Marriage, a History (5 page)

This package of expectations about love, marriage, and sex, however, is extremely rare. When we look at the historical record around the world, the customs of modern America and Western Europe appear exotic and exceptional.

Leo Tolstoy once remarked that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But the more I study the history of marriage, the more I think the opposite is true. Most unhappy marriages in history share common patterns, leaving their tear-stained—and sometimes bloodstained—records across the ages. But each happy, successful marriage seems to be happy in its own way. And for most of human history, successful marriages have not been happy in
our
way.

A woman in ancient China might bring one or more of her sisters to her husband’s home as backup wives. Eskimo couples often had cospousal arrangements, in which each partner had sexual relations with the other’s spouse. In Tibet and parts of India, Kashmir, and Nepal, a woman may be married to two or more brothers, all of whom share sexual access to her.
²⁰

In modern America, such practices are the stuff of trash TV: “I caught my sister in bed with my husband”; “My parents brought their lovers into our home”; “My wife slept with my brother”; “It broke my heart to share my husband with another woman.” In other cultures, individuals often find such practices normal and comforting. The children of Eskimo cospouses felt that they shared a special bond, and society viewed them as siblings. Among Tibetan brothers who share the same wife, sexual jealousy is rare.
²¹

In some cultures, cowives see one another as allies rather than rivals. In Botswana, women add an interesting wrinkle to the old European saying “Woman’s work is never done.” There they say: “Without cowives, a woman’s work is never done.” A researcher who worked with the Cheyenne Indians of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s told of a chief who tried to get rid of two of his three wives. All three women defied him, saying that if he sent two of them away, he would have to give away the third as well.
²²

Even when societies celebrated the love between husband and wife as a pleasant by-product of marriage, people rarely had a high regard for marital intimacy. Chinese commentators on marriage discouraged a wife from confiding in her husband or telling him about her day. A good wife did not bother her husband with news of her own activities and feelings but treated him “like a guest,” no matter how long they had been married. A husband who demonstrated open affection for his wife, even at home, was seen as having a weak character.
²³

In the early eighteenth century, American lovers often said they looked for “candor” in each other. But they were not talking about the soul-baring intimacy idealized by modern Americans, and they certainly did not believe that couples should talk frankly about their grievances. Instead candor meant fairness, kindliness, and good temper. People wanted a spouse who did
not
pry too deeply. The ideal mate, wrote U.S. President John Adams in his diary, was willing “to palliate faults and Mistakes, to put the best Construction upon Words and Action, and to forgive Injuries.”
²⁴

Modern marital advice books invariably tell husbands and wives to put each other first. But in many societies, marriage ranks very low in the hierarchy of meaningful relationships. People’s strongest loyalties and emotional connections may be reserved for members of their birth families. On the North American plains in the 1930s, a Kiowa Indian woman commented to a researcher that “a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother.” In China it was said that “you have only one family, but you can always get another wife.” In Christian texts prior to the seventeenth century, the word
love
usually referred to feelings toward God or neighbors rather than toward a spouse.
²⁵

In Confucian philosophy, the two strongest relationships in family life are between father and son and between elder brother and younger brother, not between husband and wife. In thirteenth-century China the bond between father and son was so much stronger than the bond between husband and wife that legal commentators insisted a couple do nothing if the patriarch of the household raped his son’s wife. In one case, although the judge was sure that a woman’s rape accusation against her father-in-law was true, he ordered the young man to give up his sentimental desire “to grow old together” with his wife. Loyalty to parents was paramount, and therefore the son should send his wife back to her own father, who could then marry her to someone else. Sons were sometimes ordered beaten for siding with their wives against their father. No wonder that for 1,700 years women in one Chinese province guarded a secret language that they used to commiserate with each other about the griefs of marriage.
²⁶

In many societies of the past, sexual loyalty was not a high priority. The expectation of mutual fidelity is a rather recent invention. Numerous cultures have allowed husbands to seek sexual gratification outside marriage. Less frequently, but often enough to challenge common preconceptions, wives have also been allowed to do this without threatening the marriage. In a study of 109 societies, anthropologists found that only 48 forbade extramarital sex to both husbands and wives.
²⁷

When a woman has sex with someone other than her husband and he doesn’t object, anthropologists have traditionally called it wife loaning. When a man does it, they call it male privilege. But in some societies the choice to switch partners rests with the woman. Among the Dogon of West Africa, young married women publicly pursued extramarital relationships with the encouragement of their mothers. Among the Rukuba of Nigeria, a wife can take a lover at the time of her first marriage. This relationship is so embedded in accepted custom that the lover has the right, later in life, to ask his former mistress to marry her daughter to his son.
²⁸

Among the Eskimo of northern Alaska, as I noted earlier, husbands and wives, with mutual consent, established comarriages with other couples. Some anthropologists believe cospouse relationships were a more socially acceptable outlet for sexual attraction than was marriage itself. Expressing open jealousy about the sexual relationships involved was considered boorish.
²⁹

