MICHAEL S. writes:

I find the comments of the Marriage Project with regards to the new marriage norm very interesting. Over the pass several months I have discussed marriage with my girlfriend. In the process I expressed a desire to marry and start having children. In my mind, the next step after marriage is starting a family. I was born nine months and seven days after my parents were married and most of my friends are in the same boat. My girlfriend on the other hand, believes in the new marriage norm. Her desire is to marry, “enjoy” each other for 4 – 5 years and then begin a family. I never understood her viewpoint and quite frankly had not encountered it before. Consequently, I was quite surprised to read the report detailing the new marriage norm. Coming from a traditional family, my parents taught and demonstrated the importance of a family in all of life’s activities. My uncle and aunt decided to forgo having children. After staying married for 40+ years, they drifted apart, because as my father says, “They had nothing holding them together.” It seems marriage solely for sake of marriage is nihilistic and leads inevitably to unrealized expectations and a false sense of emotional engagement.

Laura writes:

Well said. You are so right.

                                          — Comments —

Fitzgerald writes:

Great piece on the modern, “capstone” marriage perspective. 

We’ve gone from fairy tales of happily ever after which were just that and understood to be stories of princes and princesses (elites I might add, not commoners) meeting and living happily ever after to a culture where it’s believed this is attainable and the norm by which marriage and human development should be compared. Not incidentally, this has fed the same-sex marriage debate and has deeply eroded what should have been a widespread revulsion ttoward it.  For too many people today marriage is viewed through the lens of this soaring, “capstone” marriage archetype. 

In America, and in the west in general, there are many forces pushing this forward: a post-elightenment mentalitity, an ersatz religiosity substituing the notions of a “capstone” marriage as the penultimate achievement to the point of an almost ecstatic state of bliss, Madison avenue, Hollywood, DeBeers (“a diamond is forever”), etc. Advertisers have learned that a heady narcissistic cocktail (really a form of emotional pornography) of these fairy tale notions can be used quite effectively to sell anything from cosmetics and jewelry to paper towels.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I belong to the Santa Monica High School Class of 1972. Of those in my ken who married shortly after high school, I presume in a state of excited infatuation, few remained married after a few years. Of my college acquaintances, those who married during or immediately after their undergraduate years – I presume once again in a state of excited infatuation – these too suffered a high rate of failed marriages. Without discounting a few cases where the bride was pregnant and the marriage was “the honorable thing” for the groom to do, most of these embroilments must have been based heavily on physical attraction and eagerness. I assume that eighteen-year-olds or even twenty-two-year-olds are riskily young for marriage, being not yet genuinely adult and having limited experience of life – from which I draw the conclusion that sexual romance, for which there has long been a large aggressive propaganda, is an unstable basis for marriage. 

I might remark, however, that the “capstone marriages” that I associate with those whom I knew in graduate school, where children were not really in prospect, and where each partner expected to bask in his own and the other’s professional glory, also tended to break down after a short while in divorce. (Someone, usually the woman, found a job in the scarce market, while someone else had to cobble employment here and there part-time, until resentment and disappointment undid the bond.) From this I draw the conclusion that celebrating one’s social arrival is as unstable a basis for marriage as sexual romance. 

The sexual-romance justification and the badge-of-arrival justification for marriage have something in common: They are both crassly materialistic. Romantic excitement reduces the partners to objects of sexual appetite and is dehumanizing in its limitations. (Romantic excitement is also inevitably self-limiting, likely in the short term.) The professional trophy-partners likewise reduce themselves to something less than persons – something whose value the husband and wife allow to be externally determined. (He or she remains “presentable” as a spouse only through the validation of professional office and the ever-increasing salary that finances those appurtenances that the fantasy requires.) It seems to me to follow from this, by a chain of associations if not by strict logic, that the idea of marriage is the most stable basis for marriage. Sadly, the idea of marriage has few public advocates. On the contrary, almost the only images of marriage to appear in public discourse or popular culture (TV, the movies) are those of sexual romance or badge-of-arrival. Judging by the magazines on display at the checkout counter of the supermarket, for example, young women in particular are the target audience of what I would call the pornography of bride-hood. And that is only the least of it.

Jesse Powell writes:

I recently watched Jane Fonda being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show. She talked about how her greatest regret in life was that she had never been fully in love with a man meaning that she had never been fully open and emotionally intimate with a man who was likewise fully open and emotionally intimate with her. She also talked about how a previous marriage of hers ended because she wanted to be vertical while he insisted on being horizontal, vertical meaning depth or intimate and horizontal meaning shallow and on the surface. Lots of psychobabble was thrown around in the interview as Jane Fonda struggled to describe her internal emotional states at various points in her life. 

What struck me in regards to the interview was that she had been married and divorced three times in her life and that while she recounted her life story there was no sense that her three divorces entailed any shame or any indication of personal failure; it was as if her marriages were simply a part of her life journey, her process of self-discovery, and that each husband had played his role in her life. She even praised one of her ex-husbands for cheating on her since after all that was a bad marriage and it had to end.

 Jane Fonda is a great believer in “companionate” and “soul mate” marriage.

In “institutional marriage” the primary purpose is to create a good home for the children; in “companionate marriage” the primary goal is to “secure companionship and love, pursue shared interests, and enjoy couple-centered activities.” In other words, the goal of “institutional marriage” is to contribute to society through the raising of children, the goal of “companionate marriage” is to contribute to another adult in a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch my back” fashion. The ideal of upholding the values and virtues of society through sacrificing oneself for the benefit of others is downgraded to mere self-aggrandizing pleasure seeking.

Joe writes:

From the Book of Common Prayer’s ancient rite of the Solemnization of Matrimony, here are the three Godly purposes of the institution:

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name. Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body. Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined.

Quite remarkable given your conversation, that it was once called “matrimony” (i.e., “estate motherhood”) and not “marriage.” Hell a horse and a cowboy could be married, I suppose. 

Laura writes:

The Catholic Church traditionally promulgated a hierarchy of ends for matrimony, with the procreation and upbringing of children as the first and primary end. However, Vatican II and then John Paull II radically redefined marriage and made personal fulfillment (or the “gift” of self as John Paul called it in his Theology of the Body) equally important.  

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