the crux of the tolerance trap: If an ostensible concession doesn’t challenge straight lives, it’s not very radical, and if it does challenge them, it’s not a concession gays and lesbians will win. The marriage assurances are similar to gay responses to right-wing attacks on queer parents: Researchers and advocates argue that “no harm” is done to our kids, that there is no difference between gay and straight parenting. But couldn’t we imagine the strong case? Shouldn’t we argue, instead, that our progeny would/could grow up with more expansive and creative ways of living gender and sexuality? Shouldn’t we argue that same-sex marriage might make us all think differently about the relationship between domestic life and gender norms and push heterosexuals to examine their stubborn commitment to a gendered division of labor?

Once you sift out all the pomo gender studies-speak, it seems to me that her essay balances uneasily on two contradictory premises. On the one hand, she decries “tolerance” as an ideal because, she claims, it depends on the idea of immutability — if gays are truly “born this way”, then we have to grudgingly tolerate them, even if we aren’t enthused about it. This interpretation might come as a surprise to J.S. Mill, whose classic formulation of tolerance as a liberal ideal did not depend upon a notion of people being born to think a certain way. At any rate, as is typical of radical leftist perspectives, she doesn’t like the fact that “tolerance” implies a power imbalance. In a truly just world, no one should ever have to beg for concessions from anyone!

But then some of her complaints seem to be those of an aging radical unhappy that a new generation is content to accept queerness as just another insignificant lifestyle choice, rather than being a truly different subculture, forever opposed to the dominant culture’s mores. These damn queer kids today, they’re just content to be allowed to get married, join the army, and be proportionately represented among TV sitcom characters! Well, I just have two pieces of free advice, which are worth every penny: one, as long as you’re wishing upon a star for things to be different than they are, don’t forget to finish with “…and a pony.” And two, if you’re really into fetishizing intractable differences between cultures and subcultures, you might not want to be so scornful toward an ideal that takes for granted an imperfect state of affairs in which deep, important differences will always exist between people, and seeks to create the conditions for them to exist together without serious conflict. If the pragmatic reality is that you will always be a minority, both demographically and philosophically, disparaging the ideal of tolerance for being less than perfect is a bit like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

Married, Buried, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

By in marriage, ohferfucksake

Jessa Crispin:

Marriage is problematic. That is not a controversial statement to make. Its long history is mostly a history of oppression and treating women like they are property. It was a business deal and a way to manage money and inheritance, and it was not a decision made by the participants, it was a contract arranged by the parents. Only in the last 150 years or so has marriage had anything to do with love and passion, and yet redefining a marriage as an emotional bond rather than a legal one has not fundamentally changed its nature. The rules remain the same (if you give me your sexual fidelity I will give you access to my bank account), the legal arrangement remains the same, and the institution drags its ugly history behind it like a diseased tail.

My first thought when reading Bruce Benderson’s chapbook Against Marriage was, FINALLY. Finally someone is clearly and passionately attacking this arrangement, from an historical, political, and philosophical angle, as a gay rights activist and a feminist. Because marriage, despite looking for a while like it might be tossed aside to let in new ways of arranging families, participating in romance, raising children, has actually gained power in the last few decades. The pressure to marry is enormous, especially for women. And then the whole self-help culture wants to make sure your relationship is arranged exactly like everyone else’s — any deviation (polyamory, triangles, communal living, even long distance relationships) are seen as expressions of childhood trauma or low self esteem or some other form of madness.

While interviewing Benderson, she adds:

It’s the same from the feminist angle. I don’t understand, having read the last 200 years of feminist theory, and I don’t understand how we got to this point, where we are just commenting on the culture, blogging about the television shows we like and don’t like, rather than hacking away at the structure with a fucking axe.

Speaking of history, isn’t it depressingly predictable how often these Enlightenment-inspired visions of a rational reordering of social mores, when met with rejection or even a polite lack of interest, end up in accusations of false consciousness? “Hacking away at the structure with a fucking axe”? Well, first of all, points deducted for the hackneyed metaphor, and secondly, what do you mean “we”, paleface? I dunno, maybe we’re not doing that because — oh, how it pains me to state the bleeding obvious — there are such things as happy, monogamous marriages, and it is entirely possible that people have had enough time to look at hippie communes and rationally decide, “Eh, not for me, thanks.” I mean, if you want to be a nomadic, literary bohemian on society’s fringe, more power to you, vaya con dios, but before you start urging the masses to yank the wedding manacles from their fingers, you might want to consider that some people actually want comfort, stability, routine, and a reliable partner to raise kids with, and it doesn’t mean they’ve been brainwashed. (Let’s not even get into the role biology and psychology might play in all this, lest I add to the reactionary charges being prepared against me.)