Such different notions of marital rights and obligations made divorce and remarriage less emotionally volatile for the Eskimo than it is for most modern Americans. In fact, the Eskimo believed that a remarried person’s partner had an obligation to allow the former spouse, as well as any children of that union, the right to fish, hunt, and gather in the new spouse’s territory.
³⁰

Several small-scale societies in South America have sexual and marital norms that are especially startling for Europeans and North Americans. In these groups, people believe that any man who has sex with a woman during her pregnancy contributes part of his biological substance to the child. The husband is recognized as the primary father, but the woman’s lover or lovers also have paternal responsibilities, including the obligation to share food with the woman and her child in the future. During the 1990s researchers taking life histories of elderly Bari women in Venezuela found that most had taken lovers during at least one of their pregnancies. Their husbands were usually aware and did not object. When a woman gave birth, she would name all the men she had slept with since learning she was pregnant, and a woman attending the birth would tell each of these men: “You have a child.”
³¹

In Europe and the United States today such an arrangement would be a surefire recipe for jealousy, bitter breakups, and very mixed-up kids. But among the Bari people this practice was in the best interests of the child. The secondary fathers were expected to provide the child with fish and game, with the result that a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to live to the age of fifteen as a brother or sister without such a father.
³²

Few other societies have incorporated extramarital relationships so successfully into marriage and child rearing. But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.

About two centuries ago Western Europe and North America developed a whole set of new values about the way to organize marriage and sexuality, and many of these values are now spreading across the globe. In this Western model, people expect marriage to satisfy more of their psychological and social needs than ever before. Marriage is supposed to be free of the coercion, violence, and gender inequalities that were tolerated in the past. Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex.

Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution.

W
e know of only one society in world history that did not make marriage a central way of organizing social and personal life, the Na people of China. With that exception, marriage has been, in one form or another, a universal social institution throughout recorded history.

So it ought to be easy to cut through all the historical and cultural differences to find marriage’s common features and explain why the institution is so ubiquitous. But talk about opening a can of worms! Long before legislators and judges, under pressure from gay rights activists, began to debate the definition of marriage, anthropologists and sociologists had been passionately debating the same question. After half a century there is still no definition everyone accepts.

Some people argue that marriage is universal because it simply expresses the biological urge to mate and reproduce. When I was a child, a pair of white geese showed up each spring on the lake at my grandparents’ farm. Every summer my sister and I fed them, then watched them glide off together, nodding their graceful necks as if engaged in an intense conversation. Then one year only one goose showed up. All that summer he swam around the lake, honking plaintively, obviously missing his mate, or so it seemed to us.

Such animal behavior looks so much like our current idealized notions of courtship that it is easy to imagine a common biological impulse lies behind both. Remember “Muskrat Love,” the 1971 hit from The Captain and Tennille? “And they whirled and they twirled and they tangoed/Singin’ and jingin’ the jango/Floatin’ like the heavens above/Looks like muskrat love.”

Muskrats, along with beavers, wolves, gibbons, and the vast majority of bird species, do in fact form long-term relationships with single mates. Many of these animals also have elaborate courting rituals that bear a remarkable resemblance to the cooing and cuddling of human lovers. Just watch two pigeons on a window ledge, touching beaks, rubbing each other’s necks, and making soft, gurgling sounds that can’t mean anything but contentment.

These animal behaviors are not just about sex. Tree shrews, for example, take turns methodically licking and grooming each other’s faces and necks before lying down for a friendly nap. In more than two hundred bird species, male and female mates sing complicated duets together, perform intricate dances, or “kiss” each other repeatedly with their beaks, even when sex is not on the agenda. When the female sea horse spots her mate each morning, they engage in an elaborate greeting ritual, wrapping their tails around a branch of coral or a blade of sea grass and rubbing their snouts together, seemingly quivering with joy over their reunion. Then they entwine tails and glide across the ocean floor.
¹
A biologist friend of mine once remarked that she wished
her
husband would be half that affectionate when he didn’t want sex.

Some people believe that human marriage is simply an extension of the same biological processes that produce pair-bonding among animals.
²
But if it were that simple, we would not be discussing the future of marriage today.

Clearly there is a biological basis for love and even, perhaps, for long-term pair-bonding, although one scientist who believes there is such a biological base in humans claims that it is limited to about four years. But primates, our closest evolutionary relatives, do not organize their social life around pair bonds.
³
And when we move beyond the most superficial similarities, we find nothing in the animal kingdom that remotely resembles human marriage.

For thousands of years, in human society, the question of who paired off with whom was not decided solely by the two individuals who ended up together. Families and neighbors almost always had a say. Nowhere in the animal world do relatives and other community members influence an individual’s choice of a mate (except to try to get there first).