03.07.05 - The Marriage Revolution

A man wrote to a Sydney newspaper asking why so many people seemed to have difficulties in their marriage, and offering advice based on his own experience. He said, for instance, that he and his wife had a rule to go out for dinner twice a week for good food, good wine, good company and good conversation. He wrote, "She goes on Tuesdays and I go on Fridays." He extolled the value of sleeping in separate beds, "Hers is in Melbourne, mine is in Sydney." He said he took his wife on frequent trips out into the countryside, but she always managed to find her way home again.

Today in our continuation of readings from the sagas of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel, the lectionary gives us the story of finding a wife for Isaac. It is just as well that it is quite a long story, because there isn??t much more about Isaac in the Bible than this. All the mention Isaac gets is the promise of, and then his birth; maternal rivalry over his half-brother Ishmael; his father taking him to a mountain top to be a sacrificial offering; his marriage; then the birth of his twin sons Esau and Jacob. From there on the narratives sideline Isaac and concentrate on Jacob who, although the younger twin, became the ancestor of the Hebrew people through trickery and deceit.

This passage about finding a wife for Isaac is a portrayal of a marriage custom that still operates in parts of the Middle East. It is a picture which is quite different from the understanding of marriage in contemporary Western society and many other parts of the twenty-first century world.

There is one thing on which I can agree with Pope Benedict and Brian Tamaki, and the silly people who accuse the Labour Government of being anti-family because of civil unions ?± there is today a crisis in marriage. But as to what that crisis may be, and the appropriate response to it, there would probably be no agreement.

It is undeniable that the forms, values and arrangements of marriage and the family are changing dramatically all over the world. Everywhere, people are speaking about a marriage crisis. In one sense, this is nothing new. The ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned high divorce rates and criticised unruly youth. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they set foot in the New World.

Many of the things people think are undermining family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years has been tried somewhere before. There have been societies and times, including in Christian Europe, when non-marital sex and out-of-wedlock births were more common and widely accepted that they are today. Stepfamilies were much more numerous in the past, the result of high death rates in childbirth and frequent remarriages. And same-sex marriages, though rare, have been sanctioned in some cultures under certain conditions.

On the other hand, some things that people believe to be essential to marriage turn out to be relatively recent innovations. One is that marriage has to be licensed by the state or sanctified by the church. In ancient Rome, even for Christians, the difference between cohabitation and legal marriage depended solely upon the partners?? stated intent; there was no civil or religious ritual. The Roman Catholic Church long held that if a man and a woman said they had privately agreed to marry, whether they said those words in the kitchen or out by the haystack, they were, in fact, married. And in practice, there were many more ways to get out of a marriage in the early Middle Ages than at the beginning of the twentieth century.

However, when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today. Everywhere marriage is becoming more optional and more fragile. Everywhere the once-predictable link between marriage and child rearing is fraying. And everywhere relations between men and women are undergoing rapid and at times traumatic transformation. In fact, the relations between men and women have changed more in the past thirty years than they did in the previous three thousand years, and a similar transformation is occurring in the role of marriage.

When some people speak about the ideal of the family, they usually seem to have in mind the exceptional situation of marriage and the family in the West in the 1950s. Until the 1950s, relying on a single breadwinner had been rare. For thousands of years most women and children had shared the tasks of breadwinning with men. In the 1950s, for the first time, a majority of marriages in New Zealand as throughout Western Europe and North America consisted of a full-time homemaker supported by a male earner. Also new in the 50s was the cultural consensus that everyone should marry, and that people should do so at a young age. The baby boom of the 50s was also a departure from the past, because during the previous hundred years, birth rates in the West had fallen.

The 1950s family model was the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for over 150 years. In the late 18^th century, people began to adopt a radical new idea. This was that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage, and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partner on that basis. Until the late 18^th century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and social institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love.

For thousands of years, further back than Abraham arranging for the marriage of his son Isaac, marriage served so many economic, political and social functions that the individual needs and wishes of family members ?± especially women and children ?± took second place. Marriage was not about bringing two individuals together for love and intimacy, although that was sometimes a welcome by-product. Rather, the aim of marriage was to acquire useful in-laws and gain some political or economic advantage. Only in the last 200 years, as other economic and political institutions began to take over many of the roles once played by marriage, did our Western forebears begin to see marriage as a personal and private relationship that should fulfil their emotional and sexual needs and desires.

From the moment of its inception, that revolutionary new marriage system showed signs of the instability that was to plague it up until today. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage was first raised, there were warnings that the same values that increased people??s satisfaction with marriage as a relationship also had a tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. The love that had been the basis for a marriage, if lost would prove to be the basis for the marriage to collapse. Marriage became more joyful, loving and satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time, marriage became more optional and more brittle.

For 150 years, four things kept people from taking the new values about love and self-fulfilment to the ultimate conclusion that people could build meaningful lives outside of marriage, and that not everything in society had to be organised through and around married couples.

