In the end, the couples tend to win.
Once the authorities have failed at eliminating marriage, and once they have failed at controlling marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. (Amusingly, Ferdinand Mount calls this the signing of a “one-sided peace treaty.”) But then comes an even more curious stage: Like clockwork, the powers-that-be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the Western world for several centuries now-acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values.
This is the pattern that happened with the Soviets and with the twentieth-century Chinese, too. First, the communists tried to eliminate marriage; then they tried to control marriage; then they fabricated an entirely new mythology claiming that “the family” had always been the backbone of good communistic society anyhow, don’t you know.
Meanwhile, throughout all this contorted history, throughout all the thrashing and frothing of dictators and despots and priests and bullies, people just keep on getting married-or whatever you want to call it at any given time. Dysfunctional and disruptive and ill-advised though their unions may be-or even secret, illegal, unnamed, and renamed-people continue to insist on merging with each other on their own terms. They cope with all the changing laws and work around all the limiting restrictions of the day in order to get what they want. Or they flat-out ignore all the limiting restrictions of the day! As one Anglican minister in the American colony of Maryland complained in 1750, if he had been forced to recognize as “married” only those couples who had legally sealed their vows in a church, he would have had to “bastardize nine-tenths of the People in this County.”
People don’t wait for permission; they go ahead and create what they need. Even African slaves in early America invented a profoundly subversive form of marriage called the “besom wedding,” in which a couple jumped over a broomstick stuck aslant in a doorway and called themselves married. And nobody could stop those slaves from making this hidden commitment in a moment of stolen invisibility.
Seen in this light, then, the whole notion of Western marriage changes for me-changes to a degree that feels quietly and personally revolutionary. It’s as if the entire historical picture shifts one delicate inch, and suddenly everything aligns itself into a different shape. Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals).
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. Because “they” (the powers-that-be) have never been entirely able to stop “us” (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so “they” eventually have no choice but to legally permit “us” to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.
So perhaps I’ve had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It’s like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
To a certain extent, then, Felipe was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.
Do I sound like I’m trying to talk myself into something here?
People, I am trying to talk myself into something here.
This entire book-every single page of it-has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself. Such comfort is not necessarily always an easy thing to find. On my friend Jean’s wedding day over thirty years ago, she asked her mother, “Do all brides feel this terrified when they’re about to get married?” and her mother replied, even as she calmly buttoned up her daughter’s white dress, “No, dear. Only the ones who are actually thinking.”
Well, I have been thinking very hard about all this. The leap into marriage has not come easily for me, but perhaps it shouldn’t be easy. Perhaps it’s fitting that I needed to be persuaded into marriage-even vigorously persuaded-especially because I am a woman, and because matrimony has not always treated women kindly.
Some cultures seem to understand the need for feminine marital persuasion better than others. In some cultures, the task of vigorously enticing a woman to accept a marriage proposal has evolved into a ceremony, or even an art form, in its own right. In Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere, a powerful tradition still dictates that a young man who wants to marry a young woman must publicly serenade his lover outside her home. He must beg for her hand in song, right out there in the open where everyone can witness it. Of course, a lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.
The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved’s house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman’s window and belt out-in loud, rough, local dialect-a song with the decidedly unromantic title “Roma, nun fa’la stupida stasera!” (”Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!”) Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn’t dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it’s too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.
“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” the young man sings beneath the girl’s window. “Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!”
When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-participation portion of the evening’s entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, “Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!”
Then the young woman herself-the object of desire-comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.