The startup marriage

A New Yorker Cartoon (September 16, 2013)

Marriage

I am in the process of collecting fictional observations on the institution of marriage.

I don't think one has to reflect on marriage only if one is married. At a certain bare level it's an institution, a framework for organizing society and social/familial ideologies.

Thus it's important to see what folks have said about it.

A few samples:

Happiness in marriage is but a matter of chance. If the disposition of the parties are ever so well-known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

---Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

---Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

A marriage is like a very sensitive virus that thrives in darkness, in the damp, airtight dungeon of secrecy. It will die upon exposure to the light.

---Karl Taro Greenfeld, Triburbia: A Novel (2012)

Marriage after all was a destination toward which all parents [...] and all daughters journeyed inevitably [...] No matter how high, how low or how middling the stature of the social orbit into which they are born—the fact of [a daughter's] marriage, taking place ideally by the age of twenty-five, becomes registered on the subconscious of both parent and child as an imminence—something that’s as universal as the biological fact of the human body.

---Sharmila Mukherjee, Green Rose: Tale of an Indian Lesbian (forthcoming) 

Frank Bruni makes sense when he says that it's not sex or anything physical that drew somebody like General Petraeus to Paula Broadwell, 20 years his junior with a fatless body.

It's old-fashioned narcissism.

Broadwell was excessively worshipful of the CIA chief in the manner that many younger men and women are of their admirable, older-counterparts.

These mighty men didn’t just choose mistresses, by all appearances. They chose fonts of gushing reverence [...] He was having an affair with a version of himself.

Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.

Is marriage hegemonic?

"[Marriage] is kind of a lovely thing and a cool thing and a wonderful thing."

So said Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and a major donor for the Republican party.

Frank Bruni quotes him to argue that even among the Republicans a pro-same-sex marriage stance is gaining traction.

But what catches my attention is the mindlessness in the rapture. For those for whom it works, marriage is "cool", "lovely", and "wonderful".

But for some, marriage could be a singularly unlovely institution. What should they do? Lament about being "losers"?

No; instead of measuring the success or lack thereof of happiness in their lives through the lens of the success of marriages, they could revel in divorce.

Wendy Paris for instance, does that. Paris writes of her unhappy experience of the institution of marriage. During the time she was married to her husband, whom she deeply loved, she could never find happiness with him, in the sense that they never seemed to see eye to eye on anything.

They were trying to be "married" rather than happy on their own, free-of-social-convention terms.

No sooner than they started talking divorce, happiness and agreement returned into their lives, as did the spirit of cooperation, like ideas on how to raise their son.

In Paris' narrative, marriage ends up, not being villainous or something to be yearned for, but just another way of living together--a specific kind of domestic arrangement, that is.

The coup of her story is what she does with divorce. Divorce is an alternative way of living happily as well; it's not seen as the monstrous, heart-wrenching opposite of marriage, but a specific way of living together and in this sense, quite like marriage

Reading Paris one thinks of marriage as a hegemonic institution that has drowned out the validity of all others, including divorce:

It takes real work to hold the nuances in your head, to remain kind and considerate, to remember why you married in the first place and still push forward to separate. As a culture, we understand that a good marriage takes work. Why not work equally hard to have a good divorce? To paraphrase the 17th-century poet John Milton in his treatise supporting divorce, a key purpose of marriage is joyful companionship; a fraught union violates the point.

Paris' relationship with her husband got better and better, solider and solider, the day the couple hatched the thought of divorce.