September 1, 2023
The title of David Brooks’s column on August 17, 2023, was “To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More than Career.” His column was inspired by a forthcoming book by Brad Wilcox titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Wilcox is a sociologist at the University of West Virginia and the Director of the National Marriage Project. Brooks quotes Wilcox as saying, “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared with peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.” Brooks also quotes a University of Chicago economist whose own study showed that “married people are 30 points happier than those who are unmarried.” There is no indication of what the “points” are, how they were arrived at, or, for that matter, what an economist knows about marriage.
The lesson that will be taken away from the column will most likely be that married people are happier than unmarried. But this is a lesson in reading carefully of the type I try to impress upon my students, for that is not what the wording actually says. The real comparison is not between the married and the unmarried but between the “very happily married” and a combined total of the unmarried and those who “are less than very happy” with their marriages.” Also, Brooks does not quote the subtitle, which states the purpose of marriage: to “forge strong families.” In short, we have a repackaging of the old conservative ideal of “traditional family values.” To which I say, okay, I grew up in the actual era of traditional family values, the 1950’s. What did I see around me, of my parents’ marriage and the marriages of my friends’ parents? Almost universally, marriages that were, to put it mildly, “less than very happy.” Not all of them were as spectacularly bad as my parents’ decades’-long screaming match, but I cannot recall anyone who seemed to be “very happily married.” Nor am I relying merely on childhood impressions that might be distorted by immaturity and misunderstanding. With one exception, the parents of my later relationships and marital partners were more or less miserable. How many “very happily married” people are there, and are they the exception that proves the rule?
Brooks’s column provoked over 1700 discussion board responses, and by far the greatest number of them were less than very happy with Brooks. Another lesson I try to convey to students is that critical thinking demands that you anticipate, and rebut in advance, challenges to your point of view. Granted that he only has the length of a short op-ed piece, but Brooks evades two objections he must surely have known would be raised about his advice to the young to put marriage before career, the main message of his piece. First, who is it that he thinks can afford to do that? Even a century ago, as you can see in old marriage-and-family comic strips like Gasoline Alley, young people put off marriage because they knew that you can’t live on love, and they did not yet have jobs good enough or secure enough to sustain a marriage. These days, especially since the 2008 meltdown, the economic insecurity of the middle class has greatly increased. I do not want to be condescending, but I cannot help but wonder whether Brooks knows what economic insecurity really feels like. Many young people—as was attested on the comments board—do not have the luxury of putting love before money. It is not a matter of choosing between a rich and satisfying career and marriage but of managing to pay the bills.
Second, Brooks seems unaware of the situation of women. There is not much excuse for this, since Harriet Taylor Mill recognized it in The Enfranchisement of Women—in 1851. Like her husband John Stuart Mill, in his more famous The Subjection of Women in 1869, Taylor Mill insisted on equality within marriage. But she saw the implication: women would have to work. Women have to be able to leave marriages that are dysfunctional or abusive, or in which people simply fall out of love. They have to be potentially independent, and that means a career of one’s own, not just a small job, relatively unskilled, to supplement the income of the male breadwinner. Even if the husband is not abusive, he may simply walk out of the marriage, leaving the woman saddled with children and no way to sustain herself other than alimony, which is inadequate and temporary, and with no job skills or employment history. More than one woman posted disillusioned comments on the discussion board saying that marriage benefits men—but not women. Several pointed out that Brooks himself left a prior marriage for someone 23 years his junior. I am absolutely not judging this—I have no idea of the circumstances. But when men grow tired of a marriage, they are able to break free and marry again in a way that is much more difficult for women. Tillie Olsen’s famous story “I Stand Here Ironing” is the monologue of a single mother in a marriage that the husband simply deserted. It was inspired by the plight of a friend of the author. Social services threatened to take away the friend’s children because the friend had a stay-over boyfriend. Yet the woman could not leave the children to be with the boyfriend, so the demand was that she martyr herself for the sake of the children.
