a small rumination on the news from NY

[dichroic]

I don’t think anyone who reads my blog needs convincing, but it seems a bit obligatory to write something when you’re faced with history.

Way back when we lived in Texas, my husband (then fairly newly promoted to that title) was standing around chatting with two co-workers. Both were griping about recent or impending divorces, horrible exes, and how you can’t trust anybody and there are no good men/women around anymore.

Finally one of them turned to Ted and said “So, what’s your story?”

He answered, “Well, actually I’m happily married.”

When he told me the story, all those years ago, Ted said the other people seemed to be flabbergasted by this – the whole concept that someone might be married because they liked being married, instead of because it’s what you do or what you’re stuck with seemed totally foreign to them.

I can’t help but think that’s what weakens and devalues the institution of marriage – the idea that you’re stuck with it, and it’s just what you have to put up with or go through a lot of pain to get out of, rather like a stormy teenaged relationship with your parents.

People coming together in love, joy and the desire to build lives together, not so much.

(Also, there’s the personal history. in the 1930s, Ernestine Bayer was being told, in the city of my birth, that women couldn’t row. (I can only conclude that men there didn’t read Dorothy Sayers.) Whenever I’ve been in the air as pilot or passenger, it’s been rare enough to be notable to hear another female voice on the radio. In 20 years working in engineering, I have worked with only a scant handful of female engineers older than I am. It would be thoroughly hypocritical of me to judge others by their gonads.)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Comments

[dichroic]

That's certainly my reaction, too. I think the attitude that marriage is a necessary evil is the real threat.

I can see that it may have historic antecedents - after all if the Church was preaching tha everyone except priest was to 'be fruitful and multiply' and also that that and sex in general could only be pardoned within the framework of marriage, then you end up with a lot of couples who are in it because they are told to; because they want children; or because they're more or less in the position of Meatloaf at the end of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

Oh, right, I forgot economic motivations: if running a household (cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending, weaving, candle- and soap-making, not to mention a spot of child-rearing) is a needed full-time job that doesn't pay, then many people will be forced to set up partnerships with a house-runner and an income-earner. Though I'm not sure this can be as important a motivation as the other ones, because if it were the primary one I think you'd have seen more multiple-adult households. Or is it that really we *did* and the Church's influence is what restricted them so that all adults concerned were related by either blood or one-man-one-woman marriages?

[redbird]

Blood more or less distant, one-man-one-woman marriages, or things labeled in other ways so they weren't quite counted as family: I'm thinking both of servants of various sorts (including people like tutors and secretaries as well as cooks, maids, or footmen) and of roles like "companion."