The Myth of Marriage
by Monica Mehta, AlterNet.org
A radical new book debunks the concept of marriage as a time-honored institution, and argues that we need to loosen up about it.
The institution of traditional marriage is in a state of crisis.
There's
a misstatement in that sentence. But it's not that marriage is in
crisis. It's that the institution of marriage is, or was at any time,
traditional. As Stephanie Coontz reveals in her new book, Marriage, A
History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage,
human unions have gone through a number of evolutions. We would be
remiss to think that it was ever a stable institution. Instead, it has
always been in flux….
Coontz describes her thesis:
The
basic argument for this book is that what we think of as the
traditional marriage – the marriage based on love, and for the purpose
of making peoples' individual lives better – this was not the purpose
of marriage for thousands of years. Instead, marriage was about
acquiring in-laws, jockeying for political and economic advantage, and
building the family labor force. It was only 200 years ago that people
began to believe that young people could choose their own mates, and
should choose their own mates on the basis of something like love,
which had formerly been considered a tremendous threat to marriage. As
soon as people began to do that, all of the demands that we now think
of as radical new demands – from the demand for divorce, to the right
to refuse a shotgun marriage, to even recognition of same-sex relations
– were immediately raised.
But it
was not until the last 30 years that people began to actually act on
the new ideals for beloved marriage. Social conservatives say that
there has been a crisis in the last 30 years, and I agree with them,
that marriage has been tremendously weakened as an institution. It's
lost its former monopoly over organizing sexuality, male-female
relations, political social and economic rights, and personal
legitimacy. Where I disagree with them, is in how to evaluate that
change and its consequences. I agree that it poses tremendous
challenges to us, the breakdown of this monopoly of marriage, but I
disagree with the idea that one could make marriage better by trying to
shoehorn everyone back into the older forms of marriage. Because the
main things that have weakened marriage as an institution are the same
things that have strengthened marriage as a relationship. Because
marriage is now more optional, because for the first time ever, men and
women have equal rights in marriage and outside it. Because women have
economic independence. This means that you can negotiate a marriage,
and make it more flexible and individualized than ever before. So a
marriage when it works is better for people, it's fairer, it's more
satisfying, it's more loving and fulfilling than ever before in history.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
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