A common conservative critique of homosexual marriage is that it will threaten the institution of marriage. This is, in many respects an odd idea. It is not obvious why granting the right to marry to people who do not now have the right but seek it threatens the very institution of which these people want to be a part. Nor, given the mess that so many heterosexuals make of marriage is it all the plausible to blame gays and lesbians for threatening the institution. But there is one argument that I have found carries a certain weight in anti-homosexual circles, the notion that accepting homosexual marriage will set us on a slippery slope to the widespread acceptance of polygamy. (The junior Senator in Pennsylvania evidently thinks that it will also lead to inter-species marriage.) Since some people in Utah do seek the right to have polygamous marriages, conservatives ask us how we can legitimately deny them that right while accepting gay marriage.
Knowing that very few people really want polygamous marriage, most liberals don’t take this argument very seriously. I think it is useful to recognize the important difference in the status of gay marriage and polygamy for two reasons. First, it will, I think, help us recognize exactly why the demand for gay marriage is so powerful. And, second, it will help us see why certain arguments in contemporary liberal moral theory are somewhat problematic.
Conservatives critical of gay marriage remind us that the kind of marriage found in the modern West is what the sociologists and historians call companionate marriage. In this kind of marriage, the partners choose each other on the basis of mutual attraction and romantic devotion. Monogamy is the ideal in companionate marriage, however much it is violated in practice. But wherever polygamy is accepted, and monogamy is not the rule, marriage is very different. In communities that allow polygamy, marriages are contracted by families on the basis of political and economic considerations. Romantic love—if it even exists in such communities—is largely found outside the marriage bond.
The Slippery Slope
The conservative argument is correct in its characterization of modern, Western marriage as companionate and monogamous. But what conservatives fail to see is that it is precisely because this is what marriage means to us that gay and lesbian marriage must be recognized by the state and polygamous marriages must be rejected.
The argument for gay marriage is not that people should be free to create whatever personal and sexual relationships they like. Of course, people should be free to create whatever relationship they like. Their sexual lives should be free from state regulation. It is not the state’s business to tell us to have sex on a regular basis with one, two, or many other people, or with none at all. Nor should the state tell us whether our sexual partners should be of any particular gender. But while state regulation of our sexual lives violates our rights, the state does have reason to give certain kinds of relationships the special recognition and practical benefits that come with marriage. The modern Western state grants those benefits to relationships that are based upon a special kind of love, one that unites two people in, as the song goes, body and soul.
Should the State Be Neutral about Marriage?
Now why should the state encourage companionate marriage? Is this not a kind of discrimination? Should not people be allowed to create any kind of marriage they choose?
Certain kinds of liberals have adopted this line of thought and used it to justify marriage for gays and lesbians. They have held that marriage laws, like presumably other legitimate laws, must not express a preference for one vision of life or another. The law, these liberals say, must be neutral between different views of a good life. And thus, these neutral liberals have provided fodder for the conservatives who say that the arguments for homosexual marriage ultimately justify polygamy as well. Neutral liberals can either admit this or, like Michael Kinsley has recently done, say that the state should privatize marriage entirely.
The claims of neutral liberalism are wrong both in principle and in practice. While the liberal state should not prohibit people from choosing one way of life or another, it has always, and, in my view, should continue to encourage certain kinds of lives. In a liberal state people cannot be punished if they hold bigoted views, if they don’t want to vote or take part in communal affairs, or get an education, or be productive. But it is legitimate for the liberal state to encourage people to become tolerant, public-spirited, educated, and productive citizens. And it is also proper for the liberal state to encourage people to enter into companionate marriages. To see why this is so is also to see why the liberal state should not sanction polygamous marriage.
What Marriage Means In Different Places
Modern, Western marriage is not something that people make up just as they please. It is a certain kind of relationship that while conventional, has been created for good reason. Our kind of marriage is good for human beings who live the kind of lives we do. Polygamy makes sense, and indeed has certain advantages, in traditional communities in which everyone is born into a fixed and inherited political and social place; in which family and tribe is everything; and in which women are subordinate to men. In those times and places marriages are based not upon love but upon the political and economic requirements of familial and tribal success. But in a world characterized by the search for our own, individual way of life—and especially in a world in which men and women are held to be equal—companionate marriage is, for many of us, central to our happiness.
