One of the curious things about marriage is the role it’s played in embedding commonly held views about normality. Married people are generally considered normal people. As such, they have possessed inordinate power to dictate the terms of normality in a way that single people rarely can. And yet marriage, clearly, isn’t for everyone. Plenty of people have no desire to do it. Plenty of others have done it and haven’t liked it. The stats only corroborate this. Fewer people over the years have been getting married, while the stresses and strains of lockdown in 2020 (along with the temporary closure of venues) saw divorces in England and Wales overtake weddings for the first time.
Not everyone, however, is taking marriage’s declining popularity lying down. At the recent National Conservatism conference, delegates were promised a national revival founded on “faith, family and flag”. Likewise, China has just proposed a list of measures to actively encourage its young women to marry and have children (and not just one child any more: three, ideally). This is a national policy, but it’s one with global benefits: to stem the threat of economic stagnation, growing the population is supposed to ensure the continuity of a huge, and therefore cheap, labour force. In other words, unless more Chinese women have more children, we’ll all have to pay more for our merch – with matrimony here (never mind that not everyone who marries has children and not everyone who has children gets married) still framed by national governments as the gateway to maternity first of all. Other countries may well follow China’s lead. In Japan, where they’ve just recorded a seventh consecutive year of declining birthrates, and fewer couplings, the government is accused of failing to act quickly enough to mitigate the effects of a rapidly ageing population.
Meanwhile, the US has its own history of turning marriage into a patriotic act, sometimes on economic grounds, at other times on racial ones. Paul Popenoe, for instance, founder of the American Institute of Family Relations and a big fan of Hitler and “applied eugenics”, opened his marriage counselling clinic in 1930 with the stated aim of saving the marriages of the “biologically superior” so as to save the race.
Sheesh. None of it sounds very romantic. Little wonder Chinese women, even when lured by financial incentives, don’t especially fancy saving global capitalism by means of marriage. Looking at the various ends to which marriage has been recruited, it’s tempting to conclude that marriage itself is nothing but a front for powerful interests that largely contradict those of marrying people themselves. Should we take it, then, that that’s all marriage was ever really about?
Marriage may not be for everyone, but, as a currently married person, I’ve been trying to make it suit me. That doesn’t mean I’ve found it easy (I haven’t), although I have found it gets easier over time. Still, I do occasionally wonder if it is marriage’s very success as an institution that has proven injurious to the lived experience of so many marriages. For if the norms marriage has helped to reproduce have been particularly pernicious for single people, they have not been too kind to couples either. As any psychoanalyst could tell you, when it comes to relationships, the invocation of the ideal tends to summon its own shadow. This is no less true of the spousal relation than it is of the parental one, where the ideal that none of us can live up to has the effect, very often, of inspiring cruel and abusive behaviour under that idealised cover.
So, could marriage’s fall from favour turn out to be a good thing for people who marry? When marriage ceases to be the cultural norm, new marriages – or new ways of being married – might be possible. Shorn of patriarchal expectations, marrying people could find they’re better able to talk about what it is they really want out of marriage, for example. And unmarrying people should be better able to unshackle themselves from the sense that everyone from their mother to HMRC disapproves of their relationship status. The marriage contract, when no longer functioning as a fig leaf for the wider social contract, could become the testing ground for other possibilities – such as different ideas about how to inhabit a shared planet.
After all, if marriage is currently being made essential to the international market of cheap goods across the world, that isn’t very good for the world. The economic system being “saved” here is one that exploits marriage’s lifelong promise and commitment to create a culture that’s short-termist in every other way. Taken at its own word, marriage’s time signature is incompatible with many of the systems to have hitched their rides to it. Whereas, if you de-normalise marriage, something more experimental emerges.
Arguably, this has been going on since at least the late 18th century. The rise of the love match, if you think about it even for a moment, is nothing if not radical. You meet someone – whether through family or friends, or on holiday, or on a bus, or online – and hey, before you know it, you’re promising to spend the rest of your lives together. How on earth is that normal? It’s hardly surprising so many marriages don’t work. What’s remarkable is that so many do – some of them even happily. How?
Tolstoy famously found happy families alike and only the miserable ones interesting. And it does seem that he and Sofia Tolstoy had perfected the art of being deeply unhappy together in their own way. Yet unhappy marriages, as I see it, are more likely to give their game away than the happy ones, which always retain an aura of mystery. What I usually suspect of the happily married couple is that they’ve donned a cover of marital normality as a licence to withdraw from the very world that urged them into it. And I also suspect of the happy couple that, when they do step into their marriage, it isn’t merely to reproduce that world – it’s to reimagine it. However unfashionable it may be, therefore, the long term of marriage is likely to remain forever topical because marriage is one possible model (one – not the only one) for the sort of creativity and tenacious solidarity that’s surely required if we’re to face our unknown future together – for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse.
Devorah Baum is associate professor of English literature at the University of Southampton and the author of On Marriage