Clare Boylan
Body Language
When I was growing up, marriage was a sort of diploma in a woman’s life. After years of sleeping in hair-rollers, cinching her waist and preserving the well-chewed bone of her virginity, a girl finally got The Ring. The Ring was vital because it was glittery and she could flash it around. The man might be any kind of a slob, someone she couldn’t flash around at all, so the ring was the real prize. A husband was simply the price a girl paid for getting married.
For today’s girls, the trophy rating of marriage is poor. The traditional image of the shellshocked male being slapped on the back by his mates as he trudges down the aisle is being replaced by that of the tight-lipped young woman saying: “I don’t. I won’t.” Not ever. No way.
There have always been women who wanted to get married and women who wanted a wedding, and it looks increasingly like the latter category is still in business. As the marriage rate continues to plummet, the divorce rate is on the up and the rate of births outside of marriage is soaring. The bride may well be the number one endangered species of the new millennium.
My sister was dismayed when all three of her daughters decided against marriage. At first she modestly assumed it must be her own example of the institution that had put them off, but then she decided that today’s generation are simply unable to commit. But why should they? As Mae West said: “Marriage is an institution and I’m not yet ready for an institution.”
Is anyone really surprised that young women with almost equal opportunity and with licence to explore their sexuality cast a gloomy eye on a contract in which some women still promise to obey a person just because he has a penis?
One problem is that marriage has remained much the same for men because their lives have remained the same, but women’s lives have changed out of all recognition. To an older generation, marriage was a vocation, something you worked at and made the most of. My mother used to say: “A woman is given a mate in order to look after his salvation. You can’t do it by confrontation. You have to do it by example. Sooner or later, he gets affected by goodness.”
In other words, you married a sex mate, then tried to turn him into a soulmate. This fits in with Georg Hegel’s view of matrimony. He wrote of “self-conscious love” in which married people “consent to make themselves one person, to renounce their natural and individual personality to the unity of one with the other”. The reality is that it was mostly women who sacrificed their individuality. They may have been happy but all their daughters could see were lives wasted on the sweeping plane of the male ego.
Marriage has always presented special difficulties for independent women. The artist Anna Mahler told how she had finally found true love with her third husband – and why, at the age of 75, she had left him. “I realised we were running out of time. We spent too much time looking after each other. If we were going to make anything of the rest of our lives, we were going to have to do it on our own.”
A similar view was expressed by Esther, an 85-year-old Jewish friend whose husband of 67 years had died. “What do you think of all those years of marriage? Were they worth it?” I asked. She gave consideration to this, then shook her head. “He was a good man. We had a good marriage. It was absolutely worth it for the first half, when we were raising a family. But then when they left home, there was nothing left for us to do but look after each other as if we were the babies. That was a waste of both our time. I think there should be a second marriage after the children have gone, either to the same man or a different one, depending on the relationship.”
Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique wrote of “the problem that has no name”, the depression that swept over university- educated housewives in the United States in the Sixties when they tried to scale down their horizons to the narrow frame of cosy domesticity and masked their depression with Valium. Current statistics show the happiest group in society are married men and the most stressed are married women. Increasingly, women are asking: “What’s in it for me?” If the answer is a loss of freedom, an extra load of washing and a double work shift of career and baby- minding, it is hard to offer a convincing argument.
Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by marriage. My new novel is largely an analysis of this changeless institution in a vastly altered world. The idea of tying two strangers together for life seems odd and I don’t believe that marriage is necessarily a natural state. At the same time, the yearning for a happy marriage seems a natural thing. Happy marriages do exist.
The desire for a perfect soulmate, plus sexual companion on tap, is deep-rooted. While on the face of it, marital expectations have dropped in the past 100 years, in reality, our expectations have gone through the roof. It is unlikely Jane Austen’s heroines would have had any particular prescriptions for their sex lives, nor would they have wanted a career.
But far more contentious than these changes are the issues of work-sharing, power- sharing and privacy. We’ve come a long way since Simone de Beauvoir’s indictment, in The Second Sex, that “marriage incites man to a capricious imperialism”.
But matrimony is still neither a power- sharing nor a work-sharing agreement. Studies show that, despite hands-on fathers and real men who cook, the burden of work still falls to women. And the balance of power in a marriage is nearly always held by one partner. The shift of power can alter and it may be given or taken. Generations of strong women have ceded authority to their husbands to keep the foundations of their union solid.
But many strong women have also felt disempowered by the male domination of marriage and it may be that, if marriages are to survive, the sexes are going to have to share or eschew control.
Perhaps what the new generation of men and women has to learn is the lesson so disarmingly offered by Joe E Brown when he proposed to Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s perfect.”
Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger is published by Little, Brown