Episode 15 - Marriage
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
who are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
Ellie: 0:29
So David, we decided to be a little cutesy for February and do a four-part series on intimate relationships to go along with Valentine's day.
David: 0:40
Scary! Also, pretty exciting.
Ellie: 0:43
You can listen to them in any order, and you don't have to listen to them all, but they do follow nicely one from the other.
David: And they will be: 0:50
marriage, monogamy, open relationships, and polyamory.
Ellie: 0:56
We decided to focus on relationship structure. So we're talking about forms of intimate relationships, rather than, say, the feelings that go along with them. Although those will come up a little bit, and some of the other elements that go into intimacy. We'll talk about that in other episodes.
David: 1:12
Today, we're talking about marriage. Historically, the majority of adult Americans have been married, but among our generation of millennials, less than half are married. So we are marrying less, we are marrying later, we are marrying more weakly, you know, whatever adjective you want to use for this. And this is perhaps a little bit surprising given that it's only within the past few years that marriage has been opened up, for example, to you same sex couples, thus giving a lot more people the opportunity to get married, but it seems like millennials are not taking the bait. Why do you think millennials, Ellie, are not getting married?
Ellie: 1:54
Oh my God. I mean, so many reasons. Part of it is economic, right? We don't really have money to get married. Weddings on average costs, $30,000 in the US, and, in addition to that, I think a lot of us are about the institution of marriage. Many of us have divorced or separated parents. We feel like this myth of true love forever is kind of toxic. Then again, the idea of throwing a big party and getting a bunch of gifts, pretty appealing, as do the tax breaks.
David: 2:28
I'm going to just tell people that I'm getting married, that I registered at some fancy store, and then I'm getting divorced immediately the next day. Cause you, you don't have to return the gift if it's actually a divorce, rather than a marriage that didn't take place. That's my interpretation. That's my interpretation. And I'm sticking with it.
Ellie: 2:45
Hilarious. So, should we take it, David, that you don't want to get married?
David: 2:49
So I have a very strong aversion to the concept of marriage and to the practice of it as well. Every time I've been married, I've hated it.
Ellie: 2:59
All 10 times. Just kidding you guys, David's never been married.
David: 3:01
Yeah, no, I've never been married, and I can say pretty confidently that I will never get married.
Ellie: 3:07
Wow. See, I'm not so sure. As a feminist critical of marriage, I have a lot of issues with the institution. At the same time, I'm sort of one of those people who's like, "Look, if you are living in a society where something is super highly valued and you have access to it and it's not going to directly harm other people for you to take advantage, why not?"
David: 3:30
But won't it directly affect other people, if you agree with the feminist critique of marriage?
Ellie: 3:36
It could lead to perpetuation of it, but I think that's a gamble that I may be willing to take. I'm just not sure. I've also talked with my partner about doing a yearly fake honeymoon where we just go on a vacation and pretend we're on a honeymoon and try and see how many free meals we can get.
David: 3:53
Between your fake honeymoon and my fake getting registered at a fancy store, we are embodying the millennial attitude toward marriage. Kind of want the benefits, but we don't really want the institutional baggage.
Ellie: 4:06
Yes, because as we'll talk about later today, marriage confers all sorts of legal benefits upon those who undertake it.
David: 4:16
In this episode, we're talking about marriage.
Ellie: 4:19
Marriage is an institution that has existed for thousands of years, but its popularity is waning.
David: 4:25
Is there a future for marriage and should there be?
Ellie: 4:29
What can philosophy tell us about the relationship between marriage and love?
David: 4:33
Because the two are not the same.
Ellie: 4:36
They are perhaps not a happy couple. Marriage has existed for a long time among humans, but it's taken tons of different forms over time. Marriage began around 10,000 years ago as a form of securing land and property among sedentary, agricultural societies. Basically a bunch of people settled down, were hanging out on their farms, and were like, "Look, when I die, I want my land to be passed on to somebody who is my own offspring." The children of marriages thus were considered rightful heirs.
David: 5:09
Yeah. And so from the very beginning, marriage has been tied to bearing children, to private property, and to determining who a rightful heir to that property might be.
Ellie: 5:20
Absolutely. And over time, as societies developed and became more and more large scale, marriage started to get regulated more and more by the state. Many laws give married people major advantages. You get tax breaks, Social Security benefits, immigration status. In fact, in the US today, married people actually have over 1,000 federal rights that unmarried people lack. So you and I are at a major disadvantage, David.
David: 5:49
That's so many. Like a ton-
Ellie: 5:52
So many!
David: 5:52
of Bill of Rights'.
Ellie: 5:54
I know, I know.
David: 5:56
Come on, where is my single people pride march?