Marriage and Self-Definition in the Modern World
It is partly through such marriages that we define ourselves. Our choices about where to live; how to balance our domestic and work lives; what religion to embrace; what family ties to sustain, what sexual practices to pursue, and how to raise our children are dramatically shaped by our choice of marriage partner and then by the working out of our lives with our husband and or wife. And it is through these choices that we define what equality between mariage partners means for us. These choices are always difficult. In the modern world our lives are always in flux. There are so many options open to us and so many new ones that arise throughout our lives. Yet a successful life—one in which we see ourselves attaining certain goods over time—requires us to create certain oases of stability amidst the endless flux. This kind of stability gives definition to our selves and shape to our lives.
For most of us, this kind of stability is created in and through love and marriage, on the one hand, and work, on the other. And while marriage is not the only way to create it–and we must recognize that there are other ways–for those who do marry, it is often more important than work. It is in large part by making choices about how to express and define ourselves that we create the romantic love that binds us to our husbands and wives: To be one kind of person or another is to attract, and be attracted by, certain other people and not others. (We all know people who were made better people–or worse people–by their choice of marriage partner.) And, it is precisely because self-definition is so hard and uncertain that the emotional support we receive from our partners is so vital to us. Romantic love is both discovery and invention. To find / create a romantic relationship is to both reveal and create oneself. It is, at once, to make oneself vulnerable while finding new sources of strength. And, once we find / create it, romantic love is the central force that defines us as individuals—and keeps couples together when the inevitable tensions between two self-defined individuals arise. Given the importance to us of finding our own way and place in the world, and the centrality of marriage in this struggle, state support of marriage is justified.
It is, at first look, perhaps odd to think of companionate marriage as important to us because it gives us an opportunity to define ourselves. We don’t pursue love and marriage in order to find out who we are or create some kind of stable identity. But, like many important goods—like happiness itself—self-definition is something important to us that is best pursued indirectly. And, if we ask ourselves why romantic love and marriage is such a transcendentally important good to us, we begin to see that the individuality of modern life demands so much more in the way of self-definition than earlier forms of life. Few of us inherit a name that defines us, or a career, a home or even a school from our parents. Instead we make our own way in the world. We have, or make our own name, carve our own careers, create our own homes, and establish friendships and the relationships that are so important to us. At each step of the way we make choices that determine who we are and what we will be.
This is something difficult to do. We are all familiar with the phenomena of identity crises or mid-life crises. But these are distinctly modern situation. One would only find a medieval serf having an identity crisis only in a Monty Python movie.
Thus the important relationships we create do define us. And they provide the emotional sustenance we need as we try to become the people we wish to be—or discover that we are uncertain or have changed our minds about who we wish to be. For most of us, a marriage based on romantic love is the critical relationship that serves this purpose.
One can, of course, define oneself and seek emotional sustenance today in a polygamous marriage, Indeed, in our world, that very choice would, by its radical nature, would be a dramatic kind of self-definition. Of course, most of us can’t really choose to have a traditional polygamous marriage—there is no family and tribe ready to marry us off. In the communities of the past in which polygamy was is a lve possibility for most people, they couldn’t really choose polygamy—or their husband or wife. We can, I suppose, try to invent a new kind of polygamous marriage—as the remaining polygamous Mormons are doing. But, I do not think that a polygamous marriage can serve the same role that companionate marriage does in defining ourselves.
Marriage between two people is difficult enough. We all know that marriage often requires compromise. And some marriages collapse because too much compromise is required and one or both marriage partners feel that their identity is stifled in the marriage. Marriage only serves as a way to create our identity when two people find enough common ground to make their relationship one that more often realizes rather than limits their sense of themselves as individuals. And what makes that possible is the identity of interest that is much easier for two than three or more people to create and the romantic love that binds people to one another. That kind of relationship is incompatible, in both principle and practice, with polygamy. In principle, a love that is shared among more than two people is not a love in which another person becomes the center of our lives. And thus the identity of interest that makes marriage something that creates more possibilities than limitations on our individual lives is very hard to create. In practice, the jealousy that is deeply rooted in our human nature makes it impossible for the kind of love that characterizes companionate marriage to be parceled out among three (or more) people.
And thus polygamous marriage can not play the same role that romantic, companionate marriage does in defining ourselves or in providing the emotional support we need. Indeed, Polygamous marriage is thus not a means by which to solve one of the central problems of modern life, to find support for the way we define our selves and our place in the world.