Even if women do have their own careers, the problem of combining two careers with parenting remains. In the United States, at least, this problem has not been remotely solved. Middle class households do not have servants; daycare is unacceptable; nannies cost money, even part-time. Grandparents are recruited, but usually cannot take on full-time childcare for the 40 hours of a work week. Some wax nostalgic about the old extended family, in which grandma lived with the married couple and cared for children, but nowadays it is more commonly grandma herself that needs care along with the children.
So far, this newsletter has not had much to do with the imagination, except perhaps in the negative sense that marriage has become problematic because of a striking lack of imagination in our society. I am neither a historian nor a social scientist, but Brooks himself at one point counsels young people to learn from literature: “Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters.” Given that he refers to two women authors, “masters” is not the right term, but what Brooks clearly means is that you may learn who not to marry, a good thing to know, to be sure. Do not naively marry a scholarly quack, as Dorothea Brook does in Eliot’s Middlemarch, or an empty-headed temptress, as Dr. Lydgate does in the same novel. Do not marry a refined aesthete who is really a con artist, as Isabel Archer does in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Refuse to settle for the least idiotic of a whole raft of male idiots, simply because of social pressure to marry, as Merida refuses in Pixar’s Brave. Go see Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which “should” by fairy tale logic end happily ever after at the halfway point, but which continues and shows Prince Charming become a philanderer. Of course, Pixar and Sondheim could be among the “elites” we are not supposed to listen to. Yet another irony is that Brooks cites George Eliot, who, in real life, never married, yet lived in a very happy unmarried relationship with George Henry Lewes. I am not trying to score points off of Brooks, a kind of critical behavior I despise. I think there is something genuine at the heart of his esteem of marriage, and would only like to clarify what it is without falling back on oversimplifications and evasions.
Is marriage a human universal? The answer to that question depends on how we define marriage. I am not a zoologist either, but there seems to be a rough three-way division among the larger animals. In some species, there is mating, but no bonding: the male impregnates the female but then disappears, so that the mother raises the offspring alone, as with groundhogs and raccoons. Other, more social species live in bands or tribes in which males compete and fight for both females and food, as chimpanzees do. But a third type of species has developed towards monogamy, which puzzles researchers, as it seems to break the rule that males profit by spreading their genes as widely as possible. The closer a species moves towards monogamy, the more likely it becomes that the male starts to take on the role of father, helping raise the offspring and also protect them from infanticide. What strikes this layperson is that the second type is characterized by the kind of male behavior we now call “toxic”—and that this kind of organization is idealized and imitated by male reactionaries, their inevitable example and role model being the baboon band with its “alpha male.” But in the monogamous type, males are more likely to help with childcare, and are also less aggressive, since they are not trying to fight for dominance and mate with as many females as possible.
The kind of evolutionary psychology and pop journalism that tries to extrapolate from animal behavior to human is highly speculative, not very empirical. But we do not have to rely on unproven assumptions about genetically wired behavior. As Aristotle pointed out, a primary human trait is mimesis, imitation. Human nature is very flexible, not bound by anything like animal instinct. What functions instead of instinct is imitation, the modeling of identity and behavior on what human beings observe around them. Human nature is not unitary: we have multiple needs and desires that often conflict, and I think the three kinds of animal behavior have been used, from ancient times to the present, to model three patterns of behavior driven by three kinds of desire. In other words, marriage is not “natural” but constructed, and what constructs it is the imagination, which may use natural mating patterns as models.
