Every few years the concept of marriage becomes a subject of debate and every time I find myself once again reeling. Reeling as I realise that we are still performing marriage in the same way we have for hundreds of years, despite its purpose fundamentally shifting – a bicycle has become a satsuma, a pan has become a palace. We no longer need to marry, for instance, in order to have sex, or create alliances between families, or acquire land, or produce heirs, or validate a pregnancy, or even have a wife we can take to business lunches to present ourselves as normal. We marry now for love and for parties, and also to legitimise our choices, and because it’s what our parents did, and to make a statement about commitment, and to fix something, and to create safety, and to draw a line, and find a feeling of belonging, and to claim adulthood, and any number of quiet other reasons that ferment in anxiety, romance or nostalgia.
Author Rebecca Traister, discussing a series of stories in the US press, recently described the moment we’re in as a “period of marital revivalism”. An example of one such story appeared late-September in the Washington Post, about a new book called The Two-Parent Privilege. “The evidence is overwhelming,” writes Megan McArdle, “that the decline of marriage over the past few decades has been very bad for children and, by extension, society. For various reasons, however, this truth is too often left unsaid.” I would argue, in fact, that it is not only “said”, it is screamed, loudly and often. In 2019, a magazine launched for “tradwives” (housewives who eschew feminist values in favour of traditional domestic pursuits) and those aspiring to be one – the Peter Thiel-linked Evie Magazine has been described as “a Gen Z Cosmo for the far right” and a recent article listed the benefits of no sex before marriage. Another asked, “Should your husband be your boss?” Scrolling through their site I had an uneasy feeling, as if the bus was rolling backwards.
The UK press is catching up with the US – the mood translates. In the Spectator, Cristina Odone argued, “the key to improving children’s lives is marriage, an institution few dare defend,” calling for the government to change the tax system, boosting the Marriage Allowance so couples share all their personal tax allowance to, “send out the message that tying the knot is worth their while”. The right wing, Traister explains, is prescribing “the marriage cure” for whatever ails us, be it inequity, dissatisfaction or loneliness, while at the same time removing policies, like legal abortion or no-fault divorce, that have allowed women to survive independently. There is increasing pressure to get married today, a political tactic that diverts attention on to the individual and away from the prospect of designing and supporting legislation around things such as housing and childcare that make the lives of single parents and people living alone easier. Doesn’t it all make you want to organise a mass divorce in Parliament Square? Doesn’t it make you want to burn a white dress?
Marriage is one of those sticky problems for many of us, where the thing we want to do is loudly at odds with the politics we want to live. Getting married is a nice excuse to have cake, but it’s also a blunt tool of the state. People can, and do, screw with the institution, reshaping it to their needs, acknowledging it’s a structure that has traditionally embraced such horrors as homophobia, colonialism and capitalism before sighing and asking how it could look, and what, perhaps, it could do for them. But the vapour trails of tradition are long and cold, and the process of moving forward is often trickier than it appears. Discussing her new novel about a 40-something queer woman finding herself in a heterosexual marriage and a nuclear family (an experience that has parallels to her own life), Miranda July said yes, marriage, “absolutely can be made according to your specific circumstances and desires. But depending on where you sit in the culture and who your parents were, or are, that is either more or less available to you.” If you’re like her, “reinventing what a marriage might consist of… is kind of like painting over the Mona Lisa. It’s not that hard, it’s kind of exhilarating, but you think you might go to jail for it? Every second, I feel like the guards are coming.”
There is something particularly upsetting, I think, about the ways the state attempts to legislate love, or manipulate us into relationships that can be more easily controlled. At times it is tempting to twist the politics to suit our romance and get married at least partly so that we can grab the small securities our government offers. For those who are single though, or feeling pressure to conform, this “period of marital revivalism” provides an opportunity to think about what we might really be searching for in marriage, whether legitimacy, a big dress or a sense of belonging, and see where else it might be found. And if it’s simply a party, it’s worth remembering that all you really need for that is a decent speaker and an Iceland prawn ring.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