Ellie: 5:58
Right? In addition, marriage has been an important tool of biopolitics, which is the regulation and production of the human species. And it also involves separating the normal, things like rightful heirs and sexual fidelity, especially for women, from the abnormal or wrong, the bastard, the cuckold, the cheater.
David: 6:21
#TheCuckold.. I think that's going to be my new screen name on all my dating profiles. #TheCuckold.
Ellie: 6:31
Hot!
David: 6:32
I just found out that there was a whole arm of the pornography industry-
Ellie: 6:36
Porn? Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. And so I think that's a great example here of the way that marriage exists by virtue of its relation to its abnormal others. Marriage serves to normalize, it serves to enforce, whether it's heterosexuality, patriarchy, classism, racism. It is a super useful tool in the arsenal of biopolitics, especially re- not to mention reproduction.
David: 7:02
I mean, but with that being said, if we look at the history of marriage, we also find some interesting little tidbits of information, right? We find the fact that there have been polyamorous, or polygamous, structures for a long time, uh, things that by today's standards maybe would seem kind of radical and left-leaning now, uh, you know, same sex marriage.
Ellie: 7:22
At least in the US.
David: 7:23
Or in the West, more generally. So for example, same-sex marriage existed in ancient societies like Mesopotamia and ancient Rome. Um, I think Nero, the emperor, was married to a dude, if I'm not mistaken.
Ellie: 7:36
Yes. Although that is a really weird example here because he actually- Nero murdered his wife, and then he married one of his slaves who had an uncanny resemblance to his wife, castrated the slave, and the slave wore the clothes of the Empress and be called Empress.
David: 7:58
#Cuckold.
Ellie: 7:59
No, no, no!
David: 8:00
This is way too creepy. I actually don't really know what a cuckold is, so I shouldn't be-
Ellie: 8:04
Oh-
David: 8:04
using it.
Ellie: 8:05
A cuckold is a man whose wife cheats on him.
David: 8:07
Ah, okay. So yeah, totally wrong usage there, but that's super intense.
Ellie: 8:12
I know. Yeah. And so the existence of same-sex marriage in ancient Rome, for instance, isn't just like, "Oh my God, look, they were so progressive," but you're absolutely right, David, that there have been queer forms of marriage that have existed in various points in various places throughout history.
David: 8:26
Although I have to say, as a queer critic of marriage, I'm like, "Hmm, that's why we shouldn't have gay marriage."
Ellie: 8:34
Yes, which I definitely want to come back to. And so there are these examples of different forms of marriage over time. I think the through line is that marriage historically has functioned primarily as a way of perpetuating land ownership, regardless of the genders and numbers of the people married. It's also overwhelmingly been a tool of patriarchy. It's associated with women being treated as property. A father gives his daughter over in marriage, which you see through traditions like asking the father for his daughter's hand in marriage, women are just kind of passed around on the market and are valued primarily for their ability to bear children, to bear rightful heirs. And the patriarchal history of marriage might seem pretty distant to us, but in fact, it exists still to the present day and in pretty extreme ways. For instance, marital rape was still legal in some parts of the US until 1993.
David: 9:29
A lot of people don't know that. It's until quite recently that the law even recognized the concept that you could rape your wife. It was just assumed that, by definition, it couldn't happen. And when we think about the politics of marriage, it's also important not to lose sight of what you mentioned earlier, which is biopolitics, because marriage has also been a major tool of racial oppression that is often tied to eugenics. So one major concern, for example, in the 19th century that people had, when determining who they would get married to or not, was ways to avoid having what was called degenerates, a term that included a whole bunch of people that were deemed abnormal, but even more specifically in connection to race, as of 1958, the vast majority of Americans-- I'm here talking about 94%-- disapproved of marriage between whites and blacks.
Ellie: 10:24
That is unbelievable.
David: 10:25
Yeah, that's like our parents generation.
Ellie: 10:27
Let that sink in for a second. 1958, 94% of Americans disapproved of marriage between whites and blacks.
David: 10:34
Yeah. And if you look even a little bit further back to the institution of slavery, because slaves were considered legally property, they were not allowed to marry. And so all the things that are associated with marriage, like if we want to say love, or reproduction, were effectively controlled by slave owners, who often had these manuals, they were called plantation manuals, about how to effectively reproduce slaves, and run their emotional and sexual lives for them, as if they were animals.
Ellie: 11:07
Well, and they were allowed to marry, just not legally, which I think is an important nuance here because part of the legacy of colonialism, as well as the history of slavery, in an enforced monogamy, and the idea that monogamy codified in marriage in particular exemplifies a higher state of the human being, and so it's part of our progress or evolution as a species to be married. So there's a way that a slave owner on the one hand, be able to perpetuate norms of monogamy by suggesting to those that they enslaved that marriage is a good thing, and on the other hand say, "Well, we don't legally recognize your union, and so I can sell you to somebody else and keep your husband on my plantation."
