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The
Pursuit of Happiness
Febraury
18, 2004
By The Plaid Adder
Last week, the Massachusetts state legislature called a
constitutional convention in hopes of passing an amendment
to the state constitution that would ban same-sex marriage,
and thus prevent the court from forcing the state to issue
marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
This week, Fox broadcast two marriage-related reality shows.
One is entitled "The Littlest Groom." Promoted via the slogan,
"Does Size Matter?", the show features "a young man who is
4'5" tall" who will date various women and choose one lucky
winner who will become his "true love," and presumably become
the littlest groom's bride. The suspense, apparently, comes
from waiting to see whether the littlest groom will choose
a similarly little bride, or a bride of average stature.
The other is "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance." Here, the premise
is that a 'real' person, in this case a 23-year-old woman
named Randi, has been offered an enormous sum of money to
play an elaborate practical joke on her family by convincing
them that she plans to marry a big fat obnoxious guy - and
by actually planning and going through with a (fake?) wedding
ceremony. The show itself is playing a practical joke on Randi,
who believes that her fiance is another 'real' person like
herself, when in fact he's an actor who is being paid to be
as nightmarish a prospective son-in-law as possible.
So, this is how the right sees things, apparently. People
like me and my partner are a deadly threat to the dignity
and integrity of the sacred institution of marriage. The Fox
Network is not.
The coalition of right-wing religious groups pushing the
Federal Marriage Amendment always strives to present the situation
as if marriage has always been a pure and simple thing, and
we same-sex couples are the ones who are trying to throw a
wrench in the works. History does not bear this out; nor,
indeed, does contemporary American popular culture. All you
have to do is turn on the television to see that straight
America is deeply conflicted, intensely confused, and really,
when you come right down to it, pretty messed up about marriage
already. An alien from another planet who had to learn about
American culture based solely on broadcast TV could easily
conclude from the continued success of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette,
Joe Millionaire, Jessica Simpson, and now Fox's two new hatchlings,
that the GBLT community contains the last people in this country
who still take marriage seriously.
What the explosion of reality-marriage TV shows us, apart
from the fact that television producers will do anything for
a buck, is that marriage American-style is being shaken to
its foundations by the increasing friction between two of
its conflicting components: the idea of marriage as social
obligation and the idea of marriage as personal fulfilment.
From the religious right's point of view, the way to save
the institution of marriage is to return to the idea of marriage
as social obligation and forget about the idea of marriage
as at all related to your individual happiness. From my point
of view, the best thing that could happen to the institution
of marriage would be for American law to stop trying to enforce
an archaic version of marriage that has for better or worse
already been superseded by reality, and instead accept the
fact that the ideal of marriage as personal fulfillment is
much more consistent with both American ideals of liberty
and justice and the current state of marriage as it is actually
practiced in this country.
The idea of marriage as the culmination of an intimate relationship
based on love, passion, and sexual desire between a man and
a woman who have chosen each other freely is a fairly recent
invention. Right up through the nineteenth century, for most
people, marriage in the Western world was essentially a business
deal whereby a man secured exclusive rights to the body and
property of his bride in exchange for taking her off her family's
hands. Marriages were arranged not by the individuals involved
but by their families, who were more focused on how the deal
would improve their respective financial and social situations
than on whether the two participants actually wanted to be
together.
As the presumptive wage earner and the one who would assume
complete legal control over the couple's property, the man
was in a better position to accept his social obligation philosophically;
after all, his wife would bring a dowry with her, and if she
couldn't satisfy his sexual or emotional needs it was easy
enough for him to go to other women. The woman's feelings
about her prospective partner were, practically speaking,
irrelevant; the match her family arranged for her would be
an offer she couldn't refuse.
Economic, social, and psychological pressures combined to
construct marriage as woman's unavoidable destiny. For a woman
to evade marriage would alienate her family and put her very
identity as a woman at risk. Outside of marriage, she would
never be able to have a sex life without risking an illegitimate
pregnancy, and then there was the basic question of how she
would survive economically in a world where women above a
certain class status were severely discouraged from working
outside the home. She would have to marry someone; and once
she did, she was pretty much stuck with him. Since, as everyone
realized, most marriages were not in fact based on personal
affection and therefore liable to lead to a certain amount
of misery for both partners, the best way to preserve these
unions was to make dissolving them as difficult, risky, and
humiliating as possible.
Partly as a way of making this undeniably raw deal attractive
to the women entering into it, the idea of marriage as the
culmination of an intimate and passionate romance between
a woman and the man predestined to be her soulmate was developed
in poetry, fiction, and drama, and ultimately became a staple
of most of the forms of popular culture that were (and by
and large still are) primarily consumed by women.