The first impediment was the conviction that there were huge and innate differences between men and women, one of which was that women had no sexual desires. That crumbled in the first part of the twentieth century, as people rejected the notion of such differences between the genders and emphasised the importance of sexual satisfaction for women as well as men.

The second thing that held back the subversive love revolution was the ability of relatives, neighbours, employers, and government to regulate personal behaviour and to penalise non-conformity. The influence of such individuals and institutions was eroded by urbanisation and the mobility of the nuclear family, which allowed more anonymity and choice in personal life, and so allowed the growth of divorce rates

The third factor was the combination of unreliable birth control and harsh attitudes towards children born out of wedlock. Then, in the 1960s, birth control became reliable enough that the fear of pregnancy no longer constrained women??s sexual conduct. And in subsequent decades law changes abolished the legal status of being illegitimate on the basis that it was unfair to penalise a child whose mother was unable or unwilling to marry.

Women??s legal and economic dependence on men and men??s domestic dependence on women was the fourth factor that had long driven people to get and to stay married. But during the 1970s and 80s, women won legal autonomy and made huge strides towards economic self-sufficiency. At the same time, a proliferation of labour-saving consumer products like permanent-press fabrics, ready-to-eat foods, and automatic dishwashers undercut men??s dependence on women??s housekeeping.

As those barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society??s ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their better judgement, was drastically curtailed. So, today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. The revolution in marriage has transformed how people organise their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. This revolution in marriage has liberated some people from restricted, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behaviour without establishing new ones.

The marriage revolution has brought personal turmoil in its wake. But we cannot turn the clock back in our personal lives, any more than we can go back to small-scale farming and artisan production in our national economic life. Just as many people found new sources of employment in the industrial world even after the factories had displaced old jobs, many people will be able to carve out satisfying and stable marriages on a new basis. But many others will live their lives and construct their personal commitments outside marriage.

Promoting good marriages is an important goal for a church. That is why, for example, people marrying in St Lukes are required to attend an eighteen-hour-long pre-marriage education programme. In and of itself that doesn??t guarantee a long and stable and satisfying marriage. But it takes marriage seriously, and seeks to give those entering marriage through this church good skills for managing and enriching their life together. Of course, in today??s changing world there is no "one-size-fits-all" formula for marital success. But sociologists and psychologists have found a few general principles that seem to help many kinds of modern marriage to flourish.

Because men and women no longer face the same economic and social compulsions to get or stay married as in the past, it is especially important that they begin their relationship as friends, and build it on the basis of mutual respect. Women and men marry later in life these days ?± often in their late 20s or in their 30s. They come to marriage with a lot of life experience and many previously-formed interests and skills. It is no longer possible nor reasonable to assume that two people can merge all their interests and beliefs. For this reason, I try to avoid unrealistic language in marriage services about two becoming one. The two remain two, and in that they can find strength for their relationship.

In a world where marriages are no longer held together by the compulsion of in-laws and society, or by the mutual dependence of two individuals who cannot do each other??s jobs, ongoing emotional investments in a marriage have to replace external constraints in providing the foundation for the relationship. This continues to be a difficulty for men more than women. Women are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion, because they have more to gain from changing the traditional dynamics of marriage. Husbands have to learn to respond positively to their wives?? requests for change. For thousands of years, marriage was organised in ways that reinforced female subservience. Even though most if not all the legal and economic bases for a husband??s authority over his wife and her deference to his needs are gone, we still have all inherited unconscious habits and emotional expectations that perpetuate female disadvantage in marriage.

In any marriage there are times when the partners have to search for patience and forbearance, but no longer can it be as it has been up until now that it is the woman who is the more forbearing and patient. The choice to stay and work things out must be a conscious one, not a unilateral decision to accept the inevitable as it once was. Couples deep down know that if they stop negotiating, if too much time passes without any joy, or if a conflict drags on too long, neither of them has to stay with the other.

What is true for an individual marriage is also true for society. As a result of two centuries of social change, most people in the Western world have a choice about whether or not to enter marriage, and if they do, whether or not to stay in it for the rest of their lives. Similarly, as a result of two centuries of social change, those things that can give most effective support for married couples would also make things easier for the growing number of people who are constructing relationships outside marriage ?± whether it be same-sex or heterosexual couples, whether it be within a civil union or outside either of the two legally-established forms of relationship. Such support systems include subsidised parental leave, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counselling when a relationship ?± whatever its shape and basis ?± is troubled.

We are living through a marriage revolution as profound and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. A Christian community??s rational response is not to bemoan the revolution and seek to return to a non-existent golden age of marriage. But we can seek to do all we can to help marriages be more healthy and life-giving, and to save more marriages that are in trouble. But just as we cannot organise modern political alliances through kinship ties as did medieval monarchs, or put the pre-Industrial Revolution farmers?? and skilled craftsmen??s households back as the centrepiece of a modern economy, we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or for worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.

Acknowledgement: Stepanie Coontz, The New Fragility of Marriage, for Better or for Worse, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 51, Issue 35, PageB7, 6 May 2005 (http://chronicle.com)