David: 11:49
Yeah.
Ellie: 11:50
So all of this goes to show that marriage has historically been an institution that's much more tied to economics and biopolitics than it is to personal feelings. The association of marriage with love through what we know is the love match is relatively recent, as we'll say, in a moment, it originates in the 19th century, but there are some claims that over different periods of human history, love and marriage have, even if temporarily, been tied together, wedded, if you will. David, I figured you'd probably have some thoughts on this, given your work on Foucault.
David: 12:24
Well, yes, because Foucault wrote a four volume series on the history of sexuality, where he talks about the development of sexuality and sexual practices from antiquity all the way to the 19th century. And one of the things that he discusses is the evolution of marriage. And so he makes an interesting argument about the origins of this ideal of conjugal love, this notion that when you enter into a marriage contract or into a marriage agreement, you're not simply entering into an economic arrangement, you are entering into an emotionally charged dynamic with somebody who is supposed to be quote unquote your other half, right? That you're supposed to have found, in marriage, your soulmate. And according to him, and this notion of conjugal love emerges at the beginning of the common era, in the first couple of centuries after Christ. He dates it specifically to the Roman period, but argues that we actually see the beginnings in the Hellenistic period, especially in Hellenistic Egypt.
Ellie: 13:29
That's interesting because, as somebody who works a lot on feminist critiques of love and marriage, most historians and sociologists say that conjugal love doesn't emerge until much later, in the 19th century. So what sort of evidence is Foucault drawing on for the idea of conjugal love back in the Roman period?
David: 13:46
Yeah. So the question of evidence here is important because he is working against a broad consensus about when this notion of romance or romantic marriage emerges. And so he draws on a bunch of evidence, but three pieces of evidence are important. One of them is he looks at the actual clauses in marriage contracts, and compares those that are found before the Hellenistic period, so in Classical Greece, and those that start emerging in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. And so he says, if you look at marriage contracts from the Greek period, they are extremely asymmetrical, right? They are an expression of Greek patriarchy. All the obligations go from the wife to the husband and there is nothing coming back the other way. Some of them would say things like the wife is not allowed to leave the house without the permission of the husband, um, you know, like that level of control of women's bodies. And because women are simply property, as you pointed out, that are passed between father and husband, they're not even illegal subject of a marriage agreement, they don't appear in it except as objects.
Ellie: 14:55
Yes.
David: 14:56
And by the time you get to the Hellenistic period, and then the Roman period, you notice a change in the actual writing of these contracts. Suddenly, husbands started acquiring certain obligations in relation to their wives. So there is now a kind of reciprocity that enters into these contracts, and suddenly, for the first time, at least from a legal perspective, women appear as legal subjects who either consent or don't consent. So there's a kind of becoming free of marriage and reciprocal, even if it's not, of course, entirely equal. And according to Foucault, this is because you start seeing the birth of this notion that a marriage is more than a transference of property. There is a conjugal dynamic, an emotional bond, that must exist between the husband and the wife.
Ellie: 15:47
But where does that idea come from? Or does he not make claims about that?
David: 15:52
Well, his argument is precisely that it comes from changes in the institution of marriage. So it's not as-
Ellie: 15:58
But that seems to be begging the question, right? Because the idea would be that there are changes to the institution of marriage because people's conception of marriage changes, but then people's conception of marriage changes because the contracts change.
David: 16:11
Well, and I think that's largely right about social phenomena, that it's not as if there is an idea that drives historical change and then material practices reflect that. I think that's too idealistic in the technical philosophical sense. I do think there is this, almost reciprocal, almost like a virtuous cycle, where the changing of institutions creates the possibility for new forms of interaction that then take on meaning once they are made possible by those material conditions.
Ellie: 16:39
Certainly. I have questions about the ideology at work there, but we'll leave that for now. It seems to be a chicken and egg problem perhaps.
David: 16:47
Yeah, no, I think that's right, that it's a catch-22 situation, but maybe we can think about Foucault merely as describing the moment when it appears and giving us evidence of the fact that this conjugal idea is emerging. Because aside from looking at marriage contracts, he looks at two other pieces of evidence. He looks at the inscriptions on the tombs of people, like in the cemetery. Um, and so it's in the Hellenistic period, and in the Roman period, that for the first time you start seeing people getting buried with engravings that refer to their internal love for their spouse. You would have never seen that before, certainly not in the Greek period. And so he says, obviously something is a foot here, because now the marriage relationship is something that is somehow meant to transcend even the here and now. And the feminist classicist Sarah Pomeroy wrote a wonderful little book about this in the 1970s called Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, which I recently found out is one of the first books on women's history, you know, in the 1970s.
Ellie: 17:58
Also a bad-ass title.
David: 17:59
Yeah, I know that- yeah, exactly.
