The Future of Marriage
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Original positing: July 19, 2007
It seems a very long time ago, but it was only ten years previous to the time of writing (2007) that I composed an essay entitled "Marriage as an Honorific Estate" and posted it in my webzine, which is called Myodicy (Issue 4, June 1997). The thesis of that essay was relatively simple. First, I argued that marriage was becoming an honorific term and estate: it was no longer so simple to ascertain whether a given couple can properly be called married. In other words, the marital status (or lack thereof) of a man and a woman in some sort of a committed relationship was no longer a matter of fact. Secondly, I made it clear that this new development, this need to interpret and judge when it comes to ascertaining marital status, is to be regretted. Society is thereby weakened.
As I now reread the essay, I find it relatively tame, and also too academic in tone. It was as though I had not quite realized the implications of what I was saying. For a time I had set the issue aside, choosing instead to think about other issues that seemed to me to need some attention.
The convictions that were articulated in the 1997 essay had grown gradually in my mind. But in the years after 1997, the tempo of change in my thinking began to increase. Society was also changing. I came to the realization that I would one day need to write a sequel to it. One reason why I did not pick up this task any sooner is that the anticipated sequel in my mind became ever longer and more elaborate. The series of essays which I am now launching with the overall title "The Future of Marriage" is that sequel. However, it may not properly merit the title of sequel, for my point of view has changed somewhat.
The original essay was stimulated in good measure by my reading. For me, marriage was not only an institution from which I derived personal benefit and satisfaction but also a topic about which I would read from time to time -- in short, it was an academic interest of mine and had been one for many years. At the time I wrote the 1997 essay, I was leading a conventional life in sexual and marital respects. At the tender age of twenty I had married the woman with whom I fell in love while I was in college, and I was still married to her. Moreover, I was even inclined to say -- and I now realize that this was probably simplistic thinking on my part -- that this whole business of sexuality really is not all that difficult. You marry the person you love, and that leaves you plenty of room for sexual fulfillment and satisfaction.
Some major changes were ahead in my life, and I have come to think somewhat differently about the larger issue of marriage and the role of sexuality in marriage in response to those changes. A year after I posted the 1997 essay, my doctors detected prostate cancer growing within me -- a cancer that had existed for a number of years already. This particular type of cancer affects the male reproductive system and therefore has potentially ominous consequences even apart from the prospect of death. Any man who receives the dreaded verdict that such a cancer exists within him must contemplate the possibility of impotence and/or living without testosterone and the sex drive it produces.
About six months after the discovery of my prostate cancer, my wife was stricken with a severe brain injury that left her hospitalized and institutionalized for the remainder of her life, which turned out to be a little less than three years. This meant that I lived as one who is legally married but functionally single. And after she died, I needed to address the question whether I wished to share my life with a woman again, and if so, whether as a conventionally married man or in some other sort of arrangement. I found that my lifelong convictions regarding marriage were alive and well, and so it was my wish to marry again -- but not this time to beget children. My first wife and I brought four children into the world, one of whom died in infancy. Rather, what I wanted was to share all the things a grown man and woman can be to one another in the most secure and committed and intimate setting possible. And so I married again.
A significant complication in this wonderful chapter of my life is that the woman with whom I fell in love had been married before. Yet her marriage had not ended -- as mine had -- through the death of the original marriage partner. Instead it had ended through divorce; her former husband was alive and well. And so in this period of being single and falling in love, I began to think in very personal terms about the constraints -- if any -- on the appropriateness of remarriage after divorce. Does divorce basically mean separation, as some Christians maintain, or is it permitted for one who has been divorced to marry again, even though the original spouse is still alive? I had discussed this matter in my 1997 essay, in which I made mention of what I called "ineligibles," by which I meant people whose marriage relationships have broken up in a fashion that renders them ineligible to marry again as far as the Christian church is concerned. Was Janet, the woman I now loved, one of the "ineligibles"? Would my relationship with her have to remain at the level of going out to dinner and maybe a movie afterwards? I will have more to say about such issues in a later essay in the series.