Polygamy vs Feminism
A polygamous marriage cannot help create a modern sense of identity for a second reason: it is inherently inegalitarian. The modern sense of identity repudiates differences in power and position that are not the product of our accomplishments and the consent of others. And so, over time, it has called into question all hierarchies that are rooted in unquestioned claims to natural superiority. From its beginning companionate marriage whittled away at patriarchal claims: romantic love is practically impossible when men and women see themselves as fundamentally different kinds of creatures. Romantic love tends to elevate men and women in each other’s eyes. In particular, being loved by a woman is only valuable when men respect the sentiments and opinions of women.
In the last half of the twentieth century companionate marriage and modern egalitarianism lead to an upsurge of feminism that radically recast relationships between men and women. Polygamy is radically incompatible with sexual equality. This is most obviously true for women in plural marriages—or potentially plural marriages. The capacity of wives to stand as equals to their husbands is undermined not only by the reality or possibility of a man taking a second or third wife but also by the diminishing force of romantic love in binding husbands and wives to one another. And, inequality between men is also exacerbated by polygamy. If some men take more than one wife, others are left with none.
So, companionate and romantic marriage is, in its very essence, a marriage between two people. Not that modern men and women are always monogamous. But our ideal of marriage presupposes a fundamental commitment of one person to another. This is true even when sexual fidelity is seen as dispensable to marriage. Defenders of what are today called polyamorous relationships—the old term was open marriage—typically insist that the pursuit of sexual or even emotional variety should not and need not threaten the marriage bond between two people.
Companionate Marriage and Communal Support
Companionate marriage is not only desired as a means of defining our lives through romantic love and the creation of a family. It is also in companionate marriages that we create the kinds of emotional and practical support that helps us overcome the inevitable setbacks in life: economic hardship, illness, and catastrophic losses of all kinds. Most of us don’t have extended families to help us deal with these difficulties. When larger family ties are made uncertain by geographic and social mobility individuals can only turn to their life partners or the state in times of distress. The state is a necessary backup for families in the worst circumstance. But no one with any sense wants to be dependent on the state alone. It cannot provide the individual, devoted, and loving care that we need in times of crisis. The best and most important social welfare program is companionate marriage.
Polygamous marriage can, of course, also be a source support in troubled times. Indeed, some defenders of polygamy see it as a step back to a life within an extended family that provides a great deal of support in troubled times. This is precisely how we should see polygamous marriage, as a practice that only makes sense when it is embedded in a hierarchical and unchanging extended family that is tied in turn to a hierarchical and unchanging tribe. And that is also why polygamy makes no sense for modern men and women who eagerly move—and sometimes run—away from whatever extended families and tribes remain. In polygamous communities, emotional and practical support is provided not just by husband and wife but by a broad range of familial relationships. We have no such relationships today, mostly do not want them, and certainly cannot sustain them. (Can you imagine a commuter polygamous marriage?) We depend on our circle of friends and, when we our lucky, our parents, children and siblings. But mostly we depend upon our spouses in a way that is impossible to imagine in marriages that are not the product of an intense bond that can only exist when one other person is central to our lives.
Companionate Marriage and Children in the Modern World
Finally, companionate marriage is the only means we know of reproducing children who can become the strong, confident, and independent individuals capable of succeeding, not least in self-definition. Love of children has always existed. But the extended period of parental care that characterizes modern life—in which children rely on their parents for emotional and financial support well into their twenties—is a relatively new and modern phenomena. So is the extended freedom from the responsibilities of adulthood that characterize modern adolescence, which is a late 19th century invention. This extended period of care and freedom from responsibility creates problems for us. But it is necessary if our children are to have the time and space in which to develop the practical and intellectual skills they need to take their place in a world of self-defining individuals. So, too, is the kind of intense love for children that respects and thus fosters their individuality. The parental devotion that gives our children the space and love they need is most easily provided when the intense devotion of two parents for each other as individuals spills over onto their, relatively few, children. Polygamous marriages, which typically produce many children, and in which multiple wives struggle on behalf of themselves and their children for the attention and care of their husband, simply can not create children who can live up to the practical and emotional demands of modern life.
