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By Jaclyn Geller
In 1838, at the age of twenty-nine, the British scientist Charles Darwin was contemplating wedlock. Recording his views on a sheet of paper, he created two columns. Under the heading, "Marry," he wrote the following:
Children - (if it please God) - constant companion who will feel interested in one (a friend in old age)... Home, and someone to take care of house - Classics of Music and female Chit Chat - These things good for one's health...My God, it is unthinkable to think of spending one's whole life, life a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all - No, won't do - Imagine living one's days solitarily in smoky London House - Only picture yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, and music perhaps - compare this vision with dingy reality of Grt Marlb[orough] Str.
Under "Not Marry" Darwin listed the following advantages:
Freedom to go where one liked - choice of Society... Conversation of clever men at clubs - Not forced to visit relatives, and to bend in every trifle - to have the expense and anxiety of children - perhaps quarrelling - Loss of time - cannot read in the Evenings - fatness and idleness - anxiety and responsibility - less money for books etc. - if many children forced to gain one's bread... Perhaps my wife won't like London, then the sentence is banishment and degradation with indolent, idle fool.
In balancing what he saw as the positives and the negatives, Darwin operated from a set of unspoken assumptions: wedded life entailed desirable albeit sometimes oppressive companionship and a salubrious domestic routine. "Bachelorhood," by contrast, offered the space to pursue intellectual projects, but this freedom was offset by unwholesome solitude. Matrimony was social but potentially expensive. Unmarried life was private and affordable but, in the final analysis, tragic.
Darwin's typically Victorian attitudes are those of a man living in the wake of a lengthy historical shift. In the culture of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, both men and women enjoyed what social historians call "homosocial" community, operating within networks of same-sex siblings, cousins, tutors, servants, friends, neighbors, teachers, and clients. Philosophers and poets extolled Platonic friendship as a sacred bond: "Real friendship is even more potent than kinship; for the latter may exist without goodwill, whereas friendship can do no such thing," wrote the first-century Roman statesman, Cicero. The seventeenth-century British poet, Katherine Philips, described her time with female friends as "kindly mingling souls." By Darwin's century this cultural ideal seems to have eroded; England had witnessed a deification of romantic courtship: a form of widespread romanticism that enshrined marriage as the paramount relationship: a validating arrangement for men and the sine qua none of female existence. Indeed, the contemporary American wedding industry, which advertises its accoutrements as "traditional," traffics in modern emblems of Victoriana: prior to the nineteenth century one would have been hard-pressed to find a nuptial with tiered cakes topped with marzipan angels or frilly white wedding dresses. Using these images to enshrine the bride and groom as fairy-tale halves of the same whole, the wedding ceremony delivers its unmistakable message: the married pair is united in mutual fulfillment. "Single" people are, by contrast, fragmentary half-selves awaiting completion in a spouse. Charles Darwin appears to have found this binary troubling enough to make the conventional choice. On January 29, 1839, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood.
As Americans we are heirs to British legacy, and with it is the early modern view of marriage as the blending of two personalities into a reciprocal identity, the culmination of a search for an ultimate partner. The contemporary wedding, our culture's most salient interpersonal ceremony and until recently the only one recognized by law, puts bride and groom at center stage, implying that those without this shared identity are bereft, no matter how rich their personal, domestic, intellectual, and professional lives may be. (It's no wonder so many people become depressed at weddings.) Today's nuptial enforces the claims of Darwin's list, enshrining a single relationship and relegating friends, teachers, non-monogamous lovers, and other partners, to a lesser status.
In my 2001 critique of the wedding industry, Here Comes the Bride, I suggested replacing the wedding with a different practice. I recommended that each woman register for the house wares she needed before turning twenty-five. On her twenty- fifth birthday a celebration would occur in which she would commit to the most important people in her life, one of whom could be a lover. The ceremony might include friends, teachers, and other important partners; it could be religious or secular. A young woman would anticipate this landmark, as teenage girls now dream of their wedding days. But she would not have to frantically search for "the one" on whom the event rested. In the years since the book's publication, numerous male readers have contacted me to ask whether I think the custom should be extended to men as well. My answer is always, "of course!" It is retrograde to reserve ceremonial, psychological, and fiscal support solely for those in (purportedly) lifelong amorous arrangements. In offering ritualized support to all adults, regardless of their romantic status, the alternative ceremony would support various kinds of pair bonding rather than promoting a society comprised of atomic couples - hyper individualized romantic units.
During my graduate student years at New York University one of my dissertation advisors and role models was Anne Humpherys, a professor of nineteenth-century literature and an administrator at the City University of New York. Anne's mother, an Idaho homemaker, died of cancer at the age of 80; when Anne asked her father how he would manage, he replied, "Well, we always knew weren't going to die at the same time!" At that point Anne realized that even the happiest marriages, like the one her parents had enjoyed, offer no protection against the prospect of growing old alone. So, at the age of 64, Anne made a pact with her three closest women friends, all of whom are divorced, all of whom live in New York City. They committed, verbally, to stay together for life, taking care of each other in the event of an illness; the pact was, "You can call me at any time of the day or night and I will come; no questions asked." Anne's friends have had rich careers; one teaches acting; one has worked as a television producer; and one is an author. But they find the time to check up on each other weekly by telephone. No one goes for a medical test or procedure alone.
During one of our regular dinners in Manhattan, Anne explained, "Being unmarried doesn't mean being alone. Just because certain relationships in my life have not been institutionalized doesn't mean they're not valuable." In fact, if we start to formalize our various partnerships, creating a groundswell, it is more likely that policymakers will begin to acknowledge bonds other than the one that exists between husband and wife. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Alternative to Marriage Project. Perhaps it is a fitting time for members to honor the organization's work by committing ritually, legally, verbally, financially, or in whatever way feels best, to the all the partners in their lives.
Jaclyn Geller is a professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she specializes in Restoration/Eighteenth Century Studies. She is the author of articles on Samuel Johnson and Samuel Butler and of the 2001 analysis, Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, and she writes regularly for the ATMP Update.
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