Brave New Marriage

Who can help knowing by heart the myth of the American marriage? For those with a taste for metamorphosis, the standard scenario goes like this:

Romeo and Juliet are alive and well in a Westchester suburb—$60,000 English Tudor house with crushed sea shells in the driveway. Despite early marriage and two children (a boy for him, a girl for her), R. has managed to acquire a college degree and a $27,000-a-year job with a New York life insurance company as an actuary, an absolute genius at double indemnity. He is in his late thirties and slightly gone to paunch: waistline expanding, hairline receding. After three drinks tiny red veins appear on his cheeks. The boy who used to climb balconies now commutes on what is left of the New Haven Railroad, solving the crossword puzzle in the New York Times.

Juliet is still slim but severe, almost knife-edge, wearing the slightly vengeful look of a woman to whom all-night lovemaking is an event of the past—about fifteen years past. She is forever frantically smoothing things down: her hair, her furniture, her husband and children. If R. is going soft, J. is going hard; and both are turning sour. They have Made It, and so what? The passionate lovers have become sick-and-tired dialecticians. What they do now until the lark sings is argue.

At this point in the familiar scenario two endings become available to scriptwriters:

Option A: One perfectly tip-top spring afternoon while strolling through Rockefeller Center, Romeo meets Rosaline again (or Juliet meets Mercutio— that boy always had a certain something), and the trusty old heart cries: "I married the wrong woman!" or "I married the wrong man!" as the case may be.

Option B: One dark night Romeo Jr., thirteen, almost dies of an appendectomy. The next morning R. and J., haggard but hyper-alive with relief, take a second cup of coffee under the rose arbor. The Westchester sky is memorably blue. Juliet Jr., ten, followed by her beagle, Friar Laurence, comes running to Mummy with a single flawless tulip in her hands, and Mummy thinks: "This is all there is, and it's enough."

In either option, the moral stays the same: marriage is Right, but people can be Wrong. When people "grow up," when they find out who they really are and what they really want, they learn this.

How suddenly quaint the premise sounds today! When R. and J. '72 glare across their pillows at three o'clock in the morning, her punch line is no longer, "I married the wrong man," but "I married." Period. And there's no nonsense about "This-is-all-there-is-and-it's-enough." The line now reads: "This is all there is? It's not enough."

The same Americans who all these years blamed their bad marriages on themselves, now, if they seem less happy or good, blame themselves on marriage. Is marriage really necessary? At one time only Bohemians and socialists—people like that— asked the question. Now it has become the property of the middle class: the people who twenty years ago talked about togetherness; the people who ten years ago thought once you had her orgasm straightened out, that was that; the people who faithfully kept saying that marriage has its ups and downs and, you know, it's a compromise and you have to work at it but, taken all in all, it's still the best shot at happiness. These are the people who are now saying, "Marriage is hell"—and maybe the hell with it. It is "as obsolete as the piston-engine plane." It is "the triumph of hypocrisy." It is "a ghetto of lunacy." Suddenly priests seem to be the only people left who really want to get married. In effect, a new myth of American marriage is being written with a credo that goes more or less like this:

Brave Old Monogamy was serviceable in its day: on the frontier certainly and probably for as long as America was "agrarian." But the "nuclear" family loses its social and economic advantages in an "urban-industrial" culture.

Furthermore, marriage suits Americans less and less as a psychological arrangement. Monogamous expectations are badly out of line with man's (and woman's) sexual nature. The marriage contract—the very word is repulsive—has become a false and punitive convention. "Holy matrimony" is no longer a sacrament but a "piece of paper," a contradiction in terms: legalized love.

Marriage has become one of those antiquated institutions—another dirty word—that bricks people in. They are forced to play out obsolescent "roles," neglecting their own self-interest. Indeed they are not allowed to "be themselves." Condemned, before they start, to boredom and resentment, they are also doomed in a reprehensible number of instances to divorce.

A whole new genre— a kind of Brave New Marriage Lit.— has been invented to confirm the disenchantment with traditional monogamy and to codify new "alternatives." As with most movements of piquant discontent today, the generous impulse of Brave New Marriage Lit. is to "liberate" men and women not only from their actual traps but from their "hang-ups" too. Brave New Marriage Lit. is the seventies equivalent of Norman Vincent Peale or Dale Carnegie: it is here to help. How? Consider Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples (Evans, $6.95) by Nena and George O'Neill. In the political spectrum of Brave New Marriage, the O'Neills are liberals rather than radicals. They are for small mercies: extending the permissible boundaries of proper conduct, raising the ratio of pleasure to sacrifice without disturbing the conscience. They want to ease the general strain by semantics, by redefinition.

