This piece in the New York Times unwittingly takes a page out of John Locke’s reimagining of marriage in the Second Treatise. Consulting with social scientists and therapists (but no defenders of more or less traditional marriage), the author wonders if we might do better to formalize the impermanence of marriage, replacing “till death do us part” with renewable terms. If we don’t have unrealistic expectations, we’ll lower the total of unhappiness in the world.
If marriage is just another economic arrangement, just another contract, if it’s not overly freighted with our all-too-human expectations of fulfillment and contentment, then we can have a good time while it lasts, declare success, and move on.
As my mother (happily married for fifty-seven years) would say (though I can’t capture her tone in print), “my gosh!”
The lower the sights, the more dispensable the relationship, the less and less we’ll invest in it. Locke and the other classical liberals wished to found politics on what they regarded as a low, but solid, ground, over against the aspirations, especially, of classical political thought. Something is surely lost thereby–a vision of what political life could be at its best.
To be sure, Christians never invested in politics what the ancients seem to have. Our critique of lowering our sights in this way would in part be that the love husband and wife have for one another is an inkling of and response to God’s love for us; disregard that and you obscure the relationship between creature and Creator, you lose something of what it means to be human.
Of course, I’d still be free to harbor these “illusions” under the marital regime proposed here. My wife and I could presumably enter into the traditional contract if we so chose (as we did, and do). Others would be equally free to join us, or not.
Now, I can imagine someone responding to me that a pro-choice marital regime, with as many different forms of marriage as there are of mortgages (as Dr. Phil would say, “how’s that workin’ for ya?”) leaves room for my religious understanding without imposing it on everyone. So let me offer the following “secular” argument, from Alfred Lord Tennyson: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” There is something human that we lose when we tell people “authoritatively” through the state that marriage is for all intents and purposes a human relationship no different from any other. By using “realism” to deaden our aspirations, we make ourselves either less capable of relationships altogether or less capable or understanding and appreciating those into which we enter.
October 1st, 2012 | 10:04 am
Twenty years is a rather odd trial period. Five years I can understand – but you should know after five years. What would make someone say that he needs fifteen more years?
The whole idea makes little sense. If someone doesn’t like it after five years, let him divorce. Institutionalizing dysfunction is a bad idea, it will only encourage someone not to “give and hazard all he has”.
October 1st, 2012 | 12:04 pm
The marriage conract is now the easiest of contracts to dissolve. Maximilian is quite right; anyone can divorce for whatever reason. This has devalued marriage and because of the ease of divorce, we have what the authors propose in a practical way. The value of marriage has little to do with law. When we make a marriage in covenant, we are doing so without reference to the law.
How do we protect the others, those who marry without covenant. I don’t know that short contract marriage, presumably renewable, is the best answer. But cohabitation does essentially the same thing and without legal protection for the children produced by the couple.
Maybe this is about the perfidy of man. Let’s just outlaw that.
October 1st, 2012 | 12:43 pm
Another instance of the current craze to take any social arrangement and assign the name “marriage” to it.
What interests me the most here (and elsewhere) is not the wish to “define down” marriage, but the wish to “define up” failure. That is, the very modern (and very American) desire to eliminate failure from among the potential consequences of a given action: in this case, by defining it out of existence. It is hard to imagine, under a marriage regime described in the article, what set of circumstances would constitute a failed marriage.
America is a very forgiving culture, and risk abatement, in one form or another, is an important and attractive feature in many areas of endeavor, from America’s theoretical underpinnings (a la Locke) to the fields of finance, law and medicine. Marriage has been something of a hold-out in this regard, a remnant of an older understanding which admitted the possibility of failure and its painful consequence: personal and public disgrace. It stands to reason that a culture like ours, a culture of second and third chances, would eventually try to mitigate the onus of failure in marriage. It’s less clear whether marriage as an institution can persist in a robust way in the absence of strong social appreciations for the role of failure and disgrace.
I suppose we’re supposed to be forgiving of human frailty and all that. But if we’re truly interested in a revival of marriage, then we should be honest in accepting that it will entail a revival of this notion of failure, and the disgrace that follows. That means acknowedging the failure in self-knowledge and fortitude that leads two adults to end a marriage they have freely entered into; the failure on the part of parents when their grown children prove unable to sustain a marriage, or even to enter into one.
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