True, obviously, most people these days do not marry till death does them part. I’d say you could file that one away under the paradox of choice — when given the ability to endlessly customize the details of one’s life, people tend to have trouble sticking to a decision, whereas they tend to adapt and settle soon enough when such decisions are taken out of their hands. (Amusingly, this fact leads Benderson to advocate a return to arranged marriages if we must retain them at all, which, to me at least, sits rather awkwardly among all the fulminations against the ways in which the institution has stifled and strangled our romantic imagination and creative potential. Seems like a textbook false dilemma there.) And you’d get no argument from me over the suggestion that many people have unrealistic ideals in their love lives that condemn them to avoidable misery. But I’m jaded enough to agree with Schopenhauer — many if not most people spend their lives vacillating between boredom and despair. I mean, here’s a current group of patriarchy-smashing feminists, several of whom seem to espouse some type of open-relationship ideal, and judging from what I’ve seen, they’re just as confused and neurotic and generally fucked-up as anyone, with extra drama to boot. People, as a rule, are unhappy wherever they are with whatever they have, always judging the grass to be greener elsewhere. Pessimistic? No, just the human condition.

I Only Wanna be Your One-Life Stand

By in marriage, sex-you-all

Mark Oppenheimer:

Savage’s straight-talk approach has an intuitive appeal: our culture places a huge premium on honesty, or at least on confessional, therapeutic, Oprah-fied admissions. We are told to say what is on our minds, so why not extend that principle to sex? Why not tell your spouse everything you want, even if that includes wanting another person? My sense is that this kind of radical honesty may work best for couples who already have strong marriages. Where there is love and equality and no history of betrayal, one partner asking if she can have a fling may not be so risky. Her partner either says yes, and it happens, you hope, with only the best consequences; or the partner says no, in which case their relationship endures, maybe with a little disappointment on one side, a little suspicion on the other.
That is the ideal situation. What if the revelation that a partner is thinking about others creates a shift, one that plagues the marriage? Words have consequences, and most couples, knowing that jealousy is real and can beset any of us, opt for a tacit code of reticence. Not just about sex but about all sorts of things: there are couples who can express opinions about each other’s clothing choices or cooking or taste in movies, and there are couples who cannot. I don’t mind if my wife tells me another man is hot, but it took me a long time to accept her criticism of my writing. We all have many sensitive spots, but one of the most universal is the fear of not being everything to your partner — the fear, in other words, that she might find somebody worthier. It is the fear of being alone.
I’m skeptical of making an absolute out of any generally good principles, honesty included. People who proudly describe themselves as “brutally honest” only make me think that they’ve found a way to be supercilious about being a self-centered, inconsiderate blowhard. So I have no problem with the idea that each of my loved ones has some sort of sensitivity that requires certain things to go unsaid. Kindness sometimes trumps honesty. And not only that, but not every fleeting thought or impulse is worth voicing, let alone acting upon. It’s great that we have the privilege to customize our comfortable lives to such exacting specifications, but you’re not really being deprived if you can’t have absolutely everything you think you want.

Without Addition or Diminishing

By in foolosophy, marriage, sex-you-all

Jessica Bennett:

Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let’s just be honest about our marital motives.

In many ways, I agree that the venerated ideal of lifetime, monogamous pair-bonding is unrealistic and the source of no small amount of human misery. I agree that no one person can satisfy every need (more on that in a bit). But what struck me about this article was the apparent assumption that people are compelled to be as intimate as possible with those who share their deepest interests, that “evolving marriage” necessarily means sleeping around. I don’t think of myself as the ne plus ultra of stoic resignation or ascetic renunciation, but I have no problem with the idea of having close friends that I choose not to sleep with because I already have a partner that I want to be exclusive to. Yes, that could very well be just me being weird. Casual sex has never been my thing, and that’s likely due to my shy, withdrawn personality. But it seems like the principle is simple enough to be attractive to others: we are not in any way obliged to push things as far as they can possibly go.
I can’t help but wonder how much of this mindset is an offshoot of our narcissistic, therapeutic age in which our own self-esteem and gratification are what matter most, where the idea that we should ever have to be deprived, voluntarily or not, of something we want is an intolerable offense to our sense of entitlement (those primal urges being our truest nature expressing itself, after all). Looking around at society in general, it seems to me that learning to tell the difference between wants and needs is far more imperative than worrying over how precisely to customize your soulmate.
There is no one person who meets my every need. How could there be, aside from simply being a projection of my own wishes, rather than an autonomous individual? But not all needs are created equal, obviously. One of the most valuable qualities I enjoy in others is when they’re different enough in taste and temperament to be challenging and interesting. I don’t want to surround myself with clones; what fun is it to have conversations with people who you already know agree with you on everything? There’s a few core needs which have to be harmonized for a relationship to be stable, but it seems to me there’s a lot of others which aren’t nearly that important, and it’s not a betrayal or failure if they’re not being met.