Noting the increased life-span of today's couples—to say nothing of their accelerated capacity for using up experience—Brave New Marriage moderates like Margaret Mead have protested that "till death do us part" is getting to be an awfully long time. As a first small mercy the moderates proposed "serial monogamy." Liberals like the O'Neills have moved one step beyond this "pluralism"-in-sequence. Protesting that Brave Old Monogamy or "closed" marriage means "rigid role behavior," "excessive togetherness," and "possessiveness," they advise pluralism with marriage—"a little additional sharing," as they put it.

Does "open" marriage include adultery? The O'Neills are anxious to play down the question. With anthropologists' detachment, they indicate that adultery is "another option that you may or may not choose to explore." In redefining fidelity with kindly vagueness as "commitment to your own growth, equal commitment to your partner's growth," they are, to all intents, granting the sort of under-the-counter permission to extramarital sex that "situation ethics" moralists granted to premarital sex a decade ago.

The O'Neills see the need of their constituency as gratification with honor. Reconcilers of the new and old moralities, they do their best to demonstrate that ecstasy and self-improvement are often the same thing. Their thesis can be read as a compassionate resolution of Freud's dilemma: that civilization has been "built upon a renunciation of instinct."

The O'Neill school of Brave New Marriage Lit. belongs to what is loosely referred to as the sexual revolution. Another school of compassion takes its direction from another revolution: Women's Liberation. If the assumption of the O'Neills is that marriage forces couples to do an injustice to nature, the assumption of Jessie Bernard is that marriage forces partners to do an injustice to each other—particularly the husband to the wife. "Being married," she states in The Future of Marriage (World, $9.95) "is only half as good for wives as for husbands." As a frankly partisan sociologist she sees her mission to "reorient the public's thinking."

All the options get chalked on the blackboard: traditional nuclear family; serial monogamy; communes and cooperative households; short-term contracts; ménage à trois; group marriage; swinging; even celibate marriage. At the bottom, Dr. Bernard prints in block letters—underlined until the chalk breaks—her own opinion: "Needed: new social spectacles." Then she asks her pointed question: what will these "alternatives" do for women? She is not at all sure; the book ends under the caption: "No final conclusion."

The New Woman, she does suppose, will avoid "sensory overload"—that is, sex is not the solution. Rather, the answer is "personhood," and "temporarily permanent" relationships may best lead to "personhood." At any rate, the New Woman will not describe herself as "married." Perhaps "pair-bound" will do. "Once we have words for the new statuses," Dr. Bernard writes, with at least as much goodwill as naïveté, "we can clarify their nature."

All these are reasonable and humane objectives as stated; one is tempted to say that the chief motive of the Brave New Marriage author is to relieve suffering. So far, the new "alternatives" under scrutiny are just that: practical solutions designed for specific problems. If this were all there was to Brave New Marriage, it would be just another case of American pragmatism: a few inspirational mottoes and a lot of intuitive tinkering. But beneath the conspicuous common sense there is concealed an astonishing ideology—at times, virtually a secular vision of salvation—which threatens to set up an equally romantic myth to replace the one it has rejected. Its metaphysics may be paraphrased as follows:

Man is innocent—or at least lovers are. All they need is their freedom. The restrictions that frustrate them also corrupt them, making them feel anxious, guilty, and causing them to behave vengefully toward one another.

Sexual love is a benign act. "Make love, not war"—meaning, as long as you're making love, you will never make war. The lover is man at his purest-in-heart; allow him his pleasure, and his "hang-ups" and "hostility" will disappear. (Freud may be parenthetically recalled here to voice his dissent. Though he stipulated that civilization was built upon "renunciation of instinct," he went on to say that if we were to allow "complete freedom of sexual life, thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature [aggressiveness] will follow it there.")

With graphic little arrows the O'Neills' diagram the promises of Brave New Marriage:

Synergic interaction→Enhancement→Elation→→→Transcendence.

