Essay 4:
A Voluntary Union?

When a young -- or youngish -- man gets married, his male friends may mark the occasion with some nervous joking beforehand. They may insist that he needs a final night of freedom, with buddies on hand to encourage him in boisterous behavior. They will probably whisper to him that it's his last chance to sow some wild oats. Paid female companionship may even be arranged. The general theme of such hi-jinks is that an enormous change is to come over the groom-to-be the next day when he pronounces the "I do" or the "I will" (in the case of an Anglican service).

When you get married, this act of will, whereby you commit and bind yourself for the rest of your life, is irrevocable -- or is it? Well, you may be thinking: there's still the divorce option if things don't work out. Isn't there even a whole book devoted to the concept of "starter marriages"? [NOTE paul] Indeed, there is, but it was not always so. Those who claim that advocates of gay marriage are "redefining" marriage in our day and are thereby disturbing a venerable institutional arrangement that has stood unchanged for many centuries need to look carefully at what a difference the free acceptance of divorce has made to how marriage has been understood in recent generations. Could it be that the horse is already out of the barn? In that case, there is no need to lock the barn door.

Our expectations regarding marriage and its permanence (or lack thereof) have changed. During my youth there was much talk of "trial marriages." Nowadays the free availability of divorce makes that term superfluous.

Such issues will be further explored later on in this series. Back to the main theme of this essay, which is that marriage is considered a voluntary union nowadays. A man enters it and thereby throws away his freedom.

How about his bride? Can the same be said of her? She may not have much choice in the matter. For one thing, she may "have to get married." I suspect that this phrase will not immediately ring a bell with the younger set, but in my youth we all knew what it meant. You were in love, and the hormones were raging. You had been told that there is a certain line you may not cross. But sometimes your self-control broke down. The result might well be a pregnancy. In such a situation the young lady had no choice: she had to get married. Before long she would start to "show"! Yet there were some for whom an unplanned pregnancy proved -- in their own minds -- a welcome necessity. Barbara Ehrenreich observes:

When I was growing up in the fifties, everyone acknowledged the "battle of the sexes" in which women "held out" for as long as possible until, by dint of persuasion, sexual frustration or sudden pregnancy, they "landed a man." From their side of the battle lines, men viewed the proceedings with a certain sardonic detachment. [NOTE ehrenreich]

Often there was ridicule attached to such proceedings. When it came to the young man who was responsible for his girlfriend's pregnancy and therefore "had" to marry her, popular humor had him marching into the church followed by the father of the bride carrying a shotgun (hence we called it a "shotgun wedding"). The groom also "had" to get married -- that was how we used to talk. On the other hand, if he ran out on his girlfriend and started living in Newfoundland under an assumed name -- well, at least he wouldn't start to "show" after about six months.

This picture of how many marriages got started is not a pretty one. Feminists are enraged by it. But it is grounded in some well-established traditional language regarding marriage. One close acquaintance of mine, whose father was 54 when he married and started a family, explains that at a certain point in life this man decided to "take a wife." It's as though a man would go to where the eligible women are on display, look them over, take hold of one by the arm, and drag her away. The "take a wife" lingo can also be found in the New Testament. In Luke 20 the enemies of Jesus try to trap him with a clever question:

Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the wife and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and died without children; and the second and the third took her ....

Jesus does not comment on the presupposition in the clever question being placed before him (namely, that a man simply "takes" a wife). He does not bother to reject it explicitly, but then, he doesn't endorse it either. What he does say is basically this: You fellows have it all wrong. You don't understand what it will be like after the resurrection. More specifically, he says (according to the RSV): "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage ...." [see verses 29 through 35] You can find "take" lingo in Luther as well: "... take as your spouse whomsoever you please, whether it be godparent, godchild, or the daughter or sister of a sponsor ...." [NOTE luther-1]

I should not make too much of the way that ordinary words like "give" and "take" were long used in connection with wedding and marriage practices. But the general picture that emerges is that marriage did not have much of the voluntary about it in the old days. You did not get to pick your bride (or your husband) out of a catalogue. There were no websites with endless candidates, i.e. people you could date, and then -- who knows what might develop? Perhaps marriage!

Romance, falling in love -- this sort of thing could not be relied on as a solid basis for marriage. Your family arranged these things for you. Even princes and princesses were not exempt. If you got to be the king, you found that you were married to someone from another noble or royal family, for it was thought that the connection and union of the two families would strengthen the position of your royal house and also that of the country you ruled. As for your heart, you might have a mistress on the side and be truly in love with her. There were no paparazzi to spy on you in the old days because there were no cameras.

I am making a point of all of this because I wish to take issue with some commentators of our time who moan and groan about the "redefinition" of marriage that is taking place and proceed to lay the blame at the feet of those who maintain that homosexuals ought to be legally allowed to marry their same-sex partner, a development which, in the judgment of the critical commentators, would have the effect of placing such unions on the same footing as traditional heterosexual marriages. And by the way, it's time the church fell into line on this issue, according to the people who are said to be guilty of "redefining" marriage in our time.