Give Up Your Vows

By in gender, marriage, moralizing, psychology, sex-you-all

Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere, too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.

Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically – or perhaps realistically – confined, by the aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.

Mistermix:

Most of these marriages would be a hell of a lot better if the sexually unsatisfied partner had a discreet affair, but that puts the other partner in a socially untenable situation. “Open marriage” is something for dirty hippies or sleazy swingers, not an upstanding member of society.
…If we want to do something about the high divorce rate, we might want to get real about making sexual satisfaction a precursor to marriage, and also about the role of a discreet, mutually agreed-upon affair as a safety valve. Of course, religion and social norms rule that out-of-bounds.
There’s a lone genius—possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial—behind Ashley Madison. His name is Noel Biderman, and he’s the chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. “Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment,” he declares. It’s unclear if Biderman actually believes this—he’s married and has two young kids—but like Hugh Hefner before him the business he has created pretty much requires that he say it. Behind his desk, in an office so lacking in embellishment it almost looks like a hastily assembled low-budget film set, is a large flat-screen monitor promoting his company’s flagship brand. It reads: “Life is short. Have an affair.”
…Research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20 to 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. Moreover, men have an evolutionary prerogative to spread their genes as widely as possible, while women are driven to find a mate and try to gain access to the best genes out there by any means necessary.

It is my Buddha Nature to be omni-sexual. If you pluck one string on a well-tuned guitar the one next to it will vibrate because it’s the nature of sound waves. Well, my husband picks a certain chord. Then you, you hit this string and you over there, this string. You can’t hit her string. Your frequency is completely different. It’s not confusing to me. You can’t pluck my husband’s string and he can’t pluck yours.

Rationally speaking, it probably would make a lot of people much happier if the tangled threads of sexuality, love and marriage could be teased apart. Who can even begin to tally up how many decent relationships have been ruined because of a misguided notion that a burning passion, which by definition is temporary, can be sustained over years and decades? You’re not allowed to sign legally binding documents under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but people make hugely important decisions all the time while high on the sorts of chemicals that infatuation releases. Maybe the old way had merit, of looking at marriage as a way of protecting property and heritage, while discreet affairs were for getting rid of those irrational passions before they caused damage in everyday life.
For some people, though, sexual attraction isn’t just a simple matter of finding someone physically attractive and at least tolerably pleasant to have a couple hours of fun with. Sometimes the qualities that others look for in a relationship are what make a person sexually desirable in the first place. Even as a young, studly musician, I never had any interest in casual sex. Granted, some of that was due to my withdrawn nature which made such intimate contact with strangers too overwhelming to contemplate, but some of it was because I just couldn’t find anything stimulating about looking at people like they were a piece of attractive meat, independent of personality.
I know that sounds pretentious and contrived, like the kind of guys who joke about how much more often they get laid now that they’ve learned to talk like a feminist, but it’s true. I was watching Louis C.K.’s recent comedy special Hilarious, and he talked about how depressing it is as a newly-divorced 41 year-old trying to redevelop his atrophied social skills on the dating scene, only to be repulsed by the shallow, predictable identities that people all wear. “Who are you? What are you all about?” “Uh, I’m The Girl That All The Guys Want To Fuck!” You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, from the bimbos to the broheims. It’s like everyone learned their social skills by watching thousands of hours of beer commercials.
Speaking of which, I wonder sometimes why we associate superficial attractiveness with sexual desire anyway. Is it really the product of relentless advertising? Are we just Pavlov’s dogs, trained to connect a certain body type and charisma with all the subtle signals that get the lizard brain going? Is there any logical reason to expect that someone who looks handsome or pretty will be more pleasurable in bed? Or would the evolutionary psychologists say that we’re drawn to certain features that somehow indicate good genes?
I have no idea what to think about any of this. This is why I’m a hermit.