Modern, Western, companionate marriage, then, is something good for us, good for our children, and thus good for our larger community. The larger community certainly has an interest in helping individuals define themselves in marriage; find the support they need from their marriage partners; and devote extraordinary amounts of love, attention, and money to their children.
So the conservative argument that homosexual marriage will inevitably lead to the acceptance of polygamy is doubly wrong. Gay and lesbian marriage is—like all modern, Western, companionate marriage—utterly incompatible with the acceptance of polygamy. And the argument for homosexual marriage is that marriage is good for gays and lesbians—and thus for the children of gays and lesbians and for the rest of us as well—for the very same reasons that it is good for straights. Gays and lesbians deserve, then, not the right to form any kind of relationships they choose. They more or less have that right now. They deserve the right not to be discriminated against in forming the kind of relationship that the modern, Western state has long supported because of its centrality to our individual and communal well being. They deserve the right to marry.
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Another writer pointed out that there are lot of different kinds of families and that they need various kinds of help. She concluded said, “I want to help people to build relationships and futures which grow organically from relationships of trust and solidarity. That means making sure that all legal protection and opportunity possible is available to folks living and working healthily in those relationships.”
In response I said,
I’m not arguing that the state or private entities should privilege
traditional families in the way you think. My family is hardly traditional and I very much agree that life is difficult for non-traditional families of all sorts largely for the reasons you state. Making child care available to families of all types and challenging the assumption that workers have someone at home taking care of feeding and cleaning is really critical today if we want to make life easier for all of us in non-traditional families, whether they have one or two adults in them. Bereavement policies for grandparents is a great idea.
But note that in supporting these policies, you want, no less than I do, the state and private institutions to support certain kinds of relationships, those that, in your worlds “help people to build relationships and futures which grow organically from relationships of trust and solidarity.” That is encouraging a certain kind of lifestyle, isn’t it? Why, one might ask, should the state encourage relationships of trust and solidarity? Doesn’t that privilege that lifestyle over one in which our relationships are short terms, distrustful, and mutually exploitative? Why should deep relationships be privileged over shallow ones? After all, lots of people–mostly but not only men–seem to want and thrive on the latter kind of relationship. And they can be very hard to manage. Just as we should have policies that give people time off to take care of their sick family members, maybe we need policies that give people time off to handle the inevitable conflicts that arise when they are juggling four sexual relationships at a time?
Presuming you get that I’m joking, let’s look at marriage for a moment. All I am saying about marriage is that the state and private institutions should encourage marriage in the fairly minimal way it does, simply by providing state and church sponsored marriage and by giving married people tax breaks and status. Doing that doesn’t mean supporting only traditional husband at work wife at home marriages. It means supporting all the many varieties of companionate, two-adult marriages we can imagine.
And it doesn’t mean that the only kinds of families that deserve support are two adult marriages. I’m in favor of the full variety of public policies that make life difficult for all sorts of families including single parent ones. Supporting those policies is not incompatible with also providing certain incentives to marriage.
And by the way, if you don’t agree with this last paragraph, are you opposed to marriage for gays and lesbians? I ask this because the context for this whole discussion is my argument for gay marriage. If marriage is not a good thing, then why in the world should we be working for gay marriage? Why not simply work to disestablish and discourage marriage altogether?
A commentator pointed out that there are “all kinds of relationships that are as Marc says ‘companionate,’ and also economic, but not always romantic. Mothers and daughters who live together and share a household, good friends (think Kate and Allie, or the Golden Girls or Perfect Strangers), collective households (think West Philly)…” and burden of proof re:marriage (whether it’s good or bad as a governing tool) falls upon the patriarchy more than anyone else.
I responded that family legal relations are much more varied and denser than many people realize.
A relationship between a single mother and a daughter is recognized and benefited by in a variety of laws that also benefit mother-father-daughter families.
1. Inheritance and gift tax law. The latter do apply before the death of the mother.
2. Dependent tax deduction
3. Child care deduction if one has an income that qualifies; If your income is too high you can also sign up for one of those programs in which you can use pre-tax money for child care and medical.
4. The full range of other tax laws that apply to mother-father-daughter families such as medical deductions.
5. Exemptions from testifying in court against one another.
6. Rights to approve medical treatment
And on and on.
I don’t think it is fair to say that two parent families are privileged over single parent families under the law in every or even in most respects.