I have commented on the blessing of same-sex unions in an earlier essay in this series: I will not return to that theme just now. Instead I want to point out that the dreaded redefinition of marriage took place a long time ago -- but not all at once. My thesis is that over the course of a number of generations -- in a process that culminated in the twentieth century -- marriage became a voluntary union. Men stopped "taking a wife," women stopped "having to get married," and brides began to resent being "given away." Back in 1967 I married my college sweetheart, who was named Mary Masselink: she insisted on coming came down the aisle under her own steam. This symbolic step (or set of steps) on her part was not meant as a slight directed toward her dear father, for he was the minister awaiting her at the front of the church, where he would "tie the knot," as we used to say, once the bride showed up. Mary wanted to avoid the symbolism of the bride being handed from her father to her husband-to-be as though she were a piece of property. When I married Janet Russell in 2002, she was accompanied down the aisle by her five adult children! By that point the property symbolism had faded away. Before Mary's daughter Abigail got married in 2006, I reminded her of her late mother's thinking regarding these matters. Abigail thought it over and made her decision: I wound up walking her down the (outdoor) aisle.

I am well aware that this essay relates (and also presupposes) some significant history without taking the trouble to spell it out in any detail. The essay is all too brief; therefore it cannot help but be somewhat lacking in nuance.

A more careful telling of the history of marriage in the Western world would provide details about times in which ideas that are now generally in favor were just beginning to break into our consciousness. Reformation historians, in particular, want to give credit to some of the ecclesiastical leaders of those days. These men were heroes, it seems, who disenchanted marriage to quite an extent by prying it loose from its sacramental context within Roman Catholicism. Luther, in particular, wanted to make of marriage something earthly, something that should not be invested with too much transcendent mystery. He proclaimed:

Know therefore that marriage is an outward, bodily thing, like any other worldly undertaking. Just as I may eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride with, buy from, speak to, and deal with a heathen, Jew, Turk, or heretic, so I may also marry and continue in wedlock with him. Pay no attention to the precepts of those fools who forbid it. [NOTE luther-2]

Some scholars see early evidence of sensitivity to "women's rights" in certain of the changes brought about during the Reformation era. As to the situation that prevailed a little later in British history, Edmund Newey informs us:

... church weddings had been abolished during the period of the Protectorate, [NOTE protectorate] and it was moreover a key tenet of Presbyterian teaching that marriage was not a sacrament but at most an ordinance. Some extreme Independent sects even reduced it to a civil contract, and there was widespread resistance among Puritans to the use of symbols such as the ring, which tended to be associated with a sacramental understanding of marriage. [NOTE newey]

But so much desacralization led to some frankly profane practices, especially in the frontier circumstances that prevailed in the new world, where it was not always easy to rustle up a preacher when you needed one. To get married was basically to unite sexually and begin living together. As the frontier was tamed in the USA, it became necessary to stress the importance of a formal beginning to your marriage via a lovely church ceremony, plus some documentation, and so forth: thereby weddings came into vogue. In short, marriage has had its ups and downs over the generations and centuries. And in some of these reversals, we see "women's rights" asserting themselves.

Even so, the twentieth century remains the great age of marriage redefinition -- and then I mean specifically, the time before the discussion of marriage between same-sex partners. There were two factors, in particular, that need to be noted.

The first is the relatively free acceptance of divorce. When we think back to the days of Britain's King Edward VIII (the uncle of the current queen), we see how much has changed. This man was single when he ascended the throne in 1936. He was romantically involved with an American woman who had been twice divorced, and he wanted to marry her. This could never be. Parliament and the prime minister of the day (Stanley Baldwin) in effect forced a choice upon him: give up either throne or the woman you love. He opted for love, and his brother succeeded him, reigning as King George VI through the second world war, until his death in 1952 brought Queen Elizabeth II to the throne. Important to understanding the Edward VIII episode is the fact that earlier in the century it had been a social rule that a divorced person was not even allowed to be in the presence of a member of the royal family!

What happened in the previous century is that we came to accept divorce almost as normal. The stigma gradually faded away. Many churches revised their policies on the question when -- and under what circumstances -- a divorced person could marry again with the church's blessing. Whether all of this should have happened is a question I will touch on a little later in this series of essays, when I talk about "unmarriageables." For the present, I am reporting it as historical fact.

A second development, deeply intertwined with the first, is the change in women's status by virtue of which they were allowed to hold property and exercise roughly the same range of economic rights that men possess. For those who think about the divorce issue in a practical way, this was no small matter. If one granted that a women was permitted to divorce an impossible husband who was unfaithful to her or beat her or did not support her, such a right meant little if she was shackled once she attempted to sally forth into society on her own. It was feminism (also called the women's liberation movement) that fought tirelessly for women to be given the tools they would need to live on their own (perhaps with children to support) after a marriage break-up. And when all of that was accomplished, feminism fought for income equality between men and women. It hasn't quite happened yet, but women who are not married or who were formerly married have indeed made great strides in this regard and are now a force to be reckoned with when it comes to money matters.