Some People Just Aren’t the Type for Marriage and Family

By in bread and circuses, foolosophy, marriage

But the notion that the most irresistible man in the world has marital cold feet and zero paternal instincts doesn’t sit right with everybody. How can an anguished populace make sense of this crazy news? Theories about what’s really going on here abound. First, of course, faster than you can say, “He must be gay,” Internet commenters have been chiming in that Clooney, who has dated Italian model Elisabetta Canalis for two years, must be gay. “I know agents in Hollywood who, in the strictest confidence insists that Clooney is gay,” confided one CNN poster, while another on E! quickly surmised: “He is as gay as Rock Hudson. He’s fooling no one.”
Others can’t make sense of his quitter attitude, like the commenter on Us who said, “I don’t get his negative view of marriage. He has also failed at some movies yet he tries again.” And then there are those who simply refuse to believe the man. At The Stir, writer Amy Boshnack opined, “We’ve heard so many other celebs (and regular folk) say they were never going to marry again, just to end up eating their words,” and optimistically observing that ” If [Howard] Stern can marry again, I think anyone can!” And E! blogger Bruna Nessif pep talked, “Oh, chin up Georgey! Practice makes perfect,” while musing, “Can’t help but wonder how Elisabetta is taking this news.” Here’s a kooky idea. Maybe he just doesn’t want to get married. Maybe he doesn’t want to have kids. In fact, that’s the theory I’m going with.
I’ve been pretty fortunate in that my mom has only dropped a couple hints about grandchildren and continuing the family line, and even that hasn’t happened for quite a while. My parents wondered if I were gay as a teenager simply because I was a loner (granted, the long-haired, androgynous rocker look probably helped encourage such speculation). I don’t know what they think now that I’ve been single for several years, but at least they don’t bother me about it.
I just think it’s funny how personally people take it when you refuse to identify as fish or fowl for them. You aren’t interested in dating or getting married? What are you, gay? A serial killer? High maintenance? Damaged goods? A pervert with an embarrassing secret? TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE, GODDAMNIT! I’M LOSING SLEEP HERE! WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO BE LIKE ME? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?
And that, of course, is what I think it’s really about. The spectacle of someone consciously resisting the gravitational pull of custom and habit stands as an implicit rebuke to the thoughtless way so many people stumble into the biggest decisions of their lives. Being forced to consider someone who has made different, contrary, and difficult choices and still attained contentedness is enraging to those who have sacrificed so much in deference to authority and conventional wisdom for the sake of an eventual happiness that may never even arrive. It ruins the illusion of security offered by a herd mentality.

It Seems Your Ring Is Sliding Off My Hand

By in education, marriage, work

We could call them the lower-middle class or the upper-working class, but the better term is the moderately educated middle. They do not have BAs, MBAs, or PhDs. But they are not high-school dropouts either. They might have even achieved some college or training beyond high school. They are not upscale, but they are not poor. They don’t occupy any of the margins, yet they are often overlooked, even though they make up the largest share of the American middle class. In many respects, these high-school graduates are quite similar to their college-educated peers. They work. They pay taxes. They raise children. They take family vacations. But there is one thing that today’s moderately educated men and women, unlike today’s college graduates or yesterday’s high-school graduates, are increasingly less likely to do: get and stay happily married.

As they note later on, this same group has seen their wages diminish and employment opportunities vanish over the last few decades. If nobody can afford to own anything but the clothes on their back, what’s the point in joining an institution centered on the orderly transfer of property? What are they going to bequeath to their children, a mountain of credit card debt?
I was just talking to a friend last week who told me about her recent engagement. She said they were going to spend the next year saving up for the wedding, which struck me funny. Maybe a more realistic approach would be to skimp on the wedding and save your money for the divorce attorneys.

Postmodern Love

By in foolosophy, marriage, socmed, technology

What’s good about both the Stanford study and the durability of even not-so-cool sites like eHarmony is that being proactive about connection is no longer viewed as unromantic or loserish. Somewhere along the line, enough friends and friends-of-friends started meeting cool people and even falling in love to make the “Let’s just say we met at the deli” cover story moot.
But as eHarmony’s new campaign makes clear, love — or even a really good hookup — isn’t always a simple matter of what matches up perfectly on a survey. “What if you were loved for you?” it asks. What if? What if we had a way of finding people who share our interests and like our pictures, so we could be out dancing instead of sitting at home lonely? And what if, along with all the practicality and purposefulness and monthly fees the Internet brings, it turns out we still hope, in our hearts, for something approaching magic?
A friend of mine semi-shamefully admitted to me once that she had tried eHarmony out, like she was half-expecting me to burst out laughing and flash the L-for-loser sign at her. My attitude about online dating has always been, why the hell not? Her biggest complaint about it was that “people lie” about themselves in that environment. Yeah? And? Like they don’t do that anywhere else?
More than half of all marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many serious, committed relationships don’t even make it to marriage before they dissolve. Basically, the odds are overwhelming that whoever you’re currently with is not The One For You. Of course, the biggest problem with that is the idea that people meeting in their twenties or thirties and staying together for several more decades till death does them part is normal, but anyway. The point is, most traditionally-formed relationships are doomed to collapse at some point, so why stigmatize those who want to try to take a slightly more scientific approach to dating?
Most of us probably meet our prospective partners either through work or mutual friends, which in many instances can provide a paltry enough dating pool. Shy people who don’t necessarily enjoy making the social scene are even more screwed. Whereas on the Internet, you can easily find groups devoted to whatever bizarre hobby or fetish you enjoy. Whatever constellation of traits and beliefs are most important to you, there’s almost certainly people out there who match up pretty well with them. Of course there’s much more to a relationship than how it shapes up on paper, but I can’t help but think it’s an improvement to already know you have so much common ground to get started on.
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