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The Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Book of Marriage undertakes to provide an overview of one of the greatest human institutions at a time when its future is uncertain. This year, for the first time, fewer than 25 percent of American households consist of a married couple and their children. (Admittedly, the significance of this census finding is disputed.) The number of single-parent households and unmarried couples is increasing. Changes in social, religious, and sexual standards are undermining the traditional belief that marriage is a lifetime commitment. The divorce rate is appallingly high and multiple divorces increasingly frequent, with well-documented severe consequences to an ever larger number of children.

Dana Mack and David Blankenhorn intend The Book of Marriage to provide an alternative to inadequate college-level textbooks and marriage-preparation literature which, they say, are intellectually weak, noncommittal on the value of marriage in contemporary society, and rarely address marriage in its cultural, historical, and spiritual dimensions. Their aim is to celebrate the “diversity and essential humanity of the marital experience in a way that is accessible, entertaining, and useful.” The editors are not neutral on the value of marriage. By drawing on readings from a wide range of world literature and thought, they hope to convey a sense of the great historical, social, and cultural import of marriage and want their readers to come away from the book understanding that “in marrying, [people] are doing something really big.”

To organize the vast array of material needed for this overview, the editors divide the anthology into ten chapters, each asking a big question about a particular aspect of marriage and each presenting a rich collection of readings by novelists, theologians, sociologists, poets, anthropologists, philosophers, and others. The questions asked include: Why get married at all? What are we promising? What about when we fight? What about divorce? Can love last a lifetime? The spectrum of perspectives ranges from Greek drama to Shakespeare to Tolstoy; from St. Paul to Aquinas, Luther, and Maimonides; from Milton to Bill Cosby. Among the many gems are selections from Chinese and Japanese literature, the Mahabharata , and various traditions of Western Scripture and theology.

At the end of their introduction, Mack and Blankenhorn write that “it is our firm belief that a successful marriage is in a real sense the finishing school of civic education. Through marriage, after all, we can learn the true meaning of community, of tolerance, of mutual understanding, of responsibility, and of spiritual cultivation”all of the things that make for the kind of society in which the good life is accessible to all.” This is an admirable summary of what they have attempted to convey in the readings they have chosen, and to a large extent they have succeeded. However, they have made a serious mistake in their choice of a subtitle for the book: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions . The book has been organized around a series of questions, but for the most part the readings do not”and do not intend to”answer them. There is a wealth of imaginative literature here, all of which offers wise, sometimes witty, sometimes profound observations, illuminating images and metaphors, and material for reflection, but never answers. The book’s many impressive essays that address the philosophic, cultural, and historic bases of marriage don’t provide answers either. Rather than offering solutions, the writers collected in the book explore such issues as loving marriages as the basis of a healthy civic life (Martin Bucer), the subjugation of women, gender inequalities and possible reforms (John Stuart Mill, G. B. Shaw), marriage as a private contract (John Locke), the obligations of the marital promise (Erasmus), and the origins and fundamental elements of marriage (Edward Westermarck). Certain of the theological and scriptural passages do give answers”and instructions”but many of these seem legalistic, dry, and barren. They may once have served to develop and preserve a framework that bolsters marriage as a social and religious ideal; today they are interesting only as relics.

The closest thing to real answers comes in the contributions of the research-based sociologists who write with authority on the subjects they have studied. Essays such as John Gottman’s “Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” Judith Wallerstein’s writing on divorce and good marriages, and Erik Erikson’s reports of his work with the elderly are filled with fascinating facts and testimony that bear the stamp of the passionate involvement the subject demands. There’s no arguing with the evidence, and though readers may want to question some of the conclusions, these authors are very persuasive. Wallerstein in particular”with her lively and learned perspective on divorce (especially its effects on children) and good marriages”is one of the stars of this collection.

An additional weakness in the collection arises from an omission. In their introduction, the editors list “the big questions of marriage”questions relating to the nature of marital love, to sexual fulfillment, to money management, gender roles, child rearing, mixed marriage, marital conflict, the death of a spouse, divorce.” With one notable exception, each of these questions is explored in one of the ten chapters of the book. The exception is “sexual fulfillment.” “Yes, yes,” the editors might say, “the importance of that subject goes without saying.” Well, it doesn’t. The importance of all the other big questions might go without saying too, but it doesn’t. It is certainly stated in almost every one of the nonliterary selections in the book that sex, in one way or another, forms the basis of marriage. In many passages it is identified as “conjugal duty,” in others it exists solely as the means of procreation. It is a duty, a complicating factor, a danger, a pleasure. Passion is usually relegated to the immature and impulsive, as in the “passionate sexual union of youthful romance.”

