By all means - marry!

This is the text of a presentation I gave at 'Politics in the Pub' at The Wickham on Tuesday April 28th, 2009.


Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. Look at the words we use: ‘bonds’ of matrimony, holy ‘wedlock’, ‘tie the knot’ – sounds more like an invitation to a dungeon party than a life commitment to loving mutual support!

And what about all the jokes:

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.

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.
The underlying hostility and just sheer misogyny in much of this so-called humour is hard to miss.

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, 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. Australians generally wait until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So getting married is alive and well in contemporary Australia.

However, pronounced cracks are appearing in the institution of marriage in this country. 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. More and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – and 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. Yet 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 think we should pause first and consider whether it’s a social institution that will genuinely enhance our relationships and our families.

Marriage as we now understand it came into being to safeguard men’s property and inheritance rights. A man needed to know who his “legitimate” offspring were in order to make sure his property went to his descendants, so that his line would be perpetuated. Thus he needed to know that he had exclusive sexual access to his female mate. However, it was generally accepted that his fidelity would be less strictly enforced. Addressing the issue of the “double standard” has meant that monogamy is now expected from males as well as females. How realistic this expectation actually is remains open to debate! The main point, however, is that marriage has historically been about property and dynastic alliances, for the upper and subsequently the middle classes – working class people often couldn’t afford to marry, and ‘de facto’ unions were commonplace (which is why they used to be known as ‘common law’ marriages). The average Australian wedding today costs around $45,000, and once again marriage is becoming a privilege reserved to the propertied classes.

Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that heterosexual 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. Statistics show that when a cohabiting heterosexual couple marry, the husband does less housework and the wife does more. Same couple, same home – but suddenly, different roles.

Marriage has been an oppressive institution for many women, but also for many 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?
In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes explains that 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. They offended Zeus who chopped them in half. Ever since that time, the poet says, people say they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature; this is why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
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. 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”.

Marriage is inimical to the process Irigaray describes. It fosters the illusion of security, of ownership, an assumption of intimacy and longevity unearned and taken for granted. The Judaeo-Christian tradition on which our laws and social institutions were founded promotes such a view. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians directs that the wife’s body belongs to her husband and the husband’s body belongs to his wife. It wasn’t until 1991 that the Australian High Court abolished a ruling that exempted any husband from being convicted of rape if his victim was his wife. “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife”, Genesis tells us, “and they will become one flesh”. But this one flesh was for all legal and practical purposes the flesh of the husband. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, upon marriage the husband and wife became one person under British law - the property of the wife was surrendered to her husband, and her legal identity ceased to exist.

Yes the law has changed, but I think this still illustrates the fundamental problem of marriage – that for it to work, one or both individual identities must be subsumed under the other’s identity, or some new joint identity. By its very nature it forecloses on personal growth, on taking individual responsibility for our flourishing as human beings. Too often one exploits the other, and the other becomes complicit in their own exploitation. Or both give up interests, dreams, possibilities for the sake of the relationship.

I would argue that marriage involves roles thousands of years old, roles in which we were raised, in which our parents were raised, in which almost everyone in our social networks were raised, roles that come with implicit expectations and assumptions that are often not even articulated. At least same-sex and poly partnerships offer the opportunity to interrogate and negotiate those roles; marriage threatens to lay the dead weight of tradition over the creative, complex and shifting ways we are learning to do intimacy and family.

We have a choice. We can go with the tired old traditions which no longer fit modern aspirations and lifestyles. We can settle for the same as everyone else, based on religious and legal principles that discriminate against us, exclude us, and even persecute us. Principles based on biological kinship and the protection of the interests of propertied white men. Or we can continue, as we have done up to this point, to show our society new ways to do intimate relationships, to do family. Relationships based on honesty and communication, the hard work of continuously negotiating and renegotiating our commitments to each other and to our children. Not the one-size-fits-all white shroud of a dying tradition, but the living, dynamic, risky, creative challenge of continually fashioning and refashioning the relationships that fit each one of us, in whatever combinations of individuals that we choose to have in our lives. Marriage is an illusion, a myth, truly a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Let’s commit ourselves to continually designing and creating new garments that are reflexive and responsive to the changing seasons of our lives and the unpredictability and idiosyncrasies of our growth and development as human beings.