These promises may be as extravagant, as perfectionist as any promises in the history of marriage, and that, as the O'Neills would be the first to point out, is saying a lot. What does the pie in the sky cost? Little more than the courage to throw off your chains, to "be yourself." Or so the manifestos read in bold type.

Alas, nothing exposes more mercilessly the romanticism of Brave New Marriage than a comparison of its bargain price tag with its hidden costs. In exchange for releasing poor harassed humans from the injunctions of monogamy, Brave New Marriage—without apparently noticing the fact—imposes even more exacting imperatives. Examine the fine print in this casually worded rule for "pluralism" drafted by the O'Neills: "If partners in an open marriage do have outside sexual relationships, it is on the basis of their own internal relationship—that is, because they have experienced mature love, have real trust, and are able to expand themselves, to love and enjoy others and to bring that love and pleasure back into their marriage, without jealousy."

In other words: thou shalt not be possessive; thou shalt not be jealous; thou shalt not object to thy planned obsolescence; and so on—commandments that by contrast make "thou shalt not commit adultery" look like rolling off a log.

Brave Old Monogamy called for rather ordinary virtues—principally patience. Brave New Marriage, under the advertisement of reducing expectation, calls for a sort of Renaissance man of the heart, with apparently unlimited time and energy, the balance of a tightrope walker, and the tact of a diplomat.

If taken seriously, the ideology of Brave New Marriage could produce anxieties at least as onerous as sexual guilt. They already have, if one believes the advance frontiersmen (or more often frontierswomen) in places like the Village Voice who are turning their dissatisfaction with the new "alternatives" into a confessional art form. "Sex, yes. Lots of sex, more than ever," reports one self-styled "casualty of the sex war." But, Karen Durbin gloomily continues, it all "seems bleak and a little dead. A year or so ago, so much seemed possible, and even if it didn't seem possible, the try itself was worth making. New worlds were going to be forged. New men, new women, free of sex roles and competition, free of all the sexual levers that a sick, aggressive society had manipulated us with. Now here we are...Society doesn't have to manipulate us, we can manipulate ourselves."

Then there is Kathrin Perutz, another agonized New Woman, writing practically in blood. As her title indicates—Marriage is Hell (Morrow, $5.95)—she is as down on Brave Old Monogamy as anybody else, and more vehemently, more personally so. Yet a reader could imagine her composing a sequel: Brave New Marriage Is Hell Too. For she is half in rebellion against her own rebellion.

She points out what is cruel in the New Freedom: this leaving everything up to "each individual." Speaking of herself as lost in "a sea of alternatives," she complains: "We are given choice and conflict, but not the means to resolve either." Nor does she like the fact that "it's become unusual for an ambitious woman to admit great joy in her child. Why should a 'liberated' woman feel that deep love for her child is somehow ignominious?" She is discontented with the plans for accommodating children to Brave New Marriage by theorists reporting on the good word from the kibbutzim, or by Germaine Greer, recommending that one have one's child, then quite literally farm out the little him or her to an Italian peasant family.

What makes "emancipated" people like Karen Durbin and Kathrin Perutz look Brave New Marriage's gift horses (freedom, pleasure, a serene conscience) so querulously in the face? Perhaps a self-preserving sense that each individual, each generation can afford just so many investments in hope. But perhaps, too, a hunch that Brave New Marriage prophets have less control over their prophecy than they imagine.

Futurologists, for all their lip service to naturalness and spontaneity, tend to be bureaucrats at heart. They are looking for what T.S. Eliot once called a system so perfect that no one will have to be good. And so, in the end, Jessie Bernard wonders if a "national family policy" might not make things easier all around. "Policy in the future," she writes, "is going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve good marriages...The shape of the distribution of happiness in marriage will change; the mode will shift to the right. It will be possible for people to be as unhappy as in the past; but fewer will be." In short, the marriage of the guaranteed minimum: freedom and innocence gently nudged along by the "social engineer," supervised no doubt by a U.S. Department of Pair-Bound Relations.

Robert Francoeur, in Eve's New Rib: Twenty Faces of Sex, Marriage, and Family (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $6.50), goes so far as to suggest that the opinions he is enumerating will produce "a new world for mankind"—if not indeed a new mankind.

Every ideology earns its embodiment. Medieval Christianity has the Gothic cathedral. American business has the skyscraper. If the reader trusts Dr. Francoeur, Brave New Marriage has the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research north of Los Angeles.