Evolutionary psychology started contending decades ago that men have a tendency to wander, to be unfaithful in relationships, because spreading one’s genes as widely as possible increases their probability of survival, whereas women value faithfulness because of concerns for care of the offspring. Again, no real proof that these traits are inborn—what the psychologists are really doing is looking at cultural tendencies that go back to some basic human desires. We do not need to postulate any genetic determinism, only a few insights that are really just common sense. The impulse to wander, to be free-range, is a yearning to be released from the cares and responsibilities that tie us down, relationships being only one kind of tie. Walt Whitman expressed it in “Song of the Open Road”: “Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me.” All the road trip novels and films, including Kerouac’s On the Road and Easy Rider, are, ahem, driven by the same restlessness, a restlessness as old as the Odyssey, whose hero Odysseus was the first version of the sailor with a girl in every port. There are hundreds of blues songs about hopping a train and riding the rails out of town, leaving the woman behind. Women have not been allowed to indulge this fantasy very much: when it happens, it is hedged about with irony, as with Thelma and Louise. Even without leaving town, men may get the itch to wander, and women, who are left holding the kid, have to be very careful. I teach an essay by Judith Ortiz Cofer called “A Partial Reminiscence of a Puerto Rican Childhood” in which the grandmother, matriarch of the family, teaches the young women to make sure that they get their man legally trapped with a license: “She believed that marriage was not something men desired, but simply the price they had to pay for the privilege of children and, of course, for what no decent (synonymous with ‘smart’) woman would give away for free” (102). As a cautionary tale, she tells the story of “Mária La Loca,” the crazy, who believed the promises of a rich man’s son, was left waiting at the church, had a nervous breakdown, and was never right in the head from that time.
A classic work of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), by Leslie Fiedler, argued that American literature has been incapable of portraying mature relationships between men and women, because the men flee what they see as the trap of domesticity, of being the henpecked husband in a woman-dominated household, and run off to have adventures, with homoerotic overtones, bonding with other males in the wilderness or at sea, where they can be independent, fierce individuals outside the feminine constraints of civilization with its laws and inhibiting politeness. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking flees ever farther Westward to escape the advance of gentility; Huck Finn lights out for the territories rather than be brought up by women to be a proper young man; there is not a single woman in all of Moby Dick. Fiedler, influenced by D.H. Lawrence, was profoundly intuitive. A married man is a trapped man, a tamed man. Hence the custom of the bachelor or stag party celebrating the groom-to-be’s last night of freedom to indulge in guy pleasures, represented by alcohol and strippers. But the Cofer anecdote makes clear that such an ambivalent attitude towards marriage is not exclusively American, although it may be exacerbated by the American myth of the rugged male individualist. Fearing marriage as a feminizing trap that produces the henpecked househusbands of the old sitcoms is a kind of toxic male parody of a more genuine ambivalence about loss of freedom in marriage.
Along with the freedom comes variety. Don Juan-style womanizing or “promiscuity” is partly macho belt-notching, racking up conquests, but there is often a genuine fascination with the inexhaustible richness of female difference. Everyone knows that a risk in marriage is the boredom of habitual sameness, leading to the temptation of affairs or at least one-night stands. In the earlier stages of women’s liberation, there was a push to achieve for women the same freedom for commitment-free sex. Erica Jong, in her novel Fear of Flying (1973), spoke of the “zipless fuck.” But, almost 50 years later, I still read of women’s ambivalence about hookup culture.
There have always been attempts to incorporate freedom and variety into marriage. Long before the sexual revolution, “open marriages” in which both members of a couple had other partners were commoner than was publicly admitted. American puritanism has always disapproved of the European custom of the “mistress,” and there seem to be conflicting attitudes even among the Europeans themselves. C.G. Jung had a lifelong relationship with both his wife Emma and his colleague Toni Wolff. Toni Wolff was not a “kept woman”: she was brilliant, with a career of her own; she and Emma were friends and even collaborated, and Emma is on record as fully approving of the situation. In a documentary about Jung, Matter of Heart, two people are interviewed about Jung’s relationship with Wolff, which lasted until Wolff died. One is a grandson who clearly struggles to contain his anger over the way he feels his grandmother was treated. The other is a European baroness, who, when told that some people would disapprove of a three-way relationship, raises an elegant eyebrow, smiles, and says, “Forgive me, but is that attitude not perhaps…American?” The interviewer adds, “And English.” These are not “swingers,” eccentric wife-swappers, but exceptional people customizing the basic marital set-up in a way that may not be of general application but which worked for them.