Contributors who do turn their attention to the importance of sex in marriage recognize it as a constant presence in the marriage relation that enhances the spiritual connection between partners. My husband laughed when I told him that the sexiest reading in the book was the passage in the Odyssey when Odysseus returns home after twenty years. To assure herself that this is indeed her husband Penelope devises a test of his identity that brilliantly reveals the secret life of marriage in its solidarity, sexual attachment, understanding, friendship, and shared traditions and habits that are known only to the partners. Literature is filled with comparable fine descriptions and recreations of sexual encounters that are in no way unseemly or inappropriate to the purposes of a book like this one. A straightforward and thoughtful exploration of the place of this wonderful human faculty in married life and in the institution of marriage would have been quite appropriate.

I do not think the editors of this volume are prudish, but in their earnest efforts to emphasize the social, theological, and historical aspects of the cultural institution of marriage they have needlessly downplayed the aspect of marriage that has the greatest power to nourish or destroy it. Reflections of thoughtful and knowledgeable experts in this field would have been as welcome as they are in the other areas that the book addresses.

The concluding chapter”“Will We Grow Old Together?””comes closest to illustrating the strength of the sexual bond in marriage. Erik Erikson, in a fascinating and moving section from his study “The Voices of our Informants,” quotes from interviews with elderly people about their experiences with marriage, divorce, losing a loved one, and remarriage. One widow recalls “earlier sensuality [that] seems to serve as a source of happiness as it brings to life intimate experience that has been missed for many years.” Other people mention as particularly significant “the intimacy that has dominated their adult lives,” or the “spontaneous, affectionate physical contact that is so much a part of old loving.” This whole section, which deals with illness and the death of spouses, with forced separation and widowhood, is a reflection on the indelible bond between long-married people, the permanent imprint of one person on another.

In the voices of people speaking to interviewers, as well as in the greatest works of imaginative literature, we hear the joy and pain of people who have experienced the inescapably intimate bond of marriage”a bond that engages people in the most private, vulnerable aspects of their being. This is true whether the marriage is good or bad, an arranged marriage or the impulsive act of a couple of sex-crazed teenagers. Marriage constantly exposes one’s self to that of another. The best selections in this excellent volume make us aware of this most remarkable aspect of a truly essential and irreplaceable human institution.

Molly Finn is a (long-married) writer living in New York City.

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In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim

Sun, 01 Jun 1997 00:00:00 -0400

The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim.
By Richard Pollak.
Simon & Schuster. 478 pages, $28.

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Mere Joy

Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child
By Michael Bérubé.
Pantheon, 284 pages, $24.

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Jeremiah in South Dakota

Sun, 01 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500

The Cloister Walk
by kathleen norris
riverhead books, 304 pages, $23.95

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Food for Thought - and Life

Wed, 01 Feb 1995 00:00:00 -0500

The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature By Leon R. Kass
Free Press. 248 pp. $24.95

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The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan

Sat, 01 Oct 1994 00:00:00 -0400

Some years ago, during a spell of back trouble, I spent half an hour being wheeled around an airport in a wheelchair. For a few minutes I was alone, parked in the wheelchair in a busy lobby. The few minutes were memorable because they gave me a glimpse into the world of people whose disabilities show, are there for all to see, to pity, to comment on, to ridicule. Almost everyone who walked by looked twice; many stared. With no excuse beyond curiosity, strangers addressed me, usually using loud voices and very simplified language that showed they assumed my difficulties were mental as well as physical. Indeed, I felt that if this were to continue, my mental difficulties would soon outweigh my physical ones as I tried to sort out which was the real me-the wretch in the wheelchair or the complicated, intelligent, sturdy, and resourceful person I knew myself to be.

I recalled this incident when I read The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan , an almost certainly autobiographical novel by Lionel Abrahams, a South African poet who was born with cerebral palsy. On the jacket of the book is a reproduction of a haunting portrait in oils, which I take to be a portrait of the author as an intense, brooding, bearded young man, arms crossed in his lap, one large hand seemingly relaxed, the other in a fist. The fist is also reproduced on the spine of the book. Is it a fist of anger and resentment stemming from a life filled with trials, misunderstanding, and prejudice? Is it a fist brought on by an uncontrollable muscle spasm? Is it a fist of determination, a symbol of the strength, the will of a man who learned to walk only after years of treatments, “miracle cures,” and striving and who, with a mixture of innocence, cleverness, and a little spite, got himself through a childhood spent mostly in a hospital that sounds like an English boarding school, complete with bullying, betrayal, and anti-Semitism?

