The institution of marriage is not romantic. It is not about soul mates
or intimacy or love. It is about property.
That was the line of thinking that my fiery eighteen-year
old self embraced back in the day when feminism was more than a theory to me; it
was a way of life, an outlook on the world that blurred the lines between the political
and personal. Those ideas fueled my declarations that I would never participate
in such a bankrupt social arrangement. The idea that marriage is about property
is not without merit. Historically, the institution of marriage was a property arrangement, a contract
between men about women. Grooms were expected to pay compensation to fathers or
the head of the house for their brides in some parts of the world, while others
practiced a dowry system in which the bride brings something to the marriage in
the form of a trousseau that presumably added to her value. The idea may not be
without merit, but it is not wholly accurate either. There is something lacking
in the analysis that marriage is only a property arrangement. Yes, historically
the institution of marriage has its roots in sexist ideas about women, but
condemning it as bankrupt ignores something important, namely that pesky little
social part which evolves just as societies have. In other words, like all
social institutions, the concept of marriage has changed over time.
In some ways, it has not. Marriage is still a contract of
sorts. Tying the knot has legal implications. It’s why the State gets involved
and requires marriage licenses. In the movie, Up Close and Personal, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, Tally Atwater,
asks Robert Redford’s Warren Justice to marry her. He’s perplexed as to why she
wants to get married. She provides a somewhat unique answer:
Tally Atwater: I want you around in
the morning.
Warren Justice: You already have me
around in the morning. How, I don't know, but you do.
Tally Atwater: I want to know
you're legally required to be there.
The idea that there is a legal component to marriage has its
origins back in those early property contract days when a man assumed legal
responsibility for the woman he married. But that legal contract part is the
part that has changed with time. What it means to be legally tied to each other
has been transformed. Tally doesn’t want Warren to be legally responsible for
her. She wants Warren to be legally required to be there in the mornings. It’s
a twisted but heart-felt moment that demonstrates how our ideas of marriage
have evolved. The legal part has a decidedly emotional component. She doesn’t
want him to be responsible for her debts; she wants his companionship. Marriage
might have started as an institution about property, but that is no longer the
defining force.
As cheesy as it sounds, the thing that defines it now, that “being
required to be there” sentiment is about love. Love is often referred to as the
greatest power on earth (heaven and earth for you religious types). I believe
that, because it is love that changed marriage and it is love that altered my own
views of an institution I rejected for a very long time. Love is what was
missing from my analysis.
Love is one of those weird amorphous things. It is not an
entity. It has no specific shape or texture. We cannot smell or taste it. It
has no distinctive sound. It is a force that defies easy descriptors. And yet
some of us know it very
well. We have seen it. We have felt its
power in touches, smells, and tastes. We have heard it.
Up Close and Personal
was an atrociously manipulative movie with a bad ending. I saw it years ago and
while I am not ready to change my mind about it, I do have an appreciation for
that scene in which Tally asks Warren to marry her.
I never wanted to marry anyone. I had no problem with
commitment and did in fact commit myself to a long-term relationship, but I
never desired marriage. I am not denying that you can commit yourself without
marriage, but there is something to that darn “legally required to be there”
idea. It defies all logic, but then so does love.
Talking about marriage in the abstract, when you have yet to
meet the person you want to marry is an intellectual exercise. Thinking about
it after you meet that person is something else entirely. It is giddy making and exciting. It makes
your heart pound ridiculously and your stomach tie up in knots. It makes you
look at the future differently. It makes you see the world with new eyes. Those
might sound like the lofty words of a teenage girl who professes that she will
“absolutely die” if her boyfriend of the month doesn’t text, but I assure you
they are not. Love is transformative and the kind of love that has someone like
me thinking about marriage is the most powerfully transformative force I have
come across. It’s hard to describe without sounding like a silly schoolgirl,
because in so many ways it makes one feel like a silly schoolgirl. And yet the
type of love that transformed me is not of the silly schoolgirl type. It is the
enduring, soul searing type that buries itself somewhere deep inside your guts
and settles there permanently.
I discovered the difference between intellectual talk of
marriage and the soul mate kind when I met someone I did want to marry, someone
for whom merely saying you were committed was not enough. In short, it wasn’t
until I found someone I wanted to be tied to did I finally understand the
allure of the institution.
Don’t get me wrong. I have not abandoned my original
analysis entirely. In many ways, marriage is still a patriarchal institution
that carries with it an array of sexist ideas about gender roles and women’s
place. Sadly, I’ve seen perfectly happy
couples succumb to those very strange ideas and in the process, ruin the very
thing that made them want to be tied to each other in the first place. I’ve
witnessed women grow resentful that they are expected to cook and I’ve known
men that feel constrained by the social pressures of having to be the
breadwinner. These people can make
different choices. We are not slaves to sexist ideas and we do not
automatically fall into stereotypical gender roles the moment we marry. Even
so, there is no denying the power of the sexist ideas attached to marriage.
Still, the analysis cannot be black and white. Marriage as a
social institution is complicated. It is murky and that meddlesome thing that
muddies the waters is love because love is the reason people get married. They
don’t get married to fulfill some gender role but because they want to be
legally required to be there in the mornings.
I was nervous before I proposed to my girlfriend. We are
committed to each other and being practical people we talked about marriage
long before I proposed, but there is talking about it (especially in practical
terms) and then there is the reality.
Despite the fact that we had talked about it, that she had every reason
to expect the question and I had no reason to doubt the answer, I was a bundle
of nervous flutters when I did it. It was not an uncertain nervousness from fear
of what I was getting into. I wanted to be committed to this woman completely
and totally. So why was I nervous?
For me it was the significance of the moment, it was the
very public, no holds barred, very clear declaration, that I wanted to be
committed to her completely. We are at our most vulnerable when making such
declarations, so it’s probably no wonder that I was nervous.
I also wanted it to be perfect because it was a defining
moment for us. I needed to let her know that I wanted to be legally required to
be there. It seems odd that such an archaic idea, the legal component attached
to marriage in the early property contract days, should take on a romantic
meaning, but that is what has happened and that is all in the power of the
force we call love. Love changed the institution and love certainly changed me.
In the final analysis, marriage is about romance. It is
about soul mates and intimacy and most assuredly about love. It’s the property
part we dumped and with good reason. The institution itself remains because it
represents something more than a legal contract. It is the manifestation of
great love. We don’t need a marriage license to fall in love. We do not need
the institution to commit ourselves to one another, but marriage is something special.
It is decidedly something beyond commitment. It is two people saying not just
that they commit to being there in the morning, but that they want to be there every morning; that
they believe in that love so completely that they are banking that they will
always want to be there in the mornings.
I know that’s what I want.
