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In Partial
Praise of Marriage Home
by Abraham Rothberg
If you
read books, magazines or newspapers, listen to radio or watch television,
go to the movies or to plays, or simply overhear lunchtime gossip, it is
clear that the institution of marriage is under assault. Marriage is
damned as inadequate to our era, incapable of providing individual needs
and gratification, inept at raising children, impossible to sustain except
for the briefest of times, invidious as an instrument of capitalist--or
other--exploitation. Two thousand years ago the best Paul of Tarsus
could say of it was, "It is better to marry than to burn."
One has
only to turn to the recorded observations in every time and culture about
marriage to see how such a jaundiced view has persisted over the millenia.
As long ago as the Fourth Century B.C.E., in ancient Greece,
Menander was remarking that "If one will face the truth, marriage is an
evil, but a necessary evil," as damning with faint praise as St. Paul's
dictum. A millenium and a half later, in Spain, Cervantes was lamenting
that "Marriage is a noose," and those who are married are both its
hangmen--or should I say hang-persons?--and its hanged. At just about the
same time, in France, Montaigne cried out that marriage "...happens as
with cages; the birds without despair of getting in, and those within
despair of getting out." Five hundred years later, in England, Robert
Louis Stevenson wrote that "Marriage is like life...a field of battle not
a bed of roses," while in our own country, at the same time, Ambrose
Bierce defined marriage as "The state or condition of a community
consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two."
There have even been a few, like the Irish George Bernard Shaw, who
managed to give marriage a surly vote of confidence. "Marriage is
popular," Shaw proclaimed, "because it combines the maximum of temptation
with the maximum of opportunity."
Is that
Shavian the truth or all that really makes marriage so popular and so
persistent? And marriage has persisted, remaining one of
humankind's oldest, most venerable and durable institutions. Why then
such a jaundiced view by so many, such harsh criticism and rancorous
cynicism? What is it human beings have wanted of marriage that they have
not received? And what is it that they wanted and did receive that has
continued to make men and women marry? Why such high hopes and such
profound disappointments?
The
nature of marriage is so complex that it is as often as not entered into
with human uncertainty and ambivalence, so restrictive that human beings
rebel against it as against prison bars and complain of "giving up their
freedom," so thwarting that many, mocking Shaw, insist that marriage
provides the minimum of temptation and the minimum of opportunity? Yet,
despite that, marriage is also so promising and pleasing that human beings
are drawn to it as inexorably as moths to the flame. It is Goethe who
provides an essential clue when he emphasized, "Love is -an ideal thing,
marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes
unpunished."
The
love preceding marriage promises to provide self-fulfillment, even
self-indulgence, and to deliver us to ecstasies we never knew before,
but, as William Cullen Bryant once told a woman who asked him why he never
wrote long poems, "A long poem is no more conceivable than a long
ecstasy."--and whatever else marriage is no long ecstasy. Dr. Dawkins may
be right that our "selfish genes" thrust us into marriage as the surest
way of achieving such immortality as we are granted, the continuation
of our genetic inheritance, yet however urgent that genetic "destiny"
is, it evidently doesn't satisfy us. Is that because, in whatever
mysterious way, we are more than that genetic inheritance we bear, that we
have been taught or taught ourselves that marriage calls for steadiness
and constancy, for self-restraint and self-discipline, for friendship and
concern, for childrearing as well as child-bearing, for economic
cooperation, for passing along experience, tradition and property to the
next generation of our newly melded "selfish" genes? Moreover, marriage
calls for all those virtues in a relationship of some 15,000 days and
nights of what is, often, chafing intimacy and edgy stress and strain. How
then could human beings, over so long a stretch of time, not find such a
relationship confining or disappointing, frustrating or even maddening?
Still,
in those same 15,000 days and nights, men and women can and do provide
each other with affection, passion, friendship, security, humor and
serenity. No, not all the time, and yes, more often than not. Marriage
and the family are a private institution that civilizes human beings,
saves them from the brutalization of whatever system --capitalism or
communism, monarchism or fascism, feudalism or tribalism—that
they must live under. Most important, it saves them from barbarism. It
can and does give them a private life and personal identity more immune to
the tyranny of the state or the masses than would otherwise be the case.
Marriage is also a public institution which the state continues to try to
control and shape, for through the family is created the sort of citizen
the government--of whatever kind—hopes to make amenable to its wishes, in
whom it hopes to instill its values and goals. In these dual roles,
private and public, marriage must create values, embody them in private
conscience, exemplify them in public behavior, no inconsiderable task.
Marriage, then, remains the quintessential means of educating, though by
no means the only one. Far more than schools or universities, peer groups
or gangs, it directs, develops and refines such traits of intelligence and
character, persistence and discipline, the individual needs to live a
reasonably decent life. When it fails, it makes manifest
vices and viciousness which are their opposite.
As the
world's governments grow: increasingly intrusive, attempting to invade and
manipulate every aspect of life, marriage and the family can create a
bulwark against the scrutiny, interference and control of the state.
Because of its protective walls of love and concern, marriage and family
can provide shelter against the stormy intrusions of the rest of society.
In this it is not, regrettably, always successful. In an era where
rapidity of technological advance, swiftness of social change,
perturbations in taste and oscillations in morality shake our world, when
politics, work, advertising and other modern media batter the individual
and rock the very foundations of society--even threaten its
extinction-marriage and family continue to be shores against such ruins.
Good marriages do not separate themselves from society, but they refuse to
be overwhelmed by it. In flood and famine, depression and war, disease
and death, marriage and family are sometimes swept away--one has only to
read the literature under Nazi or Stalinist tyranny--but more often they
stand fast, their commitment to continuing the species and the human
enterprise intact if scarred, their hope for the future, the future's
hope.
Marriage and family may be incapable of rescuing us from natural
catastrophes and manmade calamities, from war and revolution, from
economic upheavals, from the collapse of law and civility, from the
corruption of institutions and their leaders, from the impoverishments of Babbitry and the sterile conventionality of Main Street or the rampant
greed and ruthlessness of Wall Street, but they remain an arena in which
human beings may be honest and loyal, self-transcending instead of
selfish, generously giving instead of greedily grabbing. The marriage may
be patriarchal, matriarchal, companionate, sanctioned or unsanctioned, yet
it will offer opportunities for both steadiness and security, passion and
excitement, loneliness and company. Marriage and family are a place
where, if individuals will, men and women may speak to each other from
their hearts and minds, reach understandings with sympathy and respect,
provide a human and humane small world example to that harsher, crueler
large world outside and around them.
When I
was a boy, I was told the story about a pure, beautiful diamond of which a
king was justly proud. One day, the gem was accidentally marred by a deep
scratch, and the king, distressed, called in the most skillful diamond
cutters in the kingdom, offered them great rewards to remove the
imperfection in his diamond. Though many tried, none could repair the
blemish, and the king remained deeply grieved and disappointed. Until,
after some years had passed, a craftsman one day came to the court and
promised the monarch that he would make the diamond even more beautiful
than before it was defaced. So confident was the man that the king
entrusted the jewel to him, and using the scratch as the stem of
his design, the craftsman engraved an elegant rose around the earlier
imperfection.
Marriage is much like that diamond, a jewel
that, in living is often scarred by mishap or mischief, often by intent,
and which its participants, using their own will and skill, must recarve
into roses and other designs that will not only restore the jewel to its
former comeliness but in that renewal make it even more beautiful.
Copyright © 2005,
Abraham Rothberg
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