Even Gloria Steinem, the very face of the American feminist movement, decided to get married for the first time in the year 2000. She was sixty-six years old on her wedding day and just as brilliant as ever; one has to assume she knew exactly what she was doing. To some of her followers, though, it felt like a betrayal, as though a saint had fallen from grace. But it’s important to note that Steinem herself saw her marriage as a celebration of feminism’s victories. As she explained, had she gotten married back in the 1950s, back when she was “supposed to,” she would have effectively become her husband’s chattel-or at the very most his clever helpmeet, like Phyllis the math whiz. By the year 2000, though, thanks in no small part to her own tireless efforts, marriage in America had evolved to the point where a woman could be both a wife and a human being, with all her civil rights and liberties intact. But Steinem’s decision still disappointed a lot of passionate feminists, who could not get over the stinging insult that their fearless leader had chosen a man over the collective sisterhood. Of all the souls in creation, even Gloria had elected one-and that decision left everybody else out.
But you cannot stop people from wanting what they want, and a lot of people, as it turns out, want intimacy with one special person. And since there is no such thing as intimacy without privacy, people tend to push back very hard against anybody or anything that interferes with the simple desire to be left alone with a loved one. Although authoritarian figures throughout history have tried to curb this desire, they can’t get us to quit it. We just keep insisting on the right to link ourselves up to another soul legally, emotionally, physically, materially. We just keep on trying, again and again, no matter how ill-advised it may be, to recreate Aristophanes’ two-headed, eight-limbed figure of seamless human union.
I see this urge playing out everywhere around me, and sometimes in the most surprising forms. Some of the most unconventional, heavily tattooed, antiestablishmentarian, and socially rebellious people I know get married. Some of the most sexually promiscuous people I know get married (often to disastrous effect-but still, they do try). Some of the most misanthropic people I know get married, despite what appears to be their equal-opportunity distaste for humanity. In fact, I know of very few people who haven’t attempted a long-term monogamous partnership at least once in their lives, in one form or another-even if they never legally or officially sealed those vows inside a church or a judge’s chambers. In fact, most people I know have experimented with long-term monogamous partnerships several times over-even if their hearts may have been utterly destroyed by this effort before.
Even Felipe and I-two dodgy survivors of divorce who prided ourselves on a certain degree of bohemian autonomy-had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved. Before we’d ever heard of Officer Tom, we had been living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship-and what do you call that, if not marriage? We’d even had a ceremony to seal our fidelity. (Hell, we’d had two!) We were shaping our lives in that particular form of partnership because we yearned for something. As so many of us do. We yearn for private intimacy even though it’s emotionally risky. We yearn for private intimacy even when we suck at it. We yearn for private intimacy even when it’s illegal for us to love the person we love. We yearn for private intimacy even when we are told that we should yearn for something else, something finer, something nobler. We just keep on yearning for private intimacy, and for our own deeply personal set of reasons. Nobody has ever been able to completely sort out that mystery, and nobody has ever been able to stop us from wanting it.
As Ferdinand Mount writes, “Despite all official efforts to downgrade the family, to reduce its role and even to stamp it out, men and women obstinately continue not merely to mate and produce children but to insist on living in pairs together.” (And I would add to this thought, by the way, that men and men also keep insisting on living in pairs together. And that women and women also keep insisting on living in pairs together. All of which just drives the authorities crazier still.)
Faced with this reality, repressive authorities always eventually surrender in the end, bowing at last to the inevitability of human partnership. But they don’t go down without a fight, those pesky powers-that-be. There is a pattern to their surrender, a pattern that Mount suggests is consistent across Western history. First, the authorities slowly glean that they are unable to stop people from choosing loyalty to a partner over allegiance to some higher cause, and that marriage is therefore not going away. But once they have given up trying to eliminate marriage, the authorities now attempt to control it by establishing all sorts of restrictive laws and limits around the custom. When the church fathers finally surrendered to matrimony’s existence in the Middle Ages, for instance, they immediately heaped on the institution a giant pile of tough new conditions: There would be no divorce; marriage would now be an inviolable holy sacrament; nobody would be allowed to marry outside of a priest’s purview; women must bow to the laws of coverture; etc. And then the church went a little crazy, trying to enforce all this control over marriage, right down to the most intimate level of private marital sexuality.
In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. “Sexual activity,” Brother Cherubino instructed, “should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation.” The wife could look at her husband’s private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and “never allow yourself, woman, to be seen in the nude by your husband.” And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not anywhere! “The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife,” Brother Cherubino lamented. “He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment…”
Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once the lovemaking was over-and this was perhaps the most threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression.