The Love Goddess | 04/30/2009 11:00 pm
The Forever Marriage?
Dear earth creatures, you no longer are really a nation of married people …
Editor’s Note: Who is the wisest of them all? Who is more dedicated to your pleasure than anyone on earth? Who can help you when you’re going online for the first time to find love; or when your lover’s children hate you; or when you want to strangle your husband? Why, the Love Goddess, of course. She promises nothing less than celestial wisdom, heavenly sex, divine dating. Read on …
In her book review of Andrew J. Cherlin’s interesting book, The Marriage-Go-Round, the first question The New York Times book reviewer, Dinitia Smith, asks in her review is: "Do Americans get married too much?"
She asks this because Americans have one of the highest rates of marriage of any Western country — and also a divorce rate that’s been rising since the 1960s and now rests at about 50 percent. How can this be? she wonders. How can we idealize marriage so much — and run from it so quickly?
The question has a rather easy answer, despite the complications of marriages and divorces. Idealizing marriage and also being unable to stay in it don’t seem to me in conflict with one another.
It’s a psychological truth that we put on a pedestal everything that we imagine to be wonderful but that we have lost or are in danger of losing — like, say, "The Cowboy"; "Pastoral Life"; "Childhood Innocence"; "The Good Mother." That’s what idealization IS — making someone or something bigger than life, usually because he or she or it is unattainable. (I’m a goddess. I KNOW about being put on a pedestal!) The more we experience that good thing or person as having been lost to us, somehow — obsolete for whatever reasons, no longer ours for the keeping — the more we idealize it. (Hence, our reverence for the dead — even the dead we never liked one bit.)
The Perfect Domestic Wife (Donna Reed; June Cleaver) now lives on a pedestal we almost can’t even see, it’s so high up there. Ditto the Loving, Provider Husband ("Father Knows Best"; "The Bill Cosby Show"). We increasingly idealize the notion of Family (not our real ones, of course, but the NOTION of it) since, as a nation, we’re less and less inclined to live in one.
And so forth.
You idealize Marriage most of all, though. Why? Because, you dear earth creatures, you no longer are really a nation of married people! Oh yes, yes, you get married. That won’t stop just because you also get divorced. But the idealization is of the concept; the ongoing, lifelong state of safe, secure, loving union … and that permanence, my friends, is lost to you. However often you get married, in other words, the brutal truth is: For the first time in American history, the majority of households in America are unmarried households.
Which means one thing and one thing only, and it’s not that Marriage is in jeopardy. It’s an institution, and institutions don’t change. The people in marriage have changed, is all, and the loss of Marriage as we imagine it, that Forever Marriage, makes us yearn more than ever for what no longer exists. So, despite the number of times we run away from it, recreate it, hope for it and hate it, Marriage as an ideal will live on in our subconscious minds as the place to be — and will become increasingly desirable as it is increasingly hard to attain.
So of course most of you will marry — again and again and again. Because the ideal lives on. And you will keep trying, not just because you fall in love, but because, as its permanence becomes a fading possibility, as happily ever after becomes harder and harder to attain … it is absolutely certain to become that much more hungered for!
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Read more about: Books, Divorce, Love, Marriage, Relationships, Sex, The Love Goddess, The New York Times
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I do have to admit, staying married; in this day of disposable everything, is the hardest job anyone will ever have! But is worth every ounce of effort put into it. I guess I believe if you just set your dreams together you will achieve them together. Plan out a`"long-term relationship dream" & keep working towards it, think of it as your lifes romantic relationship retirement plan.
I can’t help it, but my heart still thinks of marriage as a forever thing, whereas my brain thinks of it as a relationship that can be disposed of if the going gets too rough and isn’t worth working on.
If only we put more effort into nurturing our marriages rather than arrograntly taking the partnership for granted.
if the marriage is rough as in getting roughed up or being verbally and physically assaulted, its not a marriage, its a boxing match. Women are nurturers and men are the hunters. Men dont talk about what they are feeling they are men!!!!
They work hard to provide for their families and that means they work alot of hours.Women dont get that. They watch too much lifetime movies. Men are good, we just hear about the bad ones. Women arent saints either, they cheat, steal, lie, and blame the man for their mess ups.
It’s not even a boxing match if either is verbally or physically abusive. A friend of mine who is very tiny once told me that if any man abused her just once he wouldn’t live to tell about it. And believe me, she meant it.
