1601hell yeah...

[evile]

• Sep. 5, 2003

  http://slate.msn.com/id/2087897/
  
  
  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.