Feminism has also given us a vocabulary to criticize the bad old days. Marriage used to be a prison, we are told, and a married woman was basically a slave -- and perhaps a prostitute to boot! In exchange for sexual favors, she got a roof over her head and a degree of security and some support for the children born of her sexual union with her husband, a union that may well have been most unwelcome to her. Women's liberation therefore enabled women to escape from prison, or from Henrik Ibsen's "Doll's House." I do not agree with this analysis of marriage conditions in earlier centuries, but such a summary recital of how things used to be lives in the popular consciousness. And so people are inclined to think: the state of marriage is far from ideal just now, but at least it's a lot better than what it used to be when women were slaves.

There you have the notion of freedom and liberation again. If such a thing as marriage is to be allowed to survive at all -- and there are some who maintain that in the final analysis you can never give away your freedom, which means that there can be no marriage in any strict sense of the term -- it must be on radically altered terms. It is such thinking that gives enormous credence to the notion of marriage as a voluntary union. You enter it with the intention of staying within it your entire life. You try to be sincere in making your promise. But you know that if things get rough, you can divorce the bum and live on your own again. Gradually our belief in marriage turned into a belief in serial monogamy.

This trend developed gradually, and many commentators have given expression to it. Among them is Jessie Bernard, who wrote quite some years ago:

The whole trend in current social life is in the direction of demands for laissez faire in personal relationships. The issues that do arise will be in the direction of making divorce as non-traumatic as possible for partners and for children. The idea of forcing people to remain together is repugnant to the present world view. [NOTE bernard]

Laissez faire is the key to economic life in the prosperous Western world: the choices of individuals create the economic system and keep it moving ahead, determining the prices of stocks, of houses, and so forth. The Communists tried controlling the economy by dictation from above, but it didn't work. The Western economic system rejects top-down control: under the laissez faire approach, our economy is controlled by millions of little decisions, which cannot be corralled or contained by institutions issuing general regulations. And it's no different when it comes to matters of the heart -- such is the "world view" of which Bernard speaks. You can talk about "morals" all you like, but in the end people will follow their inner promptings.

A prominent actress during my youth (her name need not be mentioned here, but you might well figure it out) used to get criticized for her "morals," or rather, her lack of them. It appeared that she could not stick to just one man, the way she was supposed to: instead she adopted the laissez faire approach in her personal life. But unlike certain actresses of our time, she did not quietly flit from the one to the other, while trying to keep the journalists at bay, maintaining that her private life was her own business. No, the actress I have in mind insisted on marrying each man she slept with -- such, at least, is what we used to read about her romantic career. Did that make her a slut? She was indeed considered less-than-virtuous by many leaders who used to set the tone in such matters. But today we are inclined to look back on her marital career with a measure of respect and sympathy. She believed that sexual union belonged within marriage. But she also believed that marriage, as a voluntary union, was bounded by an ethical framework that we might call serial monogamy. You are supposed to be faithful to your man. You marry them one at a time. And if you do fall into marital unfaithfulness, you need to rectify the situation by divorcing the man to whom you are currently married and appearing before the preacher with the man with whom you have fallen in love. Keep it legal. Or, in parlance that also harks back to my youth: press him, i.e. your lover, to make an honest woman of you!

So what is marriage nowadays? Some might say that it's a perpetually renewing contract. Many professors with tenure (I am among them) need to get reappointed every so many years (six in my case). You might wonder: if such professors are in for life, like the Pope, why do they have to be reappointed? A good question. The reappointment procedure may have some other name, such as "tenure review," but that's basically what it comes to -- reappointment.

We normally do not set such terms for marriage, but the possibility of periodic review, with the threat that the implicit contract might not be renewed if there is some dissatisfaction with the level of service being received, is always in the picture. Husbands must therefore consider themselves forewarned. Remember, men, your wife might well be hearing from her friends: "I wouldn't put up with that -- throw the bum out!" Nowadays, a marriage is a voluntary union. It lasts as long as it lasts. [END]

NOTES

NOTE bernard
"Not News, But New Ideas," in Divorce and After, ed. Paul Bohannan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1970), p. 25.

NOTE ehrenreich
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1983), p. 1.

NOTE luther-1
See Martin Luther, "The Estate of Marriage" (1522), trans. Walther I. Brandt. Online:www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/History/teaching/protref/women/WR0913.htm

NOTE luther-2
Luther, same source.

NOTE newey
See "Jeremy Taylor and the Theology of Marriage," published in Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2002. Online findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_200204/ai_n9069722

NOTE paul
See Pamela Paul, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (New York: Villard Books, 2002). We read: "Some people still use the expressions 'training marriage,' 'practice marriage,' or 'icebreaker marriage'; others prefer the generic umbrella 'first marriage.' This book will use the somewhat uncomfortable and imperfect term 'starter marriage' when refering to this brief, twentysomething take on matrimony. Whatever they're called, these are marriages -- in every sense except 'till death do us part.'" [page 5]

NOTE protectorate
"The Protectorate" is a period in British history (1653-59) when Oliver Cromwell ruled the roost, being succeeded for a brief time after his death by his son Richard.

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Essay 4: A Voluntary Union?

NOTES

Essay 4:
A Voluntary Union?