Love and the History of the Marriage Institution

Comedian Alan King once quipped that if you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books. While his remark may not have been intended as a serious attack on the institution of marriage, you know what they say about jokes--they're only funny if they contain an element of truth.

In Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman takes a much more serious tone, attacking the notion that love and marriage are synonymous or that they even spring from the same basic human needs, writing "Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are today large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it." She goes on to write that "Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, and more exacting."

So if marriage isn't about love ... what is it about? If the institution of marriage wasn't founded so that two people in love could spend the rest of their lives together, what might motivate the creation of such an institution? It is an undeniable fact that certain people marry for shallow and probably immoral reasons: money, power, etc.... but these selfish motives can hardly be the raison d'être of marriage. What then is the primary purpose of marriage? Why was it created? What product is it intended to produce? Well, as a societal institution, it was probably intended to produce children--to strengthen the herd, so to speak. In ancient times, the tribe that produced the most children (and kept them alive to adulthood) would eventually come to dominate. In fact, given the violent nature of the ancient world (not that we have any room to talk today), reproduction was crucial to the very survival of the tribe. Failure to reproduce at a sufficient level would leave the tribe short of its most precious commodities--warriors, hunters, food-gatherers, and child-bearers to continue the process. So we may say that, in its original incarnation, the primary purpose of marriage was to produce offspring and raise them until they are capable of taking care of themselves. On this point, we are little separated from the beasts of the field.

Although some might object that, with human beings, love and romance are inseparable from the institution of marriage, the concept of marital love was actually much slower to develop than one might imagine. Most of the Greek poets showed little regard for marital love; their notions of wedded life were more practical. Theognis compared marriage with cattle breeding, and this was a fairly popular assessment. It was much more important to take a wife who could work in the fields and raise strong children than to have the luxury of marrying a woman one actually had romantic feelings for. The Romans, too, adopted this notion of breeding as the primary purpose of marriage. After all, they argued, if one needed a pretty face to make sexual release more palatable, this could just as easily be accomplished outside of marriage. And although religion generally frowned on the idea of adultery, it did promote the concept that marriage was intended primarily to produce offspring. The Bible doesn't waste any time spreading this message, instructing Adam to "Go forth and multiply," in the very first chapter of Genesis.

"Yet," writes Havelock Ellis in Little Essays of Love and Virtue, "from an early period in human history, a secondary function of sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in civilization we count most precious."

Ellis goes on to suggest that, as the hand evolved out of the animal forelimb for the primary purpose of grasping food or weapons, it eventually developed, as a by-product, the function of playing the piano and violin. Likewise, while the institution of marriage may have originally been founded for purely practical reasons, as a means to establish a safe and stable environment for raising the next generation of tribesmen, as our society evolves, it is only natural that the institution of marriage will evolve with it, binding a more spiritual or enlightened object of marriage to its primary animal objective. Ellis writes that this new spiritual limb of marriage "includes not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is more than mere animal gratification ... giving balance and sanity to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of the psychic as well as physical needs." He goes on to write that "No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace. In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a reasonable human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes the communion of souls."

There are still plenty of people out there who would question the real value of marriage as an institution. I have plenty of friends who are perfectly happy to stay single and satisfy their physical needs without all the entanglements that come along with any relationship, much less one as complicated as marriage. And maybe they're right--maybe they weren't meant to get married and have children. But as a father, I can't help but feel sad for them, knowing they will never know the joy of watching their children grow up or experience the wonder of the world again by seeing it, as if for the first time, through their child's eyes. Still, maybe marriage isn't for everyone. And maybe the high divorce rates of modern times are actually a blessing in disguise, a product of the fact that people are more willing now to get out of a bad marriage because the taboo of divorce has begun to fade. My first marriage was a bad one, and if I hadn't felt empowered to escape it, I never would have hit the jackpot, as I did with my second (and current) marriage.

But perhaps the best indicator of the value of modern marriage is the fact that those members of society who aren't allowed to marry, want to badly. Partners in non-traditional relationships across the United States are lobbying for marriage rights. Last week, when Iowa announced its intention to allow gay marriage, two Iowa State students, fearing (correctly) that the law would quickly be shot down, got engaged, secured their marriage license and found a pastor to officiate at Iowa's first gay wedding, all in 24 hours. They didn't do it to for money, power, or even procreation--they did it because they wanted to show a commitment to one another. That's what marriage should be about. Marriage isn't dead. It's evolving. And in whatever direction it evolves, it's important that love be an integral part of the formula, for as Ellen Key wrote in The Morality of Women and Other Essays, "Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love."

About the Author

Baudelaire Jones is the author of Dialogues of the Dead. For further reading on this subject he suggests love quotes and marriage quotes.