The Problem of Marriage

So what is it these days, with the divorce rate?

According to enrichment journal on the divorce rate in America:
For first marriages the divorce rate is 41%
For second marriages it’s 60%
For third marriages it’s 73%

You’d think they’d learn. Wait a minute...what am I thinking… these are human beings we’re talking about.

Snide remarks aside, looking at these statistics, you have to wonder; do these people really want to be married or do they just like weddings? Or do they just have some vague piece of glitchy preschool programming that compels them to marry when deep down they are simply not cut out for it? And (considering the high divorce rate) how many of us are really cut out for it?

Marriage as an institution cannot be ignored; every known culture has some form of legalized marriage proceeding, whether it involves banana leaves and a goat or lots of cake and a ring. Anthropologists have had many bitter and book throwing bitch-fights over the attempt to find a universal explanation for why human beings marry each other. The one who summed it up most neatly was Kathleen Gough who defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners." Later, she modified this to "a woman and one or more other persons."  Because… you know… people are weird and complicated.

A look at the marriage traditions of various cultures over the ages seems to bear her theory out to some extent. Marriage arrangements historically, appear primarily to have involved making sure your children were your children. It didn’t pay to be bringing up someone else’s brats in the bad old days of bloody hard work and nothing but a donkey to show for it. Without paternity tests at their disposal, no one knew what those lusty hussies were getting up to behind the cow shed while their virtuous men toiled in the wheat fields. So, it became a common (if euphemized) practice to “buy the rights” to a woman’s body (*cough* uterus) with some kind of offering to her family (goats) or to give the husband exclusive sexual access to her in exchange for financial support. In effect, marriage was all about buying secure breeding real estate.

This observation is strongly supported by the fact that adultery was universally seen as a gross violation of marriage terms, but only when performed with or by a woman. In Greco-Roman culture, it was not considered at all criminal for husbands to indulge themselves with pretty handmaidens or slaves, but being caught in flagrante with a married woman would lead to a whole world of trouble. This nonchalantly self-important quote attributed to Demosthenes gives some insight;

"We keep mistresses for our pleasures, concubines for constant attendance, and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be our faithful housekeepers. Yet, because of the wrong done to the husband only, the Athenian lawgiver Solon allowed any man to kill an adulterer whom he had taken in the act”. (Plutarch, Solon)

Coming forward in time, we see that many cultures started to lock women into their function as submissive breeding heifers by progressively diminishing their social status. Two telling examples are the Chinese tradition of foot binding which impeded women from leaving their homes, making them largely useless for anything but bearing children, and the Victorian ideal of the submissive, domesticated wife, denied higher education and presumed too hare-brained to vote. This deliciously draconian quote from Queen Vicky illustrates the attitude of the day;

"I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection."

Well we’ve certainly come a long way. Nowadays no one tries to tell women what to do anymore… not twice anyway. They can don pencil skirts, look svelte, crack the corporate whip and marry whoever they like; and as much as they might want to, they certainly no longer need to be married – especially not on anybody else’s terms. Women these days have choices, and they’re using them.

A quick Google for statistics shows:

From 1975 to 1988 in the US, in families with children present, wives file for divorce in approximately two-thirds of cases.

In 1988, 65% of divorces were filed by women.

(The National Center for Health Statistics)

Among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%.

(American Law and Economics Review)

From these statistics we can deduce that marriage works a lot better for men that it does for women (I’m guessing that was true five hundred years ago too). They also suggest that more educated (independent) women are less likely to stay married. Evidently, the low divorce rate of yester-year had precious little to do with good Christian, Hindu or Pagan fidelity and a whole hell of a lot to do with having options.

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine our motives for a moment and think about whether lifelong institutionalization of our romantic partnerships is still a relevant choice. Yes, we are social beings. We like to live with others. We like to have children and cuddle and talk. We like falling in love, staying in love and making contracts to run our relationships by. Over some two thousand years, marriage has become our norm, our expectation and our final rite of passage into adulthood; but let us not fail to acknowledge that in these days of radical technological, social and personal change, ‘til death do us part’ might be a little much.

In 2007 Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) party candidate Gabriele Pauli, proposed that marriage contracts become subject to active renewal after seven years or be terminated. She was ridiculed and rejected by the German public. Federal food and agriculture minister Horst Seehofer, called her idea absurd, adding; "We are not in a circus; with ideas like that, she should give up her candidacy." Granted, it’s a kooky sounding arrangement, but it is also a forward-thinking and elegant solution to the 45% German divorce rate. While Pauli’s chief objective seems to have been saving people the probable expenses, from a personal point of view, her proposal would have provided a baseline from which one would have been able to engage in marriage by continual choice (and anyone who’s been there knows that those choices can change). One might argue that the more sensible option is not to marry at all, but as long as there are little girls who dream of walking down the aisle in tasteless white dresses (and lots of cake and a ring) marriage will be with us. The “seven year contract” model allows for re-assessment of what ‘for better or worse’ really means to us by adjusting the rigid structure of marital vows to one that accommodates the reality of our ever changing lives and our ever changing relationships.

Incidentally, Ms Pauli’s principal adversary, Seehofer, later came under pressure to surrender his own candidacy after it was publicized that the married father of three had impregnated his (much younger) girlfriend. (Just sayin’).

Seven year contract or not, with the financial, sexual and social independence; high powered jobs, crèches and 4x4’s that women now enjoy, there is a new mode of existence that no longer fits into the antiquated cast of happily ever after. The critical requirement for a long term support partnerships is gone; drifted off into history along with the job you started at 18 and left at 60, shoe fashions that stayed in vogue for fifty years and living in the house your dad built with his own hands. Once the pheromones have cleared, we may come to a place where we realize that it would be a healthier option to acknowledge marriage as a quaint but outdated custom that some engage in by choice, rather than a norm that we repeatedly fail to succeed at because it no longer fits the animal we’ve become.