Revisiting “Traditional” Marriages

The call for a return to “traditional” family values comes at us from all sides these days. The problem is that it is not easy to figure out just what the call means. Apparently, it does not include standing up for parental arrangement and dowries as essential conditions for a valid marriage, even though these have been regarded as such for a very long time, and still are so regarded in many quarters of the world. Nor does it include the insistence upon the marital bond as indissoluble and forever.

This latter reticence is especially surprising. For if there is anything still left of the church’s traditional expectations for marriage, one thing is the idea that you shouldn’t be able to get out of one very easily. And yet, traditionalist Christians seem to be doing as smooth a job of leaving marriages behind as everybody else in society is these days. One telling statistic is that the divorce rate for self-styled conservative evangelicals has become just about the same as for the population as a whole.

And a good percentage of these evangelicals are getting divorced after becoming, in their words, “born again.” Once, I had in my office a middle-aged man just back from a Promise Keepers’ Rally who regaled me with a story of his recent conversion experience, following the break-up of his fourth marriage. He wanted to know whether I would be disposed to conducting the service for his fifth. “Can you believe,” he asked me, “that I used to be committed to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out philosophy of marriage?” He became agitated when I told him that, no, I couldn’t believe it and that, no, I wouldn’t  preside over another wedding for him. 

Other once widely accepted ideas about marriage also are dropping out of traditionalists’ credos. One is that marriage should endow the partners with new wealth and status, either from parental bestowal at the beginning, or from lots of children put to work tilling and managing acquired lands and businesses. Another is that real men should keep their women at home, in order to shield them from the grime and grimness of the workaday world. And still another is that they should protect their innocent partners from the sordidness of sex by “doing it” with them strictly for the sake of producing offspring, while going outside for the physical satisfactions that all hard-driving men require and deserve.  

So what does it mean, then, to call for a return to traditional values, as far as marriage is concerned? Well, in the first place, it seems to mean something like re-affirming marriage as a heterosexual and not homosexual union. Second, it seems to mean --- uh, er, any other ideas? Okay, try this on for size: it means that the man must be the head of the household and that the woman must defer to her husband in all things. About the only people I know who think this is still viable are guys whose wives won’t let them in the house after the rallies that infected them with the notion in the first place.

The fact of the matter is that, with the possible exception of the heterosexual norm, there just aren’t many traditional ideas left that most thoughtful people come back to anymore when they talk about strengthening the marriage relationship. Conservatives are as easily convinced as liberals and everyone else is that in marriage, staying excited beats getting bored, feeling good trumps doing good, and ensuring freedom pays out better than encouraging responsibility. Because these convictions have become so rock solid to so many, to just that many divorce is now as handy an option as hanging in there used to be.

As for the repudiation of gay and lesbian marriage, the issue has become prominent and important enough to deserve more attention than I can give it here. For now, I will call attention only to the intensity of feeling that the issue generates, and note that it is an intensity clearly out of proportion to what is actually at stake. If every state were to remove the bans this very night, the number of ensuing marriages would be insufficient to prop up even the flimsiest slippery slope to perdition. On the other hand, if the states continue to move in the opposite direction, civil unions for gays and lesbians almost certainly will be approved more explicitly than they now are.

And yet, the shouting matches continue. Why? Because they afford at least some of the repudiators their last real hope that they are not in fact abandoning traditional values as they demand that their own marriages feel good or else. Taking a few whacks at gays and lesbians takes the onus off of dealing death-blows to marriages that with some work and a lot of prayer might be made better, more lasting, and even holy in God’s sight.

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.