Only a subset of science fiction is about technology: one of its functions is to conduct literary thought experiments about alternative ways in which society might be structured. American puritanism notwithstanding, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) Robert Heinlein depicted and clearly advocated polygamous, more accurately polygynous, marriages, and it is now known that he did research on such an innovation, so to speak, in his first marriage. Another science fiction writer, Samuel R. Delany, in his later non-science fiction novels, has over time provided an eye-opening education for me about one kind of gay lifestyle, one that Delany’s numerous autobiographical writings make clear is not at all science fiction. Some gay men have, or at least had before the AIDS crisis, what conventionality would call a “promiscuous” lifestyle, with not just dozens but literally hundreds of sexual partners in a year, most of them relative strangers, taking sexual freedom about as far as it will go. Yet Delany is at pains to stress that this by no means rules out a lifelong committed relationship to one person. Delany himself has lived with a partner for many years: I was touched when he said in an interview that they fall asleep holding hands every night.
Reading Delany has made me leery of saying, “Such and such is basic human nature.” Reviewers of Heinlein were always confident that jealousy and possessiveness are inevitable, sometimes citing the famous scene in the Paul Mazursky film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) in which two couples try wife swapping but lose their nerve and end sitting forlornly together in the same bed: end of film. In Delany’s In the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), the protagonist, who lives in an imagined gay utopia, has an uncomfortable conversation with a lesbian from a woman’s colony who expresses the usual opinion that insecurity and possessiveness ruin attempts at open relationship. But Delany might argue that monogamy does not prevent insecurity and possessiveness—if anything, it exacerbates them. I am not making a pitch for open relationships, merely stressing, in a time when “polyamorous” has once again emerged as a lifestyle, that “monogamous couple” is a paradigm not based on biology or innate superiority. It is a social norm, because it is simple, secure, and stable—at a cost. Lest Delany’s lifestyle be dismissed as eccentric, neurotic, and self-destructive, I will add that, based on his writing, including interviews, and a documentary film about him, he seems to me genial, warm, responsible, and pretty much as free of neurosis as human beings get.
In the second type of animal behavior pattern, coupling takes place within a social context, that of a band or tribe structured by male competition for food and sex, winner take all. Unfortunately for those who would like to back up moral arguments for monogamy with the Bible, the world of the Old Testament was not monogamous, or at least not always. The most famous example is Abraham, who had a wife, Sara, and a concubine, Hagar. True, Hagar and her son Ishmael were driven out in favor of Sara and her son Isaac, but not because concubinage was considered immoral. Then there is Solomon. I always have to look up whether he had 700 wives and 300 concubines or 300 wives and 700 concubines, but the magic number is 1000. Despite the example of basketball superstar Wilt Chamberlin when I was young, who claimed to have slept with 20000 women, in Solomon’s case having possession of so many women was a symbol of status, as perhaps it was for Chamberlain as well. One Internet source, driven to desperate hair-splitting, says that while God allowed this, allowance is not the same as approval. But God only protested when one of the wives persuaded Solomon to build an altar to a pagan deity. Harems were a Middle Eastern commonplace, for the most part a way of flaunting one’s power and wealth, equivalent to Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht.
Nor was the Classical world monogamous, again for reasons of status rather than erotic desire. The whole plot of the Iliad turns on the competition of Achilles and Agamemnon for two women who are “war prizes,” captured enemy women who are bestowed as booty, no pun intended. The character Phoenix, who acted as a kind of nanny when Achilles was a child, got the job after fleeing the wrath of his own father, thereby learning the valuable lesson that thou shalt not sleep with thy father’s concubine—not because it is immoral but because she is your father’s. And Agamemnon did not help his case by bringing his war prize, Cassandra, into the house when he returned from the war, though Clytemnestra and her lover would no doubt have killed him anyway. All of this is flagrantly patriarchal, of course, as is, or was, Mormon polygamy in the United States. But long ago, before television shows like Big Love, I used to teach an essay in which some Mormon wives defended polygamy on the grounds that it creates a kind of extended-family situation that is a great help with childcare. In his utopia Pacific Edge (1990), Kim Stanley Robinson made a case for communal living, minus the patriarchy, that likewise addressed the problem of childcare for which the nuclear family setup has no good solution. In societies in which women are dependent on men for survival, which includes the world of the Old Testament, the custom of “levirate marriage” required or at least urged a brother to marry his deceased brother’s wife so that she and her children would be cared for. This led to a problem for a fellow named Onan (Gen. 38:8-10), who dutifully went in to his brother’s wife but who “spilled his seed upon the ground” because any offspring would not belong to him, for which God smote him. Onan’s contribution to Western civilization thus became one of adding an odd euphemism for masturbation, “onanism,” to the dictionary.