The writer then said while some of my points were right, an adult mother and daughter couldn’t get a tax deductino and “I am not sure if i think the state should be in the business of incentivizing one kind of relationship or lifestyle over another.”
I wrote:
I get your simple point but I think it is misguided. I think it is totally appropriate for the state to encourage certain kinds of lifestyles or relationships over others. And we do this all the time.
Here is a list of things we should and sometimes do encourage people to do:
1. Use public transportation
2. Lose weight, become more fit, get medical and dental screenings
3. Send their kids to public school
4. Reduce their use of energy especially from carbon based sources;
5. Recycle
6. Save more
7. Buy American made products
8. Practice safe sex
9. Do research on certain scientific topics rather than others
There are, of course, many more.
And, on top of that, there are all the public goods we provide that encourage people to live their lives in some ways not others: zoning laws, roads and highways, recreation centers, public colleges and universities and so forth.
Liberals have gotten confused between laws that prohibit or require people from doing certain things and laws that encourage people to do or not do certain things. Some laws in the former category restrict our rights. I do not think there are any laws in the latter category that do unless they raise the costs of doing certain things so far that they are financially out of the reach of people, e.g. a $100 a gallon tax on gasoline.
If you want a government that is always neutral between different lifestyles you will wind up with a libertarian government that protects our right to life liberty and property and does little else. That’s not what we want, I don’t think.
In response to someone who pointed out that society is not “really worse off “ if there are diverse kinds of relationships including polyamorous ones, and who asked, “are we sure that marriage is really good for society” I wrote the following answer:
As I point out in the essay, our government does not and should try to stop people from having multiple sexual relationships. The question is should we encourage marriage of a certain kind, a companionate marriage based on romantic love and not allow other kinds of marriage, such as polygamous marriage.
I think the answer is yes. It is hard to find good social scientific evidence for a lot of things. But the evidence that marriage is good for people and good for kids is pretty powerful.
While contemporary marriage grows out of previous practices that were patriarchal in nature, the tension between the romantic ideal of companionate marriage and patriarchy is one of the forces that has slowly undermined patriarchy.
I do think it is possible for companionate marriage and polyamory to co-exist. That is to say, some people can carry on sexual and perhaps even quasi-romantic relationships with third parties without undermining their marriage. Indeed, with marriages lasting so much longer than they once did, I suspect it is relatively rare that people don’t form some other sexual or emotional attachments over the course of a long marriage.
But I very much doubt that long term polygamous relationships, let alone or marriages are possible for most of us. The Jefferson Airplane song Triad is lovely. But if I remember correctly, the relationship that was the source of the song was over by the time the album was pressed and released. Triad relationship tend to founder because of jealousy in the first instance but jealousy is rooted in the nature of companionate marriage, that is, in the expectation that people have of someone else being there for them, intellectually emotionally, and sexually, all the time. That’s hard enough for two people who love one another. Adding a third person in a more or less equal standing just makes things much harder. And adding a third person with a subsidiary standing runs up against the ideal of companionate relationships and is likely to be unsatisfactory for the third person over the long run. It’s not impossible, I suppose. But it’s difficult.
Saying that doesn’t mean I favor laws against adultery. Married couples have to figure out for themselves how to deal with the issue. But it does no one any good to pretend that polyamory and strong marriages easily coexist. To think that there is no issue here strikes me as the triumph of ideology over good sense.
To someone who argued that my long marriage has biased me in favor of marriage whereas other people who have had unhappier marriages or been divorced might look at things differently I wrote:
I’ve been in a very happy marriage for 22 years—well for almost all of those 22 years as like all other married couples we have some difficult days. Maybe that disqualifies me from talking about marriage, although by Tolstoy’s principle I should know a lot about all the happy ones. I was single for the first 40 percent of my adult life, however, and I’m sooo tempted to respond to you by writing about what life was like for young single people in the seventies and eighties.
But I think this post would be a lot more useful if I just point out that personal experience can be as misleading as it is revealing. It sounds like you have had or have seen some bad divorces and are concerned about the constraints of marriage keeping people in bad relationships. But, come on, by any historical standard, marriage is much easier to leave than it has ever been before. That doesn’t make it easy and I suspect that this is a good thing. Shouldn’t people should think two or three or forty five times before getting divorced, especially if they have children. There isn’t an ideal set of marriage constraints for everyone but I’m inclined to think that the “degree of difficulty of divorce” is probably about where it should be.
