Marriage as Medicine
December 14, 2011
READING A REPORT by the National Marriage Project, which studies and promotes matrimony, is about as inspiring as reading a car manual. In its latest State of Our Unions report, the Marriage Project writes:
[Y]oung men and women need to understand that paths exist in society that allow for successful navigation through the contemporary challenges of marriage and parenthood. This report suggests that, for many young adults, the best path for forming and sustaining a family is a hybrid marriage that incorporates features from the newer soul-mate model with features from the older institutional model. Such a hybrid marriage allows today’s young men and women to forge a marital friendship that is more likely to be both generally happy as well as enduring, one that, over the long-term, benefits, adults and children and affords women and men the opportunity to live a life that feels ultimately meaningful.
Were Romeo and Juliet contenders for a “hybrid marriage?” Did Penelope and Odysseus follow the institutional or the soul-mate model? Despites its good intentions and sometimes illuminating statistics, the Marriage Project makes marriage as dry as a bone. I feel a wave of intense boredom at the opening of one of its reports, which are always and without fail highly depressing and leave the impression that marriage is as interesting as a visit to the accountant and as possible for the average man and woman as building a nuclear reactor in the backyard.
The Marriage Project consistently misses the main reason why people marry. That is, the desire for completion in the opposite sex. When the sexes are blurred, their distinct spheres melded, marriage loses meaning. Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew says more than volumes of marital satisfaction surveys:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor, both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And crave no other tribute at thy hands,
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt.
People marry, not because it’s healthy or good for them, but to attain something they cannot attain any other way. Marriage will never flourish in an androgynous world.
