But the toothpaste was already out of the tube. Because what Lillian and Edwin wanted was not all that different from what their contemporaries wanted: the freedom to enter into or dissolve their own unions, on their own terms, for private reasons, entirely free from meddling interference by church, law, or family. They wanted parity with each other and fairness within their marriage. But mostly what they wanted was the liberty to define their own relationship based on their own personal interpretation of love.
Of course, there was resistance to these radical notions. Even as early as the mid-1800s, you start to see prim, fussy, social conservatives suggesting that this trend toward expressive individualism in marriage would spell out the very breakdown of society. What these conservatives specifically predicted was that allowing couples to make life matches based purely on love and the whims of personal affection would promptly lead to astronomical divorce rates and a host of bitterly broken homes.
Which all seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it?
Except that they were kind of right.
Divorce, which had once been vanishingly rare in Western society, did begin to increase by the midnineteenth century-almost as soon as people began choosing their own partners for reasons of mere love. And divorce rates have only been growing higher since as marriage becomes ever less “institutional” (based on the needs of the larger society) and ever more “expressively individualistic” (based on the needs of… you).
Which is somewhat hazardous, as it turns out. Because here comes the single most interesting fact I’ve learned about the entire history of marriage: Everywhere, in every single society, all across the world, all across time, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket. You can set your clock to it. (It’s happening in India right now, for instance, even as we speak.)
About five minutes after people start clamoring for the right to choose their own spouses based on love, they will begin clamoring for the right to divorce those spouses once that love has died. Moreover, the courts will start permitting people to divorce, on the grounds that forcing a couple who once loved each other to stay together now that they detest each other is a form of wanton cruelty. (”Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them,” protested George Bernard Shaw, “but don’t send them back to perpetual wedlock.”) As love becomes the currency of the institution, judges become more sympathetic to miserable spouses-possibly because they, too, know from personal experience just how painful ruined love can become. In 1849, a Connecticut court ruled that spouses should be allowed to legally leave their marriages not only for reasons of abuse, neglect, or adultery, but also because of simple unhappiness. “Any such conduct as permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner,” the judge declared, “defeats the purpose of the marriage relation.”
This was a truly radical statement. To infer that the purpose of marriage is to create a state of happiness had never before been an assumption in human history. This notion led, inevitably you could say, to the rise of something the matrimonial researcher Barbara Whitehead has called “expressive divorces”-cases of people leaving their marriages merely because their love has died. In such cases, nothing else is wrong with the relationship. Nobody has beaten or betrayed anyone, but the feeling of the love story has changed and divorce becomes the expression of that most intimate disappointment.
I know exactly what Whitehead is talking about when it comes to expressive divorce; my exit from my first marriage was precisely that. Of course, when a situation is making you truly miserable, it’s difficult to say that you are “merely” unhappy. There seems to be nothing “mere,” for instance, about crying for months on end, or feeling that you are being buried alive within your own home. But yes, in all fairness, I must admit that I left my ex-husband merely because my life with him had become miserable, and this gesture marked me as a very expressively modern wife indeed.
So this transformation of marriage from a business deal to a badge of emotional affection has weakened the institution considerably over time-because marriages based on love are, as it turns out, just as fragile as love itself. Just consider my relationship with Felipe and the gossamer thread that holds us together. To put it simply, I do not need this man in almost any of the ways that women have needed men over the centuries. I do not need him to protect me physically, because I live in one of the safest societies on earth. I do not need him to provide for me financially, because I have always been the winner of my own bread. I do not need him to extend my circle of kinship, because I have a rich community of friends and neighbors and family all on my own. I do not need him to give me the critical social status of “married woman,” because my culture offers respect to unmarried women. I do not need him to father my children, because I have chosen not to become a mother-and even if I did want children, technology and the permissiveness of a liberal society would permit me to secure babies through other means, and to raise them alone.
So where does that leave us? Why do I need this man at all? I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend’s grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” The same goes for Felipe: He needs me only for my companionship as well. Seems like a lot, but it isn’t much at all; it is only love. And a love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later-again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.
Moreover, the emotional havoc that accompanies divorce is often colossal, which makes the psychological risk of marrying for love extreme. The most common survey that doctors are using these days to determine stress levels in their patients is a test put together in the 1970s by a pair of researchers named Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. The Holmes-Rahe scale puts “death of a spouse” at the very top of their list, as the single most stressful event most people will ever undergo in their lives. But guess what’s second on the list? Divorce. According to this survey, “divorce” is even more anxiety-inducing than “death of a close family member” (even the death of one’s own child, we must assume, for there is no separate category for that awful event), and it is far more emotionally stressful than “serious illness,” or “losing a job,” or even “imprisonment.” But what I found most amazing about the Holmes-Rahe scale is that “marital reconciliation” also ranks quite high on the list of stress-inducing events. Even almost getting a divorce and then saving the marriage at the last moment can be absolutely emotionally devastating.
So when we talk about how love-based marriages can lead to higher divorce rates, this is not something to be taken lightly. The emotional, financial, and even physical costs of failed love can destroy individuals and families. People stalk, injure, and kill their ex-spouses, and even when it doesn’t reach the extreme of physical violence, divorce is a psychological and emotional and economic wrecking ball-as anyone who has ever been in, or even near, a failing marriage can attest.
Part of what makes the experience of divorce so dreadful is the emotional ambivalence. It can be difficult, if not impossible, for many divorced people ever to rest in a state of pure grief, pure anger, or pure relief when it comes to feelings about one’s ex-spouse. Instead, the emotions often remain mixed up together in an uncomfortably raw stew of contradictions for many years. This is how we end up missing our ex-husband at the same time as resenting him. This is how we end up worrying about our ex-wife even as we feel absolute murderous rage toward her. It’s confusing beyond measure. Most of the time, it’s hard even to assign clear blame. In almost all the divorces I’ve ever witnessed, both parties (unless one of them was a clear-cut sociopath) were at least somewhat responsible for the collapse of the relationship. So which character are you, once your marriage has failed? Victim or villain? It’s not always easy to tell. These lines mesh and blend, as though there’s been an explosion at a factory and fragments of glass and steel (bits of his heart and her heart) have melded together in the searing heat. Trying to pick through all that wreckage can bring a person straight to the brink of madness.