(Of course, breaking up is always hard to do even without marriage. I can’t resist repeating a college joke about the typical Wesleyan relationship: You get together for three weeks of sex and fun and then spend six month having painful conversations about whether and when to break up.)
Again, I don’t know that we actually have more people living together and children outside of marriage. In the US, there has been a slight reversal of that trend.have been leveling off and in some part reversing. See Frank Fukuyama’s book, the Great Disruption.
I don’t believe in quality time. Parenting to me hanging around waiting for those key moments when something important happens and you kid needs to hear from you or more often, says something important. You never know when that moment is going to come but if you are not around a lot, you are going to miss it. That’s why parents need a lot of help from one another if there are two of them and from day care centers on or near the job if not.
As for kibbutzim, two points. First, they are hardly equivalent to plural marriages. And, second, I read a book many years ago about how the children of kibbutznicks actually had some serious problems forming deep personal relationships because they never had a close relationship with their own parents. I’m sure their other views, and I’m sure some folks would say that the capacity for deep relationship is overrated. So let’s just say your point is far from certain.
By the way, child abusers are rarely parents but are often step-parents. (All those fairy tales about wicked step mothers point to an important truth.) That is certainly is one reason to be concerned about the consequences of plural marriage for children.
Some further arguments:
1. I guarantee you that arranged marriages for Koreans won’t last another generation or two any more than the arranged marriages of my great grandparents survived another generation. It hardly counts against my argument to look at people who have very different expectations and hopes from marriage than people who have grown up much more with the expectations of most westerners.
2. Yes some evidence is equivocal about cause and effect. Time series evidence need not be and there is some that suggests that marriage benefits us.
3. There is pretty substantial evidence that married couples stay together longer than unmarried couples. Again there is a question of cause and effect. But if you read the literature on marriage, especially the qualitative literature, it becomes pretty clear that the legal commitment does constrain and in some ways deepen the emotional commitment. And that’s a main reason why people marry. The main benefit the state and church gives gives married people is not tax benefits but the very existence of the status of being married, the expectations it creates for people who marry as well as for their friends and family, and the slight hassle of undoing that status.
4. For the last time, it is no more discriminatory for the state to encourage marriage than it is to for the state to encourage recycling. Even XXX agrees with me about that. Can we please drop this now?
5. In America at least, there is very little evidence that marriage is going away. We are not yet Sweden and there is little evidence we are heading in the direction of Sweden. People are marrying at rates that are, if I remember correctly, a little higher than twenty years ago. Divorce rates have stabilized. And most people who divorce remarry within a few years.
6. And even if I’m wrong about whether the state should encourage marriage, nothing you have said suggests that the state should be neutral between monogamous and plural marriage. And that was the point I started with.
This has been fun, but I have to tell you that for the first time in a long time, I’m cognizant of being on a blog called YOUNG philly politics.
In response to a further challenge about whether we really have good reason to believe that marriage benefits people:
1. The evidence to which I’m pointing is substantial research that suggests that men and women who are married tend to be healthier, happier and live longer lives than people who are single.
You are suggesting that other kinds of relationships between people might create the same good things. But what exactly are you talking about? Would a extended family in which sons and daughters are subordinate to the patriarch who chooses their spouses be as satisfactory? The point I made in made essay is that such a form of marriage would make no sense for us.
So what alternatives are we talking about? How about friends without benefits—that is friends living without either a romantic or sexual connection, like Kate and Allie. (But weren’t they really lesbian lovers?) Maybe that would work, but it is hard enough to live with someone one loves and / or with whom one has sex. I find it hard to believe that friendship without love or sex would be as sustainable or sustaining as one with it.
So, I’d kind of like to know what alternatives to marriage we should be evaluating.
2. I wouldn’t say the burden of proof re the benefits of marriage fall upon the patriarchy because I don’t think that marriage is an inherently patriarchal social practice. Indeed, companionate marriage is quite the opposite in spirit and increasingly in practice.
Now on to the main issue you are raising: It is much easier to be single than before. And it’s easier to divorce than before. That is true because of a general increase in wealth, because more women are in the workplace, and because of government social programs. That leads to a decline in marriage rates and a higher incidence of divorce particularly in Northern Europe. That may be a good thing if you believe, as I do, that companionate / romantic relationships are good for us. It means that more marriages are undertaken and sustained on that basis rather than on the basis of economic necessity. So I’m totally with you in support of the kinds of social welfare programs you advocate even if they reduce marriage rates or increase divorce rates.
