By all means - Marry!

This was a piece I wrote for my son's wedding. I didn't end up giving it in this form, but I found it a very useful exercise, to look at my hostility to marriage, and to help me see social institutions, like marriage, as a lot more flexible than I had realised - a handy idea for a sociologist!


Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. At the moment, about a third of Australian marriages end in divorce, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 46% of all 1999 marriages will eventually end in divorce. Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that marriage as an institution favours men – married men enjoy better physical health and greater life expectancy, earn more on average, and suffer lower rates of depression, than single men, whereas single women have better physical and mental health, higher earnings, and greater longevity than married women. Even though women participate in the paid work force more than ever before, they are still doing most of the domestic labour. The 2001 HILDA survey revealed that partnered men estimated on average that they spent 25.5 hours per week on domestic and child care tasks, while partnered women estimated that they spent 44.4 hours per week on the same tasks. But it’s not only women who have a jaundiced view of marriage - you just need to look at some of the jokes about it:

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. Rodney Dangerfield.

I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste!

And then of course there’s the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Marriage is a great institution. But who wants to be institutionalised?

Well, lots of us in 21st century Australia, apparently. In 2001, the majority of the population over the age of 15 were married, and that was almost 6% more than at the beginning of the 20th century. Australian marriage rates are higher than in most European and Scandinavian countries, though lower than the US and Muslim and Asian nations. While it’s true that more and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – many end up marrying, and indeed, 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. And couples are generally waiting until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So marriage is alive and well in contemporary Australia. And while many heterosexual people are bypassing the institution altogether, and even more are leaving by the back door, through separation and divorce, gay and lesbian people are hammering on the front door, demanding to be allowed in.

I guess the thing about social institutions, even more than ones made from bricks and mortar, is that they are flexible, they’re able to change and adapt to people’s changing lifestyles, different values, and divergent attitudes and expectations. My partner is a lecturer at the Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland – it’s a delightful place, full of Federation-style buildings set in spacious grounds. Its facilities date from the opening of the Ipswich branch of the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum in 1878. Many of the surviving buildings have been heritage-listed, have been restored and are now used as teaching and library space, computer labs, and staff offices. An institution for the confinement of tortured souls has become a place of learning, growth, and opportunity for many young Queenslanders.

Marriage may once have been, and may still be, an oppressive institution for many women and men, a place of constraint, duty and obligation, of abandoned hopes and bitter disappointment. Yet we continue to turn to marriage as one of our highest ideals for relationship and human fulfilment, for mutual support and loving commitment. What continues to propel us there?
Plato’s Symposium is a philosophical discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a series of speeches, both satirical and serious, given by a group of men at a drinking party. Plato has the comic poet, Aristophanes, explain why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found their love partner. It is, he says, because in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels; there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the hermaphrodite, who was half man, half woman. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods, so Zeus decided to cripple them by chopping them in half. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. This is meant to explain why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
This kind of thinking is also reflected in the biblical account of the creation of human beings, where God took a rib from the first man as he slept, and made the first woman out of it, described as a ‘suitable helper’ for the man. Genesis goes on to say, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh’, and this has formed the major part of the wedding ceremony, and our understanding of marriage, for many centuries.
I think today, we both long for this ‘oneness’ with another human being, but at the same time we suspect it may not be possible, or perhaps even desirable – we don’t want to lose our unique identity, or give up the opportunity to grow and flourish as individual human beings. Perhaps the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has put this most eloquently.

You who are not and will never be mine are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you, because you are transcendent to me. But this not being I, not being me or mine, makes speech possible and necessary between us.

I will never be you, you will never be mine. A gap remains between me and you, between you and me. I will never be capable of perceiving you completely, and not even of loving you, or of speaking to you completely. Perceiving you does not involve losing me or you; my perception must remain a path towards you, towards us, an us which is always disunited, distanced, always a “two” irreducible to one. We can each become, the one for the other, a bridge towards a becoming which is yours, mine, and ours. I can be a bridge for you, as you can be one for me. This bridge can never become the property of either. What captures my attention can teach me how to sustain your becoming, how to approach you, how to dialogue with you. What moves me can give rise to praise, to grace, to admiration.

Irigaray seems to be saying, if we accept our difference, our inability to become ‘one’ then we can help each other to discover each other, to continue to learn about one another as we grow and progress through life, that we can continue to be surprised, delighted and yes, sometimes challenged, by each one’s journey of becoming. This is the journey that Julie and Joel have been on for some time, but which they have committed themselves to take in each other’s company today, to be that path towards each other, that bridge towards a becoming, which celebrates their difference and lovingly supports their flourishing as fully rounded human beings. As a mother, this has been my greatest hope for my kids, and it gives me more joy than I can say to see my son safely launched on this adventure of life with such a wonderful partner. May they continually be moved to praise, to grace, to admiration as they behold each other on their journeys of becoming.