Is marriage innate, and marriage fairy tales

Posted by Sappho on October 24th, 2005 filed in Marriage

First, there was Maggie Gallagher’s guest blogging stint at The Volokh Conspiracy, arguing against same-sex marriage (Dale Carpenter follows as guest blogger, arguing for same-sex marriage). And then there were lots of responses on other blogs. I’m rounding up a few of these, found via Eve Tushnet, Lauren of Feministe and Father Jim Tucker. Because I get bored with just repeating why I support same-sex marriage (go read Jonathan Rauch, he’s my marriage hero, and makes, to my mind, the best case, and you can find him arguing with Maggie Gallagher here), I’m picking quotes which prompted me to ask myself what I think about marriage in general, regardless of whether my answer leads anywhere really useful in the SSM debate.

We start with the question of whether a culture can lose the institution of marriage, or whether marriage is simply innate and will always be there. Maggie Gallagher argues:

I don’t think marriage is a universal human institution because marriage is innate. The forms of marriage differ so wildly, cultural variations are huge. You only have to go into the inner cities to see that marriage is not innate. It can disappear.

Yes, there are things in human nature that help sustain it (e.g. a pair bonding preference; sexual jealousy) but others that undermine it (e.g. men’s subjection for much of their life to powerful, indiscriminate and rather impersonal lusts).

But fundamentally marriage is sustained by culture, not biology.

….

But marriage in a particular society is not inevitable; death by sexual disorganization is always an option. Happens quite a bit actually. cf. Roman empire.

Eric of Classical Values disputes Maggie Gallagher’s view of the Roman Empire:

Say what you will about the Romans, but they were anything but sexually disorganized. They had numerous rules — rules which might not be acceptable to modern Americans, but rules nonetheless. Here’s a typically simplistic reaction by a modern writer to some of them:

Sometimes on the wedding night, the husband would not sleep with his new bride but arranged to sleep with another woman. The Roman state wanted fertility among mothers. Widows were not allowed to remarry. Husbands went out of their way to keep their own wives locked up like slaves. They deprived their wives of a life outside the home. It was forbidden for wives to possess money. The legal age for marriage in Ancient Rome for a woman was age 12, whether she had reached puberty or not.

Virginity upon marriage was valued. Roman men were allowed to engage in adultery, but their wives were not. Female sexuality was entirely defined in their patriarchical value: sex with wives for legitimate children and procreation of a man’s children and prostitutes, concubines and slaves for a man’s sexual leisure, rape for power over any woman.

And Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber disputes Maggie Gallagher’s whole approach to understanding marriage cross-culturally:

Gallagher seems to equivocate: sometimes “marriage” means, “some institution which functions to produce and raise children more or less reliably”; other times it means “the legal institution of marriage as it now exists in the United States.” And then when it suits, the universality of the former usage is elided into the specificity of the latter.

If I think about it, what I mean by marriage comes closest to “some institution which functions to produce and raise children more or less reliably” (and connect them somehow to their fathers and mothers). Though of course, as long as it’s doing that, marriage can, and does, also serve to do plenty of other things (from unpleasant things like subordinating women to men’s control, to useful things like the goals Jonathan Rauch sees of allowing for mutual support and settling people down). And I do think it’s innate enough that no whole large society is ever likely to be without it (though it may break down in smaller pockets of a society, under stress, or perhaps in smaller tribes under intense pressure from larger nations). And, from my point of view, if, for example, in Scandinavian countries people stop using the institution we translate as “marriage” and start using, instead, another one that we translate as something like “registered partnership,” what’s happened isn’t that marriage has gone away – people are still binding themselves to each other and their children in some way – but that one form of marriage has been replaced by another one, perhaps a weaker and less binding one, but still some form of marriage.

So the issue isn’t whether marriage will disappear. But that doesn’t mean that changes in marriage, legal or cultural, don’t matter. They do, a lot, for good or ill. And there are some legal changes – from abolishing civil marriage altogether and leaving people to some libertarian ideal of each making their own individual marriage contracts, to legally establishing sharia – which I would consider horrible, and would oppose ever seeing in the US. Other changes that have happened, such as women being able to acquire their own credit, or more cultural flexibility about how husbands and wives divide up their roles, I’d consider positive. So culture does matter.

At this point I turn to another anti-Maggie Gallagher argument, by Julian Sanchez at Reason, who is more clever in his titles than I am. Sanchez addresses the question of the relationship between the childrearing aspects of marriage, and all the other stuff it does for us:

As I suggested previously, the idealization of marriage, and much of its appeal, turns crucially on its serving those other functions: promising fulfillment and intimacy for the married couple, rather than just a stable childrearing environment. It’s not that SSM threatens to disconnect marriage from procreation; the argument for gay marriage is appealing precisely because people already understand that marriage has meanings and functions beyond procreation.

Maybe what Gallagher says here is an indication that she recognizes this. She’s effectively saying: Look, we can’t have marriage just be about procration (and design law accordingly); its appeal involves all these other things that induce people to do it. Indeed, the people for whom (and for whose children) its most important are precisely those who demonstrably don’t feel the need to get married just to provide a stable environment for their kids. Those people need, if you will, the marriage fairy tale.

I found this argument interesting, because it suggests to me a certain cultural tension. If we emphasize too much the adult satisfaction aspects of marriage – romantic fulfillment, companionship, etc. – are we giving short shrift to the “hanging together and caring for the kids even when it’s tough” aspect? On the other hand, if it’s just about hanging together and caring for the kids, and if you don’t get any of what Sanchez calls “the marriage fairy tale” with it, how many people would want to marry, for duty alone?