Marriages That Outlast Love

It’s that mythical time again: June brides, wedding bells, perplexed grooms, and the promise of blissful lostness in a beloved’s arms forever. “Mythical” is surely the right word here. For one thing, people are getting married in the church pretty much anytime these days --- June, October, March, you name it. And for another, they are divorcing outside the church in just about the same numbers, no matter what the month is.

But I have been a minister for too long not to get caught up in hopeful thinking about marriage every time the month of June starts rolling in. So, “for better or for worse,” this and the next two columns are devoted to what we have come to and where we are going as a church and a society regarding support, and the lack of it, for marriage, family, and the human future.

Okay, “the human future” is a bit pretentious. A more modest approach will be to settle for thinking about marriage in the here and now, and about whether as an institution it can be made to function at least a little better than it has been functioning for quite some time. One good reason for going this route is that there is an especially trustworthy companion readily available to walk it with us.

One of my favorite historians of marriage and family life is Stephanie Coontz, currently a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. For years now, every time I have needed especially wise help in putting some of my thoughts on these subjects into a more coherent order, she has seemed to be right there, with new articles and sometimes even a new book. Lo and behold, she has done it again. Her newest book is Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. It’s a keeper.

One thing that Ms. Coontz does exceptionally well in this book is to document in easy to understand ways the massive changes in our Western understanding of marriage that have taken place over roughly the past two hundred years. Most basically, she writes, the changes revolve around replacing marriages arranged for economic and political purposes with marriages chosen on the basis of mutual affection and love. Eventually, “successful” marriages would focus almost exclusively on meeting the respective spouses’ emotional needs.

And therein, I offer, lies our fundamental difficulty sustaining the institution of marriage today. “As long as love lasts,” wedlock can indeed seem nothing less than a holy relationship. But according to present understanding, when love goes, then the relationship may have to go also. Some of our present-day My-Needs-Aren’t-Getting-Met marriages end in quiet, “no-fault” divorces. Others limp along in the form of unholy deadlocks, often including abuse, that are carefully shielded by closed doors. Still others morph into Wars-of-the-Roses litigation gleefully presided over by colluding lawyers whose sense of propriety and professional responsibility went the way of their first failed bar exams. 

For at least 5,000 years, Stephanie Coontz reminds us, people got married for reasons quite other than to experience sex-charged emotional intimacy. For the latter, they typically looked outside the marriage relationship. One important thing this means is that our current biggest idea about marriage --- that it is about two and only two peoples’ endless bliss --- is an idea bucking ideological currents far stronger than Western society and our churches may be willing to acknowledge.

The biggest single problem with the emotional intimacy model is that it undermines any realistic possibility of keeping a marriage bubbling when the sexual and emotional fizz dissipates, even though keeping it intact is still crucial to the well-being of others besides the disappointed and/or orgasm-less, bored, angry couple. Of course, according to the intimacy model, there are no others whose wants and needs have any relevance, children included; only those of the frustrated spouses count. But before the modern spirit of individualism went over to the dark side, almost everybody knew better.

Without a doubt, people both back yonder and today go too far when they make parental arrangement and/or approval a necessary condition for any marriage having validity in the eyes either of church or state. But they are right on target in insisting that being head over hills in love may be the least conducive state to be in for making decisions whose consequences inevitably last a lifetime, and maybe even longer. Is it time, then, to begin putting our collective weight more heavily behind “traditional” marriage values than we have been wont to do? As the next column will try to show, the correct answer to this question should come as no surprise: yes and no.