"It is impossible" Dr. Francoeur cries, "to verbalize the realities of the diffused, low-keyed, 'McLuhanesque cool' sensuality-sexuality which permeates the Sandstone community." But he tries.

The physical design of the SFCSR is late-period Hugh Hefner. The main building features a hundred-foot plush-carpeted living room with a mammoth womb of a fireplace; an enormous buffet dining room; and a paneled lounge with strobes and colored lights that illuminate a pool table, a bar, water beds. Off the lounge is a "cozy" room with wall-to-wall mattresses. Nearby there awaits an indoor swimming pool, warmed to body temperature.

What is happening at that bar, in that ninety-nine-degree swimming pool, on those water beds? "Feedback and constant re-evaluation within a basic but flexible process philosophy."

Here at last we may have arrived in a blaze of jargon at what the signals are all about: philosophy—though not necessarily "flexible process" philosophy. The quarrel over Brave New Marriage is a quarrel over Brave New World. Sexual ethics—the comic debates of reluctant prudes versus determined lechers— are the least of it. What is happiness? What even is pleasure? What—dare one say it—is real? These are the ridiculously portentous questions that keep worrying their way into a reader's mind. Along with that other question: Do these people know?

It makes a mad scene, begging for satire—but melancholy satire. Two armed camps of sentimentalists—the future people and the past people—dispute whether they are talking about a dream or a nightmare. On the one hand, mod prophets are running to keep up with their own Zeitgeist; on the other hand, Cassandras warning (about two hundred years too late) against the "deauthorization" of Western civilization. And in the middle: just plain sad, complicated people with people's sad, complicated needs.

A final prediction:

The future people demanding change, more change, are getting to be like those back-seat fanatics in Keystone Kops chase scenes whose lips shape screams of "Faster! Faster!" as the steering wheel comes loose and the tires fall off. Even without their help marriage in America is moving at superspeed.

The will to condemn has gone out of society in the matter of divorce and abortion, and these changes in attitude are slowly being legalized. ("No-fault" divorce laws will come close to sanctioning "serial monogamy.")

People don't lose their jobs or even their "reputations" because of adultery, though they may lose their reputations now by indulging in too much chastity. Sexual varietism, including homosexuality, is "understood" to death.

In practice, moderate Brave New Marriage is here, and the ideologues shouting 'Repression!' are fighting a battle largely won. The real danger is that, out of their excesses of utopian zeal, they may change a quite tolerable equilibrium into something worse. To paraphrase Santayana, those who don't know their puritanism are condemned to repeat it. If the Brave New Marriage-makers were dealing with tennis instead of marriage, they would listen to the curses of the players, then sympathetically solve the problem by lowering the net and stipulating "limited and temporary" base lines. They leave their players relieved of all special demands but also near that intolerable point where total freedom becomes total responsibility. You must do whatever you think you want to—this last imperative of American puritanism is likely to prove the harshest as well as the most impossible ideal of all.

A final scenario:

Don't look now, but who is that trim and tanned couple in the Sandstone corner, he nicely slimmed down, she nicely rounded out? Paddling in the pool, feeding back and re-evaluating like mad, are R. and J. in their latest metamorphosis. In Brave New World, Huxley visualized another Shakespearean character—Edmund in King Lear— "sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm around a girl's waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing-gum and looking at the feelies."

Let us imagine one last three-o'clock-in-the-morning dialogue. R. and J., as part of their "flexible process philosophy" program, have been reading Romeo and Juliet aloud. Now it is "personhood"-assessment time for Shakespeare and, of course, for them. R. rolls over on their water bed with a squish and begins:

"God, all that morbidity. Love and self-sacrifice and death. I mean, Shakespeare's really perverse."

"It's as if suffering meant something, as if unhappiness were a civil right," J. agrees. "But sometimes a sort of—you know—bell rings, and I almost think I get what he's saying..."

"Time to swim," R. interrupts brusquely, waking Rosaline on the next mattress. With J. holding one hand and Rosaline the other, he takes the plunge. The ninety-nine-degree blandness dissolves the odd tweak of distress their conversation had given him. He has a sudden, grateful impulse to explain how right, how honest, how—well—moral it is to arrange life as pleasantly as possible. But he can't find the words, so he only says:

"This beats climbing balconies."

And, of course, when you look at it one way, it really does.