Let's repeat it: 18:01
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. And she's the one that actually points out this pattern on tomb inscriptions.
Ellie: 18:10
Wait. So she did it before Foucault, or after? Cause I know he's writing in the 70's too.
David: 18:13
No. So she's writing before Foucault and Foucault cites from her.
Ellie: 18:17
Cool.
David: 18:18
Yeah.
Ellie: 18:19
And what's the third piece of evidence?
David: 18:21
Love letters. Foucault points out that, by the second century of the common era, evidence gets passed down through history in the form of documents of husbands writing letters to their wives, especially when they are away doing military service, for example.
Ellie: 18:36
Manly stuff, you know.
David: 18:38
Yeah, you know, manly stuff as part of the Roman Imperial project, where to go and conquer and vanquish a bunch of people, and then you miss your wife. And so you write a letter in which you reflect on your other half. There are no such things in the Greek period, would never write a love letter to their wives.
Ellie: 18:59
Only to boys.
David: 19:00
Exactly right. They would write it to young boys, between 14 and 17 is the age. And so for Foucault, these three pieces of evidence: the contracts, the tombs, and the love letters that we find in the Roman period, but not in the Classical period, are evidence that there is what he calls a new marriage tie.
Ellie: 19:21
But it must not have lasted very long, right? Cause then we get to the Middle Ages and Christianity codifies the treatment of women as property and a very traditional economic notion of marriage that's actually not that tied to love. There still is a love ideal there, but it's very much love as in service to God, which we will talk about in the monogamy episode when we talk about courtly love. But I think that is to say this ideal then gets buried again, right? And it doesn't emerge until the Romantic period at the end of the 18th century and really flowers in the 19th century.
David: 19:55
And so the point here is that that ideal that is eclipsed in the Middle Ages was already there in the first place in order for it to be eclipsed and taken over by other forces, whereas in the Classical period, it doesn't exist at all. So if I were to ask a Greek, "Do you deeply love your wife? Is she the one?" You'd be like, "Well, she's the one wife that I have. I don't understand the question," because the function of having a wife was simply to run a household and to have legitimate children. That's it. Love doesn't enter the equation. But I think you're right that then it resurfaces in the 19th century, which is, you know, the century of conjugal love.
Ellie: 20:39
Yeah. And historians point to a few reasons why suddenly, in the 19th century, marriage becomes more about personal feeling than it does about economics. For instance, Anthony Giddens writes a famous book called The Transformation of Intimacy that is about this, and there are also a lot of feminists who've written about this, including Francesca Cancian and Eva Illouz. In the 19th century, especially among the bourgeoisie, the ideal of personal feeling starts to come up, and that comes in part through the philosophy of Romanticism, which emphasizes a private sphere and a connection to nature, right, an emphasis on the natural, but also, the rise of the romantic love ideal has to be associated with the relative liberation of women. If you think that women and men are hopelessly unequal, then it's hard to see how you could conceptualize a married couple being passionately in love, right? As Shulamith Firestone writes in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex, falling in love with a woman as a man requires an alteration of male vision because you have to bring the woman up to the level where she's no longer considered the peer of other women, because you think that women are inferior to you, right? And so you have to have some sort of relative exceptional-
David: 21:57
Lift her to manhood or what, like to the level of men?
Ellie: 22:00
Uh, you have to lift her perhaps to the level of an idol, so she's actually not even human at all, right? Because if you are a man living in a patriarchal society and women are seen as beneath you, then it doesn't make a lot of sense for you to fall in love with one of them, right. And so, I mean, Firestone concludes that men, even in 1970, can't love, but whether or not there is actual equality nowadays, certainly in the 19th century, women start to see a relative level of liberation, in particular bourgeois women. There's so an emphasis on class mobility that starts to emerge, especially in the 20th century. So the 20th century latches on to this new love ideal, and starts to extend it past the bourgeoisie to other classes. And you start to get marriage across classes, although that's still relatively uncommon, even in the present day. Most people marry within their same class, but in any case, people start going out on dates, they start seeing more individuals from different backgrounds as options. Queen Victoria, for instance, called her marriage to Prince Albert a love match. She really was vaunting this ideal of conjugal love, of being married to the one that you love.
David: 23:09
Yeah. I read a history book about how they both matched on Tinder. Yeah.
Ellie: 23:16
Oh my God. God
David: 23:20
Even if we see marriage taking on this emotional dimension of feeling both arguably in the Hellenistic and the Roman period, and then also in the 19th century, marriage and love have often been opposed to one another in the eyes of a lot of philosophers. And this has to do with the fact that marriage does start as an economic institution, and so a lot of the philosophers have worried that by its very nature, it kills love and cannot live with it, it cannot foster it.
