The problem is that modern Western culture has somehow inherited both these ancient worldviews-though we have never entirely reconciled them because they aren’t reconcilable. (Have you followed an American election cycle recently?) American society is therefore a funny amalgam of both Greek and Hebrew thinking. Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek. We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God’s will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.
And when it comes to our ideas about love-well, we are a tangled mess of both. In survey after survey, Americans express their belief in two completely contradictory ideas about marriage. On one hand (the Hebrew hand), we overwhelmingly believe as a nation that marriage should be a lifetime vow, never broken. On the other, Greek, hand, we equally believe that an individual should always have the right to get divorced, for his or her own personal reasons.
How can both these ideas be simultaneously true? No wonder we’re so confused. No wonder Americans get married more often, and get divorced more often, than any other people in any other nation on earth. We keep ping-ponging back and forth between two rival views of love. Our Hebrew (or biblical/moral) view of love is based on devotion to God-which is all about submission before a sacrosanct creed, and we absolutely believe in that. Our Greek (or philosophical/ethical) view of love is based on devotion to nature-which is all about exploration, beauty, and a deep reverence for self-expression. And we absolutely believe in that, too.
The perfect Greek lover is erotic; the perfect Hebrew lover is faithful.
Passion is Greek; fidelity is Hebrew.
This idea came to haunt me because, on the Greek-Hebrew spectrum, I fall much closer to the Greek end. Did this make me an especially poor candidate for matrimony? I worried that it did. We Greeks don’t feel comfortable sacrificing the Self upon the altar of tradition; it just feels oppressive and scary to us. I worried about all this even more after I stumbled on one tiny but critical piece of information from that massive Rutgers study on matrimony. Apparently the researchers found evidence to support the notion that marriages in which both husband and wife wholeheartedly respect the sanctity of matrimony itself are more likely to endure than marriages where couples are perhaps a bit more suspicious of the institution. It seems, then, that respecting marriage is a precondition for staying married.
Though I suppose that makes sense, right? You need to believe in what you’re pledging, don’t you, for a promise to have any weight? Because marriage is not merely a vow made to another individual; that’s the easy part. Marriage is also a vow made to a vow. I know for certain that there are people who stay married forever not necessarily because they love their spouses, but because they love their principles. They will go to their graves still bound in loyal matrimony to somebody they may actively loathe just because they promised something before God to that person, and they would no longer recognize themselves if they dishonored such a promise.
Clearly, I am not such a being. In the past, I was given the clear choice between honoring my vow and honoring my own life, and I chose myself over the promise. I refuse to say that this necessarily makes me an unethical person (one could argue that choosing liberation over misery is a way of honoring life’s miracle), but it did bring up a dilemma when it came to getting married to Felipe. While I was just Hebrew enough to dearly wish that I would stay married forever this time (yes, let’s just go ahead and use those shaming words: this time), I had not yet found a way to respect wholeheartedly the institution of matrimony itself. I had not yet found a place for myself within the history of marriage where I felt that I belonged, where I felt that I could recognize myself. This absence of respect and self-recognition caused me to fear that not even I would believe my own sworn vows on my own wedding day.
Trying to sort this out, I brought up the question with Felipe. Now I should say here that Felipe was considerably more relaxed about all this than I was. While he didn’t hold any more affection for the institution of marriage than I did, he kept telling me, “At this point, darling, it’s all just a game. The government has set the rules and now we have to play their game in order to get what we want. Personally, I’m willing to play any game whatsoever, as long as it means that I ultimately can live my life with you in peace.”
That mode of thinking worked for him, but gamesmanship wasn’t what I was looking for here; I needed a certain level of earnestness and authenticity. Still, Felipe could see my agitation on this subject, and-God bless the man-he was kind enough to listen to me muse for quite a long while on the rival philosophies of Western civilization and how they were affecting my views on matrimony. But when I asked Felipe whether he felt himself to be more Greek or more Hebrew in his thinking, he replied, “Darling-none of this really applies to me.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I’m not Greek or Hebrew.”
“What are you then?”
“I’m Brazilian.”
“But what does that even mean?”
Felipe laughed. “Nobody knows! That’s the wonderful thing about being Brazilian. It doesn’t mean anything! So you can use your Brazilianness as an excuse to live your life any way you want. It’s a brilliant strategy, actually. It’s taken me far.”
“So how does that help me?”
“Perhaps it can help you to relax! You’re about to marry a Brazilian. Why don’t you start thinking like a Brazilian?”
“How?”
“By choosing what you want! That’s the Brazilian way, isn’t it? We borrow everyone’s ideas, mix it all up, and then we create something new out of it. Listen-what is it that you like so much about the Greeks?”
“Their sense of humanity,” I said.
“And what is it that you like-if anything-about the Hebrews?”
“Their sense of honor,” I said.
“Okay, so that’s settled-we’ll take them both. Humanity and honor. We’ll make a marriage out of that combination. We’ll call it a Brazilian blend. We’ll shape this thing to our own code.”
“Can we just do that?”
“Darling!” Felipe said, and he took my face between his hands with a sudden, frustrated urgency. “When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.”
Can we, though?
I prayed that Felipe was right, but I wasn’t sure. My deepest fear about marriage, when I dug right down to the very bottom of it, was that matrimony would end up shaping us far more than we could ever possibly shape it. All my months of studying marriage had only caused me to fear this potentiality more than ever. I had come to believe that matrimony as an institution was impressively powerful. It was certainly far bigger and older and deeper and more complicated than Felipe or I could ever possibly be. No matter how modern and sophisticated Felipe and I might feel, I feared we would step onto the assembly line of marriage and soon enough find ourselves molded into spouses- crammed into some deeply conventional shape that benefited society, even if it did not entirely benefit us.
All this was disquieting because, as annoying as it may sound, I do like to think of myself as vaguely bohemian. I’m not an anarchist or anything, but it does comfort me to regard my life in terms of a certain instinctive resistance to conformity. Felipe, to be honest, likes to think of himself in much the same way. Okay, let’s all be truthful here and admit that most of us probably like to think of ourselves in these terms, right? It’s charming, after all, to imagine oneself as an eccentric nonconformist, even when one has just purchased a coffeepot. So maybe the whole idea of bending under the convention of marriage stung a bit for me-stung at that stubborn old level of anti-authoritarian Greek pride. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would ever get around that issue.