In this first essay, which serves as something of a preface to the series as a whole, I do not wish to rehash or rearticulate what I said in the 1997 essay. I now regard that essay as somewhat dated, but thanks to the miracle of internet technology it is still easily accessible. I would encourage anyone with a serious interest in the series of topics in this series to begin with the 1997 essay. But as I look back on it, I do find it too restrained -- almost as though I was diplomatically avoiding the more difficult subjects. In this series I plan to tackle the tough issues, running the risk of stirring up a bit of controversy.
It is my contention that Christians -- perhaps not all of them, but certainly many of the ones in the Christian circles in which I primarily move -- are too reticent when it comes to talking about sexuality and marriage. When I was growing up and attending Christian Reformed worship services, there was not much mention of sexuality as a factor in marriage. Nor did we hear much about sexual waywardness -- not that we were tolerant of such waywardness, mind you, but it fell largely into the "it goes without saying" category. Still, such topics were not altogether avoided. From time to time, a preacher could lay it on the line, so to speak. Sad to say, the emphasis seemed to fall on the negative, on the great danger which sexual drives and impulses pose to our well-being.
In the churches in which I now worship primarily (Anglican and Presbyterian), the subject of sexuality is pretty much avoided in the preaching and discussion. Or if it gets onto the table at all, it is generally through the debate about homosexuality and same-sex unions and so forth. As for heterosexual behavior, it seems to be pretty much one's own business.
Now, I am well aware that in Christian circles there is a fair amount of writing about sexuality, with ethics as the overall framework of reference, and this is as it should be. Moreover, most Christians are in favor of having a certain amount of biological instruction regarding human sexuality made available to children in schools, and this is also as it should be. But wider ranging theorizing about sexuality is in short supply. I have not come upon much material that is to my satisfaction.
In my own way, I have tried to contribute to such theoretical discussion, stressing especially the cultural and symbolic dimension of human sexuality, which sets it off from the reproductive activities of animals. But I have learned from a very distressing episode in my life that the tolerance for such discussion in conservative Christian circles is comparatively small, and so I have reluctantly given up teaching about these things. However, I am still free to write, and this I intend to do -- on this website which is devoted to frictophobia and to a series of themes in social philosophy.
Yet sexuality itself will be a secondary theme in this series of essays, which are bound together by the notion of the future of marriage. With regard to marriage, I believe that we as Christians are at a fork in the road. In the time in which I was growing up (the 1950s and 1960s), there was still a great deal of overlap between the Christian understanding of marriage and the understanding that prevailed in North American society in general, but in more recent decades, a great gulf has emerged.
I may be oversimplifying, but I wish to indicate at the outset that the fork in the road which I see before us is essentially a choice between narrowing our conception of marriage and broadening it. I believe there is quite a push underway in our society to broaden out the meaning and definition of marriage. Some people think that such an expansion will enable us to solve certain social problems. My own tentative conviction is that the better path to follow is to narrow our understanding of marriage and its essence. I believe that we need to make our conception of marriage more strict, while recognizing in the process that significant elements or components that we may associate with marriage are not as widely shared between Christians, on the one hand, and those who profess no religious faith or adherence, on the other hand, as we used to think. At the same time, I wish to continue to defend the thesis that some sort of idealized -- or even idealistic -- notion of marriage is something Christians share with people in a number of other religious traditions.
My aim in posting these essays on the Internet before they are completed is to invite discussion. Over a period of years I have been trying to get discussion going in the circles in which I move, and many friends and colleagues have had interesting things to say to me. But I would like to go beyond the sorts of "solutions" that have been coming to me informally. And so I hope that readers of this series will be stimulated to write themselves (my email address is below). Perhaps I can establish a web page devoted to links to other materials to make it easier for those who are following the series to pick up on the various points of view that are currently battling for recognition. [END]
© Theodore Plantinga 2007
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Please note that the views expressed in "The Future of Marriage" series are not the official views of Redeemer University College.