Ellie: 23:51
So the marriage, so to speak, of love and marriage has often been an uneasy one. I love Kierkegaard's point on this, which Beauvoir also quotes in The Second Sex. Kierkegaard says that reconciling love and marriage is so hard that it requires divine intervention in order to work.
David: 24:09
Well, I mean, thankfully Kierkegaard was his own version of Christian, so maybe he did believe he was going to get it.
Ellie: 24:14
Well-
David: 24:15
Beauvoir not so much.
Ellie: 24:16
he dramatically ended his engagement, and remained unmarried for the course of his life. Let's think about this idea. Can love and marriage coexist?
David: 24:35
Enjoying Overthink? Please take a minute and rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So given what we've said about marriage and its history, we can see that it's an institution that is not inherently about love, at least not historically. What do you think about this Ellie?
Ellie: 25:08
Well, as somebody who wants love, and thinks that love is very important, this worries me a lot. And you know, I look at people who've been married a long time and I see that a lot of their ways of living haven't fostered respect or care, let alone love. So it sounds really nice to me to have somebody to build a life with in a committed way, and I understand how marriage codifies that, plus like the benefits of marriage from a legal standpoint, as we said are very appealing.
David: 25:34
A thousand rights!
Ellie: 25:36
Yes. I would say that I'm very skeptical of marriage. In the case of my own upbringing, I was raised to believe that my parents had an extraordinarily happy marriage and that all was well. And then as an adult, my dad came out of the closet and had a very different narrative around his reasons for getting married. He talked a lot about how he wanted to get married because at the time, in the 1980s, that seemed like the only valid way that he could start a family and have children while also being socially accepted. I also grew up in a Christian context where homosexuality is vilified, and at the time that I was growing up, obviously same-sex marriage was not allowed. So I think here about how the institution of marriage, and particularly its prevalence in our society, forced my dad into a situation that might not have fostered his wellbeing, even though he and my mother had a very special relationship that is ongoing even now that they're separated.
David: 26:35
This highlights an important point, which is that people are socially pressured into entering an institution that maybe, if they had more choices, they wouldn't choose to enter. When I think about the people in my life, growing up in Mexico, most of the marriages that I saw were hyper hyper traditional marriages in which women were expected to be in complete obedience of their husbands. And so I remember my grandmother describing marriage, quite frequently, as a cross that she had to bear.
Ellie: 27:09
Oh, wow.
David: 27:10
A metaphor of crucifixion, and it's something that you just enter and you never leave. And so growing up with these models of marriage, I became very, very cynical about marriage, and I remain very cynical which is why I said earlier I can say very confidently that I will not marry.
Ellie: 27:30
Will you come to my wedding, if I have one, though?
David: 27:32
Oh, yeah. I mean, you and I came up with the idea of this podcast while attending a wedding of two close friends, um-
Ellie: 27:40
Who are, who have great politics, are feminists, you know, et cetera.
David: 27:43
Yeah. And so I don't want it to come across as if I believe that you've done something wrong or irredeemable if you've entered into a marriage contract, it's just that for me, it carries too much psychological trauma from childhood in terms of seeing certain marriages and me being unable to look beyond them. Um, not to mention the fact that as a matter of principle, I do object to the idea married people getting more rights merely on account of being married.
Ellie: 28:12
Oh, definitely. and I think that's part of the trouble for me is that I do live in a society where there are all of these benefits to being married. And part of me is like, why would I not seek those if I can? I'm grubby opportunist. Ah, I know, but I mean, this is, but this has always the constant issue with being critical of the system, but having to live within it, right? Um, the kinds of ethical choices that we make are important for helping set an example, but I don't want to be under the illusion that my decision not to marry would suddenly transform the institution. I just don't have that much power, in the same way that I occasionally buy stuff on Amazon, even though I'm very opposed to Amazon's business principles.
David: 28:54
Yeah, and I think you're right that we pick and choose our battles. And, for me, marriage is an important battle. It's something that has caused some tension in past relationships where people didn't understand why I feel so, so strongly to something that maybe they didn't see as that big of a deal, because it's just signing a piece of paper. It doesn't mean that much. For me, it does mean a lot. And in other episodes, we've talked about my aversion to promising emotions, this is an effect of that as well.
Ellie: 29:28
Yeah. I mean, I think here, when we think about the philosophy underpinning marriage, marriage presupposes a lifelong commitment to another person following what you just said, David. You know, it sounds like you don't think that that kind of lifelong commitment is even possible. I am less opposed to that. I do think that there are certain lifelong commitments that are important for us to make, and that can be quite compelling and beautiful, even. So I'm not opposed to marriage from the standpoint of the lifelong commitment factor. I do think that one thing that comes up a lot for me is the hypocrisy of marriage. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who is best known for very dry analytic philosophy, actually wrote a book in 1929 called Marriage and Morals, where he talks about how marriage has historically been associated with tons of hypocrisy. So it claims, for instance, to be a satisfying relation among equal parties, but in practice, it's been very destructive for women. And so if you think, for instance, about the condemnation of adultery within marriage, marriage supposedly says that both men and women should not cheat on their partners, but in practice, husbands have gotten to cheat on their wives with pretty much no consequences over the course of a lot of history. Women have been condemned, even killed for doing so.
