As someone living happily ever after in the secular West at the beginning of a new millennium, it is hard for me to imagine anything more elemental: First comes love, then comes marriage. Bad news, matrimonial romantics.
In her delightful book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage, journalist Susan Squire traces roughly the first 5,000 years of marital behavior, and the real matrimonial axiom is not nearly as catchy: First comes proof of paternity, consolidation of property rights and the occasional ravishment (sorry, Sabine ladies!); then comes marriage.
Squire’s long history of connubial blisslessness starts in the caves and proposes that the marital relationship didn’t really become complicated until our ancestors had an epiphany: All that humping in the fields? It wasn’t just to pass the time between hunting and gathering.
This is tiresome stuff, commonplace and trendy and campy and all the rest. Poor women. So trod upon, if trod is the right word. Her suppositions about early “love,” namely mere lust and lust and more lust, is idle speculation and no more. Love, in the romantic sense and all the other senses, has been around for a long time, long before the courtly love traditions, and our usual sense of marriage is hardly Luther’s invention, since there is no sign that his marriage was anything more than mere convenience to him. The tale of Paris and Helen, vis a vis romantic love, is a usual tale. And people have been marrying for love. After all, there is no reason to suppose that Joseph did not love Mary; he gave up a lot for her, so that this relationship hardly seems like a business affair. Anyway, this “deconstruction” of marriage is now popular, denigrating with humor,a good way to sell books. Ho hum. Bring on the Palins/ They are much more interesting. Larry
This kind of speculation – posited as science – ignores much. It ignores human experience in various independent cultures, it ignores scientific knowledge (such as oxytocin release and its effects), it ignores knowable history by finding some plausible way of explaining it away – w/o data to support doing so.
I mourn the lowness of the ideas …. the crudeness of the “humor” … the sense of victimhood. Aside from everything else, it is boring! This point of view is so predictable.
(By the way, I am a woman.)
I used to read this tripe and believed most of it – subsequently I owned, for a while, a copy of the 1900 official US Census.
Contained therein was illegitimate births – about 3% of all births nationwide. Very little contraception, very little abortion, very little of hiding a girl overseas or in Mexico, yet, only 3% Illegitimate. Not only that but the illegitimate rate for New York City was about 35%. If one factors in the distortion of that rate on rural America one comes up with about 2% illegitimacy which is, amazingly, the same figure that my mother had given me some years earlier and the same figure that occurs in most parts of my ancestors. The past is not what we are told it was. The present is not what we are being told it is. Propaganda reigns. The cultural winners of the Hundred Year War are (re)writing history.
Even if what is written in the article were true, I would have to pity the lives that were exposed to such terror. But I have greater hope for my granddaughters. We will do what we can so that they can experience the security and contentment that my wife, my mother, 2 grandmothers, and 4 great-grandmothers all had.
Or else they can grovel in the alleged attrocities of the past or of their neighbors, and feel cheated that they are not chosen to be Vice president of the United States.
Don
It’s stuff like this that reminds why I will never give a dime to public TV or public radio. The latest [url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-garrisonkeillor,0,2528674.columnist]outrage[/url] by Garrison Keillor further solidified my resolve. NPR is nothing but a bunch of egotistical, narcissists who get their jollies from looking down their noses at the great unwashed trying to live their lives in “flyover” country. Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like the typical, snooty Episcopalian! Hmmm, I wonder if TEC can add a Prairie Home Companion Liturgy to the new prayer book?
Kendall – good for you for posting this.
The book is the product of many years of research. Of course, its sometimes upsetting to read “contrarian” histories.
I note that the commentors seem to assume she is making a moral claim about marriage. No – she is naturalizing it. The author is married and likes marriage. She’s not against it.
Larry’s comment, for example, doesn’t indicate he read her prologue. Yes – for most of written history people may experience something like “love” in some form. But do most people marry for love? As someone who has family in the South, I find such an idea preposterous. People marry for many reasons: to get out of the house; to have sex in private; to ensure the care of children.
The deeper, and relevant point, for us in our condition is how our own ethic about sex, presupposes that we know that sex produces babies. If we were unaware of that consequence, what would the world be like?
This reveals the deep link between sex and property/paternity in marriage. For good reason: men can determine which progeny they are responsible for.
Fascinating essay.
See Wilkins comment on love and marriage. Of the people you know who have gotten married, in how many cases was love a crucial element? I don’t know how many marriages I have been witness to – the number is pretty large – but I only know of two in which love was not an essential element. Now, of course, this is merely anecdotal, and yet, what is your experience? Is love in t he South REALLY that different? Do so many people in the South get married because they are shotgunned into it, or join in unholy matrimony because the money is good, or the marriage arranged. Tut tut, are there no southerners who aren’t teed off by such allegations. Larry
Oh, for goodness sake. Of course people marry for love in the South. And in addition to love, there are quite a few other factors that go into it. Pretty much like the rest of the country. Sometimes the decision to marry is unwise, or insufficient effort is made to make the marriage work, love or no love, but I don’t think that is limited to the South.
As for the book, Squire has set up a straw man (silly people who think romantic love has always been the primary consideration in marriage as opposed to the exploitation of women), than knocked it down to make some point. I’m not sure what the point is, exactly, except that she is liberated from all that nonsense, and still has a fabulous marriage, to boot. As Larry said, trendy and tiresome.
Virginian and Larry – being Half- Indian, I mean the global south. Pardon the confusion.
Most of my cousins did not marry out of love, but for the potential for love. In a good part of the world, marriages are managed by families. I don’t know if the writer thinks she is “liberated from nonsense.” But she is taking an eagle’s eye view of the institution. Romantic Love [which looks a lot like lust to the author, and perhaps rightfully so] is a very western view of what is essential to marriage.