I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Marriage carries multiple logics. It is a contractual mechanism for establishing property rights, combining finances, and accessing government benefits. It creates a structure raising children. And, in modern times, it is seen as a way to ensure lasting emotional intimacy and commitment.
Marriage is simultaneously a legal contract, an economic partnership, a kinship structure, and an intimate relationship.
Yet these aspects coexist uncomfortably for many people, and this discomfort, along with the moral ramifications of stepping outside of marriage, have provided a rich topic for fiction writers to explore.
In Madame Bovary, published in 1856 and 1857 and set around the same time, the heroine Emma, not yet eighteen years old, marries country doctor Charles Bovary. This is a reasonably good outcome for her, as in the mid nineteenth century the most a woman could hope for was usually marriage to a financially successful and reasonably kind man, then living in a nice home and having children.
But Emma, having read popular novels, wants luxury and romance. She needs marriage for its financial and legal supports, but she wants emotional excitement too (along with fine things). She finds married life dull in its focus on meals, Charles’ medical practice, housekeeping, and other routines. Instead she seeks the overwhelming passion and aesthetic beauty that she discovered in romance books she read while being educated at a convent.
In modern life, however, women (and men too) don’t simply seek romance and luxury, as Emma did. They seek, and often feel entitled to, a particular kind of intimate relationship that sociologist Anthony Giddens calls a “pure relationship” in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy. This is a relationship which is created and sustained purely for the mutual emotional and personal satisfaction it provides. Many modern women and men expect that this will exist alongside all the earlier requirements and expectations of marriage: financial collaboration, sexual fidelity, legal structure, and, a sense of owning another person. I don’t mean that in the sense of wives being property, but rather that, in a marriage, there is this expectation that you own a person’s emotional, romantic, financial, and sexual attention. And if you don’t give that, and instead you seek romance and sex and personal fulfillment outside of the marriage, you are to be shamed and shunned, whether divorce happens or not.
A relationship founded upon ongoing satisfaction and assuming continuous intimacy is fundamentally at odds with a marital relationship that is legally and morally binding, and with the expectation of some sort of ongoing ownership over another’s attention regardless of how they currently feel or are being satisfied in the relationship.
People want to find in marriage both the sense of chosen and vital intimacy alongside legal and moral scaffolding that makes enduring the default and leaving an act of shame. A pure relationship is contingent, because it is freely chosen at each moment. A marriage is enduring and binding because it is promised to be forever.
The fictional characters I’m learning about right now — Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier, Constance Chatterley, and Maria Bertram — do not necessarily seek the “pure relationship” that Giddens discusses but rather they each seek a kind of freedom to be one’s self. They are each seeking aliveness over stagnancy and tedium.
In modern life, marriage is expected to be and do too much. What is the solution? Either to forego it (or give it up once you’ve had it) or to redefine it.