While it’s true that men from the old school didn’t talk about what they were feeling, there’s been a subtle shift. With so many of today’s young men having been raised by single mothers, they’ve learned to appreciate all that their moms sacrificed for them. Their understanding shows up in how they treat women in the workplace and at home. So the future looks promising in that regard based on what I’ve read.
Some free advice to men and women everywhere: ALWAYS TREAT YOUR SPOUSE LIKE YOUR BEST BUSINESS CLIIENT.
When we lament that our ‘disposable society’ as why marriages don’t last ‘forever’ in this day and age, we must stop and realize that—never before in human history—have we been exposed to more romantic possibilities. In addition, life expectancy is much longer than in times past. These factors MUST be taken in account when evaluating the state of the institution of marriage today.
For example, if one was a farm wife in a ‘little house on the prarie’ where you might get to ‘town’ once a month, traveling by wagon, without any real mass media, there just were not very many OPTIONS available. You married and you had children. Your life totally revolved around scraping out a living for yourself and your family, and…well…you died.
Today we have much more ‘leisure’ time for romantic pursuits, and—through mass travel—we have unprecedented opportunities to interact with a wide variety of people. In the past, women like me either languished in misery married to men that nature and providence preventedx them from BEING ABLE to love in a romantic sense, or they chose to be ‘old maids’. Today, I will not remarry a person I can and do love because my state (Alabama) will never allow me to do so.
So, I believe, chalking up the state of the marital institution to societal shallowness or lack of values is a gross over-simplification. Technology has provided us with lives that can be much more complex than those of our predecessors; the desire for contentment is basic to the human condition. We simply don’t have to settle for or accept a life in which we are unhappy because of limited/non-existant choices. Modern life may have changed, but human nature has not!
In certain areas of Texas, where I have lived all my life and where the telling of tall tales is still considered both a sport and an art form, there is a much-loved and very lively party game affectionately called BULL#$%!! To play, the participants take turns telling stories, sharing factoids, unlikely trivia, etc. As the game continues, the tales invariably get taller and taller, and the truth gets stretched farther and farther, until eventually someone tells such an outrageous whopper that someone else cannot help but jump up and shout BULL#$%!! The player thus challenged is then obligated to prove the veracity of their story to the satisfaction of the majority of the other players, or else be eliminated from the game. The goal, of course, is to get away with the biggest whopper without getting caught. It’s a great game, TONS of fun, and many times I’ve laughed so hard my sides hurt for days.
I wrote all of that so that I can write this:
Ms. Love Goddess, ma’am:
With all due respect, BULL#$%!!
I and my 17 years of happily-ever-after with my best friend, closest confidant, and hunka-hunka-burning-love just cannot help but jump up and call BULL#$%!! on you.
Lord knows, a forever marriage isn’t easy, but no marriage is. And the forever marriage may be as rare as a hen’s tooth these days, but it definitely exists. At least at my house it does.
Jane M, I love plain speaking! Thanks so much for calling BS!!
You are correct, marriage is often not easy. Anything worth having is worth working for, amd marriage certainly fits well with that adage. My mother told me that if I needed a ‘best friend’ outside of marriage to confide to, then I had not found the right man. She also said "You can change your mind all the way up the aisle, but when the two of you turn from the altar to leave the church you damn well better understand that it’s DONE". My parents celebrated 62 years of marriage in April, so I guess those theories have worked for them.
He’s my third husband. I got around before I met him, and that’s part of how I know what a treasure he is. I hear a lot that good marriages take work, but that really isn’t true with us. We don’t "work" on our marriage. We don’t fight. We don’t hurt each other. We thrive together. We’re each other’s safe haven. We’re each other’s home. We never run out of things to talk about. I’m extremely lucky, and boy, do I know it. He thinks he’s the lucky one. I’m so glad he thinks so. It isn’t that we’ve never been challenged. Of course we have, but we’re always on the same side. I think we do things that could be shared with other people, and if they also did those things they could have a better marriage, but I’m no expert. Maybe when we met we were just two people getting lucky. The happy, forever marriage may be uncommon, but it can be done. That much I know.
Didn’t most of those "forever marriages" last about ten years, until one or the other of the partners died prematurely?
Because in the good old days, almost everyone died at an age we would consider premature - 45 was old!
marriage is ok, but if a man is going to take care of you you dont need a piece of worthless paper for him to do so. im with a man for 11 years. he’s a great provider and we are our own best friends. He was burned in a divorce and so was I. I will love him dearly for the rest of my life (and you dont need to make a vow to be a loving caring considerate human being.)