David: 30:55
And accused of cheating, even when they're not cheating.
Ellie: 30:59
Absolutely.
David: 31:00
Men are like running the streets and accusing women of doing that. I found out, after my grandfather died, that he used to follow my grandmother around all the time, because he was convinced that she was cheating on him, even though it's well-known that he cheated on her all the time.
Ellie: 31:20
Yeah. And so there's this possessiveness of women, and a policing of their behavior, has been permitted through structures of marriage over time. Our ideals of marriage also tends to promote the idea that your partner will fulfill all of your emotional needs. And I think that's just really unrealistic. In practice, it tends to put much more pressure on women than on men, because women are expected to do the emotional work for both themselves and men, but even taking out the gender component of it, I think it's extremely dangerous to expect somebody else to be the center of your world, and to think that your relationship with them can satisfy you a hundred percent.
David: 32:01
And yet, even though that's a very intuitive claim, a lot of philosophers continue to idealize marriage into a higher synthesis as if this ideal fits the reality, even though I think we have very good reason to believe that it does not.
Ellie: 32:19
Yeah. And I think Hegel, the early 19th century philosopher whom we talked about in our episode on masks, is a great example of this. So he says that marriage is not just a contract or a social institution, but he also says it's not just a mere expression of personal subjective feeling either. Instead, marriage is something in between. It is an ethical relationship where people consent to depend on each other. I give up parts of my freedom in entering a marriage, but Hegel says that I actually get my freedom back and I am even more free than before through marriage, because suddenly I have this meaningful relationship with another person that also allows me to depend on them and gives me social recognition, and Hegel thinks this is really beautiful. Marriage transforms the passing feelings of love into a self-conscious, permanent commitment. So he says that in the wedding, decision & inclination combine.
David: 33:23
What does that mean? Decision and inclination combine?
Ellie: 33:27
Basically the idea that a rational commitment or a contractual relation as figured through the decision, combines with my personal inclination, my desire, my passion. And so marriage is a blending of the public and private, and it's also a blending of the present and future.
David: 33:49
You know what is also blending is Hegel's genitalia with the genitalia of his landlord's wife, because he had illegitimate child. So even for all his writings- Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. So speaking about Bertrand Russell's thesis about the hypocrisy of marriage, you know, here's Hegel talking about the unity of the private and the public and the coalescing of decision and inclination, and again, he's having sex with the wife of his landlord behind his back.
Ellie: 34:16
Yes. I have to say, I read Hegel on marriage, I'm very taken in because I think it's beautiful, and yet, Hegel is such a perfect example of the hypocrisy and ideology of 19th century marriage that we continue to see today, whether it's through the implicit acceptance of cheating by men, or also through this idea that the love match might seem to be pure, but always in the background is the specter of the reproduction of the nuclear family. Hegel actually goes so far as to say that we have a duty to get married. And part of that is because of the ability for self-realization in liberation marriage, but also it's partly because marriage for him symbolizes the creation of a family.
David: 34:59
No that's right. Yeah. And the notion of being obliged to get married is something that he picks up from earlier Stoics, who had this theory that by nature, human beings naturally want to pair up, and so if you want to live according to nature, which is the Stoic understanding of happiness, then you have an obligation: get married.
Ellie: 35:21
Which is just like so wild, because the idea that marriage is natural couldn't be more farfetched.
David: 35:27
Yeah, exactly.
Ellie: 35:28
May be good, but it's certainly not natural.
David: 35:30
But at least this would support Foucault's argument that in the Roman period, which is when the Stoics were writing, that's when you have the notion of conjugal love emerging, it's that ideal that allows marriage to be naturalized.
Ellie: 35:45
So whether we think about marriage as a duty we need to undertake to live in accordance with nature, or we think about it as the embodiment of a loving commitment to another, it's clear that the history of marriage is somewhat dark.
David: 36:00
This makes me wonder, what's the future of marriage? Is it an outmoded institution nowadays or can it continue to be an important form of social relationships?
Ellie: 36:11
Does marriage have a future? Well, a few years ago, when debates around marriage equality were raging in the US and many other countries, a number of queer theorists spoke out against it. And I remember being really shocked by this in graduate school, when I heard that queer theorists were against same-sex marriage, but their claim was that we shouldn't be extend marriage to same-sex couples because marriage itself is the problem. If marriage is an essentially a oppressive institution, we shouldn't be seeking to perpetuate it by making it available to more and more people. And I remember in particular a debate in Australia that was televised by the BBC that featured two speakers for same-sex marriage and two against it. And on the against same-sex marriage side were a conservative white man and then prominent queer theorist, Annamarie Jagose, and Jagose basically said, look, we need to get rid of marriage, and so I'm against same-sex marriage. Let's not legalize it in Australia. It has since been legalized in Australia, but that was her point. What do you think about this, David?