I don’t see any evidence, however, that there is a decline in the number of companionate/ romantic relationships that have the form if not legal status of marriage. Left free to their own devices, in the modern world, the vast majority of people couple up or want to do so. I think there are deep reasons connected to the nature of identify formation that this is true, not to mention that couples have a lot more sex than singles.
In the book I’m working on I point to two different possible transformations in marriage in the future. One is that marriage rates are going to stabilize in the west and even start to rise again because the formal establishment of a permanent relationship strengthens what I call the identify formation function of romantic love and better secures the well-being of children.
On the other hand, I see some tendencies for people to form multiple and shifting relationships. This is the vision of some proponents of polyamorous relationships. We talk, for example of “office husbands and wives” who become partners in our lives as important as our “real” husbands and wives. And we make deep friendships with people who share our recreational enthusiasms. Sometimes those relationships become sexual. As our lives become more complicated and different kinds of organized groups–at work and at play–become important to us, we might find that overlapping and shifting relationships become, at least for a time in our lives, the best way to make deep connections with other people. There, after all, different kinds of love and romance and different settings in which those kinds of love are more likely to be important to us.
Ultimately, I think the former tendency is going to be a lot stronger than the latter. The joys and comforts of a good marriage are, I think, going to continue to be more attractive to most people than the excitement of juggling multiple relationships. And given the limits of time and energy, and the potential for jealousy that seems to go along with deep relationships, I do think there is something exclusive about romantic love. Or perhaps I should say that the latter tendency will tend to be stronger in people during the increasingly lengthy period in which we experiment with different identities up until we are ready to have children, when the former tendency will come to the fore. But some people will be more inclined one way or the other over the whole of their lives. And people who divorce might find themselves back in the latter tendency again. And so forth.
All this is just guessing on my part. The meaning and importance of marriage is in flux today and thus it is important for us to think through, both as individuals and as members of a community, the various ways we can live our lives without too quickly condemning one possibility or another. Flexible legal arrangements for sharing our lives with other people–be they friends or lovers or family members–strikes me as useful in this period and beyond. And so is a tolerance for variety and an openness to unusual or so far unimagined possibilities.
But in the meantime, given what marriage means to us, denying gays and lesbians the right to marry is just wrong. And that was the main point of my essay.
To someone who wrote that the high rates of adultery suggest that marriage is not as important a good as I have argued, I responded that:
The only really good random sample we have of Americans suggests that 75% of men and women are faithful to their spouses. Given how many bad or not so good marriages there are; how high our expectations are for marriage; how much longer we are married than our ancestors, how much sexual temptation there is and how easy adultery can be in American today, I find this number to be surprisingly high.
Or to put the point another way: Dan Savage said when he spoke in Philadelphia, that if you are married for much of your life and have only had sex outside of marriage once or twice, you actually are showing an pretty impressive commitment to the institution.
My further response to the commentator who raise a question about my argument for encouraging marriage:
There is the general point about whether the state can encourage (not require) certain kinds of lifestyles. We agree about this in saying yes.
There is the particular point about whether the state should encourage what the sociologists call companionate marriage, ie, marriage based on romantic / sexual love.
I’m saying yes, in a minimal way. You are saying no for reasons I’m not sure I understand. Your basic point seems to be that there are a lot of different kinds of ways in which people come together to support each other and that the state should help all of them in the same way and not pick out companionate marriage for particularly special treatment. You also seem to think that it is unfair for singles not to get the tax advantage open to marrieds.
To be honest, I have my doubts about the slightly lower rates for married people and I’d happily give it up. Some tax benefits go to anyone who has a child whether married or single. And most the other tax advantages can’t be sensibly given to singles.
But on the larger point, I do think there is a difference between all of the other kinds of relationships you talk about—friendship of various kinds, adult mother-daughter family units and so forth—and married couples. I think relationships between lovers who make a long term commitment to one another is particularly valuable and strong and that most of us, given a choice, between living with our parents or a friend and living with a lover in a long term relationship would say agree that there is something special and preferable about the latter. So I think we should encourage companionate marriage–and that various poly marriages don’t meet that test. And, on those grounds, I don’t think that giving married folks a tax advantage is no more unfair than giving people who heat their homes with solar panels a tax break even if people who live on tree lined streets can’t sensibly take advantage of that tax break.