Marrying for love is a modern phenomenon. For most of history, in most cultures, choice of partner has been strictly circumscribed. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a dense and difficult book on the complex kinship patterns among clan-based peoples that may determine not only marriage eligibility but even the layout of a village; he also generated controversy by saying that women were treated as items of exchange in marriage. Whatever is true among such traditional people, women have been items of exchange, at least among the elite, for most of recorded history. Nothing has been commoner among nations and empires than to seal a political alliance by marrying off a sister or other relative—though it does not always produce the desired result. The Trojan War had been caused by Helen’s abandonment of her husband for the sake of Trojan Paris. In a clearly intended symmetry, the wars that dominate the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid are ignited by the political marriage of Aeneas to Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus of the Latins. But Lavinia had already been promised to Turnus, who becomes Aeneas’s arch-enemy, often speaking of him spitefully as a new Paris.
In some cultures, marriages are arranged to this day. If we go to the masters, as Brooks counsels, we find the plots of many comedies and novels turning on parental opposition to the marriage of young people. Young love triumphing despite the opposition of the senex, the old man who is usually the patriarchal father, is more or less the plot of the Roman New Comedy of Plautus and Terence, which was the model for Shakespeare and his fellow writers of comedies, the plot then coming down into the 18th and 19th century novel. Sometimes the senex is just on a power trip: the father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream insists that his daughter marry one young man rather than another apparently just because he can. Sometimes, in both literature and life, the father regarded the prospective husband as an upstart trying to get ahead by marrying upward. John Donne married Anne More in secret for this reason. When her father found out, he at first had Donne fired and thrown in jail, though the couple went on to sire 12 children, which is one kind of happy ending. But families did have to worry who a young woman married, because inheritance and estate went along with marriage. An imprudent marriage to a gambler or a rake could ruin the whole family. Or, if the family had no money, the daughter might be forced to marry to ensure the whole family’s financial security, the plot of one of the most ironically named novels of all time, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. It is also the plot of James Cameron’s Titanic, set in roughly the same time. Until interrupted by an iceberg, Kate Winslet was on her way to a loveless marriage to a rich man rather than cavorting below decks with penniless working-class Leonardo DiCaprio.
Somewhere around 1150 CE, a new kind of love was invented by the troubadour poets in southern France. We have reached the length of a newsletter and only now arrived at the phenomenon of romantic love. The nature of romantic love and its transformative effect on modern culture demands a newsletter in itself, which will follow next week. Of all the forms of love, romantic love, which idealizes and transfigures both the beloved and love itself, is most clearly a product of the imagination rather than nature. Does romantic love find its ultimate fulfilment in marriage? Or is its intensity and aspiration the very opposite of marriage, which grounds us in the everyday, in the common world? Does a culture of romantic love eventually become a culture of divorce?
All you need is love, the Beatles tell us. Is that because the word “love” encompasses the full spectrum of human needs and desires: erotic, companionate, social, romantic? Joseph Campbell did not believe that a world mythology was either possible or desirable. We have to create our own mythology, every one of us, out of universal symbols and mythic patterns yet forged into an individual shape. The same is true of marriage. Every marriage is unique to the couple who creates it and lives it. There is no perfect individual, and there is no perfect marriage. But that is okay, for, as Wallace Stevens said, the imperfect is our paradise.