None of the questions raised by this powerful little book has an easy answer. In the matter of the fist, the answer to all three questions is probably “yes.” The author is a poet, with a poet’s ability to compress, to make symbols and images, to intermingle all the aspects of a subject into a web that can’t be untangled. The title of the book is an ironic comment on the way Felix’s life has been affected (or determined or definitively shaped or distorted or limited) by his physical handicap. Felix has definitely not chosen to be celibate. The book consists of seventeen named “stories” told by Felix in the third person. Each of them could stand alone as a meditation on some aspect of Felix’s life, but together they form a unified portrait of a remarkable sensibility. “Miracles” begins with Felix going home to be cured by an Australian lady doctor, “but the lady doctor did not cure him because she suddenly had to go back to Australia.” Next he went to “a German doctor called a quack,” then to “a clever specialist,” then to a faith healer. When he finally walked, he did it on his own. Walking down a street triumphant over his achievement, he heard someone say, “Aw, shame!” “What’s she saying shame for?” asked Felix. “I can walk.” “Yes, you can walk,” said his mother. “But don’t you realize, you’re still not normal?”

In “Perfection” Felix tries to learn to control the unruliness of both his body and his personality. He is plagued by seizures, by involuntary body movements, by his inability to walk. He is angry, with a violent temper. He hates the boys who bully him, “scared all the time, and ashamed of the things they despised him for (except being Jewish).” Into his life comes Skipper Ross, the “teacher of perfection,” who tells Felix, “You have to overcome the limitations of yourself and supersede your passions. That is the road to perfection.” Skipper’s mind-over-matter exercises and sermons inspire Felix to be constructive and focus on what he can do. But we see how deep this goes at the end of the chapter when Skipper tells Felix he has a “strong feeling that you are ready for something important” and gives Felix a day alone to figure out what it might be. “Something important . . . something wonderful,” Felix says to himself. “It could only be bodily perfection.”

In “Knowledge,” perhaps the central chapter of the book, Felix recognizes his vocation and is accepted by his beloved writing teacher Johan de Waal as a “novice of the creative brotherhood . . . endowed with wings with which to soar above whatever made existence mundane, solemn, dull, ordinary.” Feeling liberated from the shackles of his physical handicap, Felix’s ideal is no longer physical perfection. But gaining knowledge beyond the facts he learns from his encyclopedia introduces him to a distressing array of life’s complexities and ambiguities.

A problem, mordantly described in “Special Arrangements,” is caused by well-meaning efforts of others to make life easier for Felix that actually constitute ruinous meddling. Special arrangements of this kind derail his incipient love affairs. For years Felix lives in the possibility that one girl or another will take him as a lover, but one after another they turn to him for friendship and to others for love. Felix’s “Moment” finally comes when he is twenty-seven, an ecstasy in which “the scent of roses, the pleasure he took in the keenest lyrical poetry, came to his mind.” But “when his orgasm came . . . he tried to suppress the convulsions, the silly giggling, snorting, hooting that came from the nets and knots of his nerves and not from his will.”

The six celibate years that follow his brief love affair end when Felix goes to Europe with friends and decides that only prostitutes can help him out of “his personal emergency.” After many humiliating efforts, Felix finds someone who doesn’t refuse him and he even manages to bring some vibrancy into the sordid transaction. On his way home through a midnight Paris bursting with life, Felix eats a “vast scalding bowl” of onion soup and picks his way through the bustling markets “beyond all fear, exulting amid the fruits of the earth.”

Felix never comes to terms with his inability to find a lasting love or with the disparity between the self he knows and the person others see-but then, how many of us do come to terms with that? This dense, thoughtful, and, in the end, brilliant little novel sharply and movingly poses the question.

Molly Finn is a writer living in New York City.

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The Homesick Homeless

Sat, 01 May 1993 00:00:00 -0400

Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy
by jay tolson
simon & schuster, 544 pages, $27.50

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The Unfathomable Mystery of Autism

Sun, 01 Nov 1992 00:00:00 -0500

There’s a Boy In Here:
A Mother and Her Son Tell the Story of His Emergence from Autism
by Judy Barron and Sean Barron
Simon & Schuster, 264 pages, $20

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