David: 37:28
Well, most queer theorists that I know and most radical queers that I know are opposed to the institution of marriage, and they don't believe that queer liberation hinges on the right to marry. And this has led a number of people, for example, to draw a distinction between the mainstream gay liberation movement that really staked its future on the acquisition of this right and more separatist, uh, radical dimensions of the queer community that are calling for a very different kind of future that is less heteronormative. And that doesn't look like the same as before, but with two dudes or two women.
Ellie: 38:11
Yes, because part of the point that Jagose makes is that focusing on same-sex marriage is actually taking resources away from much more important liberatory projects that the queer community could benefit from much more. And if you think about, you know, the stereotyped versions of same-sex marriage that we've received in the media in recent years, they often are extremely heteronormative. You might think about Mitch and Cam in Modern Family. And it's like, one is sort of the dad and one is sort of the mom, right. And even when it's not that explicitly heteronormative, there is this ideal of buying a home, setting up, settling down-
David: 38:47
Yeah. The kind of life you live is a life that many other people have lived and that is prescribed people to live.
Ellie: 38:56
And so, again, we're not saying here that now that same-sex marriage is legalized, people shouldn't pursue it, nor that they shouldn't buy houses if that's available to them or have children, this isn't about a personal condemnation, but it's more about naming the broader structures that are at play here and showing how the expansion of heteronormativity and a nuclear family ideal to people than it was available to before is not intrinsically a good thing.
David: 39:22
Yeah. And a lot of queer theorists worried, and I think this was one of my main worries about gay marriage, that the passage of gay marriage would effectively de-politicize entire sections of the queer, gay community. Because there are a lot of mainstream gay people out there who were just waiting for the right to marry so that in many ways they could start voting Republican and move to the center, right? Like they're not-
Ellie: 39:49
Yeah.
David: 39:50
leftists, they're not progressive.
Ellie: 39:52
The Buttigieg
David: 39:52
Yeah.
Ellie: 39:52
Not that he became a Republican, but
David: 39:56
Yeah, exactly right. I think were to select a spokesperson for this assimilationist arm of the gay community, like it would be Pete Buttigieg.
Ellie: 40:08
Yeah. Well, so should we throw out the baby with the bath water? Should we get rid of marriage?
David: 40:13
Yes. Throw the baby out, drown the baby in the bath water before you throw anything out, just to make sure it's dead.
Ellie: 40:21
So you, so you don't think that there are any queer, feminist kinds of marriage that might live on? And I say this as an open question, as somebody who struggles with this myself, I'm not sure.
David: 40:34
I've seen some interesting marriage ceremonies, but most of them have happened outside of the reach of the state, so they're not even recognized as legitimate marriages. So a few years ago I attended a marriage in the woods by two radical fairies in Tennessee.
Ellie: 40:49
I remember your radical fairies phase.
David: 40:51
Yeah, and I was like, you know a pagan wedding between two queer, gender-bending, radical fairies, I can get behind that. But again, it doesn't actually register a marriage in our society, but there are some people who have suggested reforms to the institution of marriage, and who tried to salvage this institution by making it a little bit less problematic. So if you held my feet to the fire and said, David, what would it take for you to agree to an institution of marriage that's not so horrible, I think I would point to the concept of minimal marriage, which was developed by the feminist theorist, Elizabeth Brake. Brake points out that there are a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions in the institution of marriage, precisely because of what you mentioned earlier, Ellie, this notion that one person must fulfill all the functions associated with marriage. It's supposed to be your best friend, it's supposed to be the person you want to have children with, it's supposed to-
Ellie: 41:57
Your sexual partner-
David: 41:59
your sexual partner, et cetera.
Ellie: 42:00
turns you on.
David: 42:01
Yeah. And so it's almost as if-
Ellie: 42:03
Maybe your mommy and daddy? Oof.
David: 42:06
Okay. You see, this is why people shouldn't get married because this is what they're ultimately looking for.
Ellie: 42:12
Your pet.
David: 42:15
No, but she makes the argument that maybe we can change marriage to make it more palatable. And she says, in fact, more just. When she talks about minimal marriage, she means two things. The first one is that the state has absolutely no business determining the sex or the number of partners that one can have in a marriage. So it should be opened up, to, of course, consenting adults, but you can not put restrictions on sex or number. And the second point is that the state should not require complete symmetry in what she calls the distribution of rights and benefits associated with marriage.
Ellie: 42:57
Say more more about that.