Before there was the explosion of reality-marriage shows,
there was a brief craze for film adaptations of Jane Austen
novels, in which the idea of marriage as romantic fulfilment
is recruited to soften what would otherwise be a fairly bleak
depiction of the effect that the marriage market has on the
women who are forced into it. In Austen's world, social obligation
and personal happiness can be reconciled because her heroines
learn to fall in love with appropriate men. Pride and Prejudice
would be a lot uglier if Jane Bennett didn't have the good
sense to really love the rich man her mother is pushing her
toward, or if Elizabeth didn't learn to love the even richer
man whose fortune will compensate for the fact that Elizabeth
basically cost the family their estate by refusing to marry
the asinine, bootlicking hypocrite who is destined to inherit
it. The message is that you can fulfill your obligations and
still have your passionate romance - as long as you make sure
you fall in love with the kind of man that your family and
your society want and need you to marry.
What happens as women start to become more financially and
socially independent is that they get less interested in tailoring
their emotional and sexual desires to suit their social obligations.
And it's once that happens that we start to notice the conflict
between the romantic idea of marriage and the socioeconomic
aspect of it.
The most obvious symptom of this conflict is the ever-rising
divorce rate. The idea of marriage as a lifetime commitment
to one partner was supported in the past by social and economic
forces that made it difficult and dangerous for women to leave
a marriage in which they were not happy. The reality, as we
appear to be seeing, is that without external coercion, about
half of the people who currently get married are unwilling
or unable to sustain a happy and healthy relationship over
the course of their lifetime, or even over the course of the
next ten years.
The social-obligation model of marriage demands a permanent
lifetime commitment from both partners; the personal-fulfillment
model dictates that once the relationship is dead, the marriage
should die too. If straight people didn't expect their marriages
to make them happy - or at least not to make them unhappy
- they wouldn't divorce each other once they started to make
each other miserable. They would just do what the American
Family Association says gay people should do: stay in their
heterosexual marriages and suffer.
When it comes to marriage, as with everything else, then,
there is a tradeoff between freedom and security. The more
freedom individuals have to marry people with whom they are
actually in love, the more flexible the institution of marriage
becomes. On the other hand, the more effectively a society
enforces the ideal of marriage as a permanent heterosexual
bond, the more drastically it restricts the personal liberty
of the individuals who are trapped in those marriages.
And it's precisely the conflict between freedom and security
that fuels the reality-marriage shows, in which the contestants
are controlled from outside by the premise of the show and
the rules of the game, and put under tremendous pressure to
make themselves produce "true love" for one of their preselected
eligible partners. Those who succeed in conforming to expectations
will then claim the cash prize that stands in for the financial
and social benefits that have always been attached to heterosexual
marriage. The whole interest of the show is in the question
of whether the contestants can produce the happy ending that
the audience wants by reconciling their personal feelings
to the restrictions created by the game.
To that extent, reality-marriage shows are merely continuing
the work that fictional romances have always done by convincing
the American viewing public that it is not only possible but
easy to have your wedding cake and eat it too, as long as
you play by the rules. But the fact that these shows involve
real people - and, if it gets far enough, real marriages -
is an indication that the ideal of marriage being championed
by the religious right in this counry has already been destroyed.
If everyone in this country agreed that marriage really was
necessarily a sacred, permanent, lifetime commitment between
one man and one woman, no audience would stand for a show
that pushed people into it this arbitrarily. You'd like to
think, anyway, that the pleasure that viewers derived from
shows like Who Wants To Marry a Multimillionaire? or Married
By America or the new generation of arranged-marriage shows
would be dampened somewhat by the awarenss of what these people
were really risking.
Would people be as excited as they are about Trista and Ryan
if they knew that they were going to be stuck in that manufactured
romance for the rest of their lives? It would be like watching
Survivor knowing that there would really be only one survivor,
and the losers would be killed instead of merely put on a
plane back to civilization. No, the only reason that the actual
marriages of real people can become entertainment is that
everyone realizes the stakes have been lowered, and that the
sacred institution of heterosexual marriage has been trivialized
to the point where it can become a practical joke - as it
apparently will on My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance.
So when you consider where marriage has been brought to
in this country, you would think people would look at the
push for same-sex marriage as one of the few signs of hope
for marriage as an American institution. Here you have a group
of people who want nothing more than to be allowed to help
protect the idea of marriage as a lifetime and loving commitment
between two people who have chosen each other freely. These
are people who have already risked much to be with the people
they love, and are willing to risk more in order to ensure
that their relationships are treated with the dignity they
deserve. The first lesbian couple married by the renegade
mayor of San Francisco had been together for fifty-one years.
That's since 1953, folks. Imagine what they've gone through
to stay in love for that long. And yet somehow, according
to the religious right, they don't deserve to have their relationship
legally recognized, and Trista and Ryan do.
That just is never going to make sense to me. Perhaps I'm
just too much of a romantic for a culture that seems determined
to find out just how cynical it can get. I can't get past
the idea that marriage should be about love, that if you love
someone who loves you back you should both work like hell
to keep that love alive, and that you shouldn't make promises
about a lifetime of love and commitment to a stranger who
was picked out for you by a team of television producers.
I believe that love is real, that it matters, and that it
is something to celebrate. And I believe that any two people
who have managed to protect love from all the selfishness
and greed and hatred that works against it are doing something
good in the world, and that it should be recognized and supported,
especially right now when this country is starving for light,
hope, and good news.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting
an equally demented online audience since 1996. More of the
same can be found at the Adder's
Lair.
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