Marraige Trap - Book Review...
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From MSNBC...
The Marriage Trap
A new book wrestles with monogamy and its modern discontents.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 5:01 PM PT
The classic 1960s feminist critique of marriage was that it suffocated women by
tying them to the home and stifling their identity. The hope was that in a
non-sexist society marriage could be a harmonious, genuine connection of minds.
But 40 years after Betty Friedan, Laura Kipnis has arrived with a new jeremiad,
Against Love: A Polemic, to tell us that this hope was forlorn: Marriage, she
suggests, belongs on the junk heap of human folly. It is an equal-opportunity
oppressor, trapping men and women in a life of drudgery, emotional anesthesia,
and a tug-of-war struggle to balance vastly different needs.
The numbers seem to back up her thesis: Modern marriage doesn't work for the
majority of people. The rate of divorce has roughly doubled since the 1960s.
Half of all marriages end in divorce. And as sketchy as poll data can be, a
recent Rutgers University poll found that only 38 percent of married couples
describe themselves as happy.
What's curious, though, is that even though marriage doesn't seem to make
Americans very happy, they keep getting married (and remarried). Kipnis'
essential question is: Why? Why, in what seems like an age of great social
freedom, would anyone willingly consent to a life of constricting monogamy? Why
has marriage (which she defines broadly as any long-term monogamous
relationship) remained a polestar even as ingrained ideas about race, gender,
and sexuality have been overturned?
Kipnis' answer is that marriage is an insidious social construct, harnessed by
capitalism to get us to have kids and work harder to support them. Her
quasi-Marxist argument sees desire as inevitably subordinated to economics. And
the price of this subordination is immense: Domestic cohabitation is a "gulag";
marriage is the rough equivalent of a credit card with zero percent APR that,
upon first misstep, zooms to a punishing 30 percent and compounds daily. You
feel you owe something, or you're afraid of being alone, and so you "work" at
your relationship, like a prisoner in Siberia ice-picking away at the erotic
permafrost.
Kipnis' ideological tack might easily have been as heavy as Frederick Engels'
in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, but she
possesses the gleeful, viperish wit of a Dorothy Parker and the energetic
charisma of a cheerleader. She is dead-on about the everyday exhaustion a
relationship can produce. And she's diagnosed something interesting about the
public discourse of marriage. People are more than happy to talk about how
unhappy their individual marriages are, but public discussion assumes that in
each case there is something wrong with the marriage—not marriage itself.
Take the way infidelity became a prime-time political issue in the '90s: Even
as we wondered whether a politician who was not faithful to his or her spouse
could be "faithful" to the country, no one was interested in asking whether
marital fidelity was realistic or desirable.
Kipnis' answer to that question is a resounding no. The connection between sex
and love, she argues, doesn't last as long as the need for each. And we
probably shouldn't invest so much of our own happiness in the idea that someone
else can help us sustain it—or spend so much time trying to make unhappy
relationships "work." We should just look out for ourselves, perhaps
mutually—more like two people gazing in the same general direction than two
people expecting they want to look in each other's eyes for the rest of their
(now much longer) lives. For this model to work, she argues, our social
decisions need to start reflecting the reality of declining marriage
rates—not the fairy-tale "happily ever after all" version.
Kipnis' vision of a good relationship may sound pretty vague. In fact, she
doesn't really offer an alternative so much as diagnose the problems, hammering
us into submission: Do we need a new way of thinking about love and
domesticity? Marriage could be a form of renewable contract, as she idly
wonders (and as Goethe proposed almost 200 years ago in Elective Affinities,
his biting portrait of a marriage blighted by monogamy). Might it be possible
to envision committed nonmonogamous heterosexual relationships?
Kipnis' book derives its frisson from the fact that she's asking questions no
one seems that interested in entertaining. As she notes, even in a
post-feminist age of loose social mores we are still encouraged, from the time
we are children, to think of marriage as the proper goal of a well-lived life.
I was first taught to play at the marriage fantasy in a Manhattan commune that
had been formed explicitly to reject traditional notions of marriage; faced
with a gaggle of 8-year-old girls, one of the women gave us a white wedding
gown and invited us to imagine the heartthrob whom we wanted to devote
ourselves to. Even radicals have a hard time banishing the dream of an enduring
true love.
Let's accept that the resolute public emphasis on fixing ourselves, not
marriage, can seem grim, and even sentimentally blinkered in its emphasis on
ending divorce. Yet Kipnis' framing of the problem is grim, too. While she
usefully challenges our assumptions about commitment, it's not evident that
we'd be better off in the lust-happy world she envisions, or that men and women
really want the exact same sexual freedoms. In its ideal form, marriage seems
to reify all that's best about human exchange. Most people don't want to be
alone at home with a cat, and everyone but Kipnis worries about the effects of
divorce on children. "Work," in her lexicon, is always the drudgery of
self-denial, not the challenge of extending yourself beyond what you knew you
could do. But we usually mean two things when we say "work": The slog we endure
purely to put food on the table, and the kind we do because we like it—are
drawn to it, even.
While it's certainly true that people stay in an unhappy relationship longer
than they should, it's not yet clear that monogamy is more "unnatural" than
sleeping around but finding that the hum of your refrigerator is your most
constant companion. And Kipnis spends scant time thinking about the fact that
marriage is a hardy social institution several thousand years old, spanning
many cultures—which calls into question, to say the least, whether its
presence in our lives today has mostly to do with the insidious chokehold
capitalism has on us.
While Kipnis' exaggerated polemic romp is wittily invigorating, it may not
actually be as radical as it promises to be: These days, even sitcoms reflect
her way of thinking. There's an old episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry and
Kramer anticipate most of Kipnis' critique of domesticity; Kramer asks Jerry if
he and his girlfriend are thinking about marriage and family, and then cuts him
off: "They're prisons! Man-made prisons! You're doin' time! You get up in the
morning—she's there. You go to sleep at night—she's there. It's like you
gotta ask permission to, to use the bathroom: Is it all right if I use the
bathroom now?" Still, love might indeed get a better name if we were as
attentive to the intellectual dishonesties of the public debate over its
failings as we are to the emotional dishonesties of adulterers.