David: 42:59
So let me give a very concrete illustration. We've already established that people who get married get a ton of rights that people who don't get married don't have. And so, for example, I have the kind of job where I have health insurance and my health insurance entitles me to coverage for my spouse, if I am married. So I effectively have a plus one benefit for my health insurance. Now, I have a partner who also has a job that already insures him. And who's job also gives him a plus one if he were married. And so in this case, because of who I'm dating, I don't actually use my plus one. And Elizabeth Brake says, "Why couldn't you transfer that plus one that you have to somebody else in your adult network of care, in such a way that it would actually fulfill the function that it's supposed to fulfill." So, if I'm dating a partner who doesn't need health insurance, but let's say my mother, who is equally central to my conception of the good life, and whose wellbeing is very important to me, why couldn't I take my plus one give it to her? Why can't she be my plus one on my health insurance plan?
Ellie: 44:14
Wow! That is so cool.
David: 44:16
Yeah. And so one, for all benefits, we should be able to take all the benefits of marriage and actually place them where they make sense, given the specific outlook of our adult network of care. And so, for example, it could be that I am married to somebody with whom I don't have children, and that in fact, I have children with somebody outside of my marriage. It's quite common. And so all the benefits associated with children, that are effects of marriage, don't make sense when I can't claim them for my children. So maybe I should be able to transfer some of those rights person who is the father or mother of my children, rather than to my legal spouse.
Ellie: 45:00
Wow. Yeah. And I think that really hints at, you know, the fact that, if we are thinking about marriage more and more in terms of a personal expression of love, then maybe we should decouple its benefits from the economic, right?
David: 45:17
Well and that decoupling is essential for Brake's analysis, because she says, historically, it's been assumed that the person that you marry, is the same person that you love, is the same person that you want making end of life decisions for you, and so on and so forth.
Ellie: 45:31
Yeah.
David: 45:31
But our lives are much more messy, much more complicated, than that.
Ellie: 45:35
And health insurance is hard as hell to get in US.
David: 45:38
Exactly. I mean, my mother is one of those 30 million Americans who doesn't have health insurance. So if I were marry my partner, Rabih, I should be able to give her my plus one health insurance, but I'm not. And so there is an inconsistency in the way in which we approach marriage, according to Brake, which is that we justify all these privileges and all these benefits associated with being married on the basis of things that accompany marriage, but are not equivalent to it, like having children. If that's really the case, then we should focus on those things. And so the rights-
Ellie: 46:15
Yeah.
David: 46:15
should attach to having children, not to being married.
Ellie: 46:19
Yeah, but then I wonder whether that doesn't lead us to a conclusion where marriage actually just has no place at all. It comes to be a meaningless term. We can move on to talk about more inchoate or anarchic forms of human connection and blur the lines between different people in the roles that they play in our lives, no longer seeing a single person as best friend, co-parent, sexual partner, next of kin, et cetera. Another contemporary philosopher, Carrie Jenkins, goes a little bit in this direction in her book What Love Is, where she writes that she suspects that one way that love will change in the near future is that marriage will become less important and people will move away from it, especially lifelong marriage, to what she calls serial temporary monogamy. She points out that people are increasingly disillusioned by marriage's expectation that it be forever. And you can see this in rising divorce rates. So it's actually only in the late 1960s that, in the US, what are called no fault divorces were legally permitted in every state. And so the no fault divorce is the idea that, you know, it just didn't work out for us. You don't need to have done something wrong in order for me to divorce you. This rise of no fault divorces is associated with a view of marriage that starts to center around self-fulfillment, so in the late 1960s, in the 1970s, you get the rise of the sort of self-help mentality in America that had already been seeded in a number of ways in previous decades. People start to see marriage as a way to develop themselves, as to become the best version of who they are. There's a kind of therapeutic mindset involved. And Jenkins says, look, marriages are usually not even lifelong anymore anyway. And so we might as well recognize that, and start to see serial temporary monogamous relationships as the future, because to some extent that's what we're already doing. Now, Jenkins herself doesn't necessarily think that that's the best option, she actually advocates a polyamorous future, but she doesn't think that that's likely to happen in the interim. And so she says what's more likely to happen are these serial temporary monogamous arrangements.
David: 48:37
Yeah. And when I think about Jenkins' position, it does seem to make sense of what I see around me. A lot of people that I know I think would fall into this category of this serial, temporary monogamous, people who enter into relationships that they deem meaningful, in which they make a commitment, but which also have this flexibility to them and this recognition of the inherent finitude of relationships. So there is no sense, there's no illusion, there is no delusion there is only one who is also forever.
Ellie: 49:11
Speaking of one who is also forever, stay tuned next week for our episode on monogamy. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 49:27
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice dearoverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 49:35
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 49:49
Thanks so much for joining us today.