The reason I wrote the original essay is because I don’t think that we have to worry about opening up the question of polygamy in order to defend gay marriage, something I gather we both want to do. I don’t at all think that opposition to polygamy is rooted in prejudice as opposition to gay marriage is. Marriage is something gays and lesbians deserve because it is something that is important to the well-being of many human beings who are member of the lgbt community. I simply don’t think you can make a case remotely like that for polygamy or polyandry or any other kind of poly form of marriage.
If you could make such a case, there would be poly families riding the coattail of the LGBT community clamoring for the right to marry. Where are they? My impression is that poly relationships are a way for people to limit their commitment to particular others and that is why there isn’t a pro-poly marriage movement today. The people who defend poly marriage are, by and large, not folks are in poly relationships. I’ve heard of very few who want to enter into a plural marriage and I know of no men or women having affairs who would love to be able to have a second wife or husband. Rather they are people (including many law professors) who have bought into a certain philosophical perspective that calls into question any kind of preference for one kind of human relationship over another.
What I’m trying to show in my essay (and in my joking about the “unfair preference for deep over shallow relationships”) is that not all discriminations about how we live are a matter of prejudice. Some are a matter of reason and experience.
In response to a challenge that transit and zoning laws are not really about lifestyle choices, I argued that:
We provide public services like transit and zoning because we want to change how people live. We often act like the way we use our land–such as the rampant suburbanization of our society–just happened or is the product of our individual choices. Not so. It was created by public policies that creates incentives for people to live one way or the other. Many of us, for example, have argued for a long time that our incentives are backwards and that we should be encouraging denser development in which rely on public transportation, public parks and recreation centers not a swing set on every acre lot and two cars in every garage.
Safe sex, recycling, increasing savings, and finishing high school are encouraged by means of laws that create subsidized programs, public advertising and economic incentives. (Recycling Bank, for example, is all about providing incentives to recycling.) Encouraging people to marry by giving married people a certain status and benefits is no different.
Whether it is a good public policy or not is one question. Whether the state has a right to encourage this kind of choice is another. I’m addressing the second question here and my answer is that I don’t see any difference in principle between encouraging that choice and encouraging people to do the many other things the state encourages.
Asked to write a bullet point answer to why government should encourage certain kind of relationships, I wrote:
• The government should encourage marriage because the entering into a stable, long term romantic / sexual relationship is central to the happiness of the vast majority of human beings in modern societies like our own and the status and benefits of marriage encourages people to form and sustain these relationships.
Now, you can criticize this on a number of grounds. You could say why do we need to encourage people to do what makes them happy? The answer is that human beings don’t always immediately know what makes them happy. We have to learn this and one thing our parents, teachers and at one remove the government should do is to try to point us in the right direction.
(Compare: why should we encourage people to read the classic works of philosophy, poetry, and fiction when they are more immediately entertained by TV? The answer is that we have to learn to develop a taste for good literature and that no one who has developed that taste wants to go back and only watch TV sitcoms and reality shows.)
Or you could say that these kinds of relationships are not as important as I think. To this, the easy answer is look at what most people show makes them happy by what they do and say. People try very hard to couple up. And when those relationships break down, they do it again. And most people say that their spouses and children are a major source of what makes them happy in life.
You can just shrug your shoulders and say that this is merely conventional and dispensable behavior or that it just doesn’t work for you. That is the post-modern pose in action. And that is a really simple claim. But that doesn’t make it right. And to understand why it is not right, we have to try to understand how marriage (and coupling up) survives under the conditions of modern life because they respond to some deep-seated longings almost all of us have. Saying what those longings are, however, is not easy. It is never easy to understand the things that are closest and most important to us.
So that’s one reason I’m writing a book about the nature of eros and why I wrote a long essay about why marriage is important as part of an argument for gay marriage.
If someone criticizes me for trying to understand a complicated matter in a way that respects those complications, I think that says more about their limitations than my own. And, I really don’t think that in asking for a simple answer you are doing justice to your own capacity for thinking about the really complicated stuff that makes our lives what they are. You are being, dare I say it, polemical.