Okay folks, time to turn to the latest sex panic. During the Covid years, the only notable erotic anxiety could be characterized as the “no-sex” regime, though as far as I could tell from my quarantine bunker no one hit the panic button. Now though, the Atlantic has reviewed Molly Roden Winter’s More and our collective concern about how we relate to one another begins to take shape.
More provides a portrait of a lady in an open marriage. The Atlantic review by Tyler Austin Harper offers a critical reading and analysis of the book, a welcome balance to the rave review published in the Washington Post. Also, Harper points to the upper reaches of our class system as the likely consumers of this latest form of marriage therapy. This kind of discussion should lead to more reflection rather than a knee jerk assumption of sexual crisis. Only time will tell – though, not that much time. These panics tend to work like anxiety attacks, rapid onset and then somewhat quickly resolved after the legacy media notices something else, like world hunger.
illustrating the free love message of Victoria Woodhull.
And the other indicator that might temper my judgment of a “panic” is that this one concerns marriage and the middle-aged (or, those with aspirations to middle-age). Much easier to provoke panic about the young, an epidemic of pregnant teen-agers (in the 1970s), or the non-mating rituals of college students. Just Google “Atlantic” and “hooking up” to see how the sex play of a small minority of fairly affluent young people took up residence in the minds of Atlantic editors after Hannah Rosin’s 2012 article “Boys on the Side.” The Atlantic was far from alone in its Kinsey-like interest in college fraternity sex, but it is the print medium I’ve had the longest relation with. To tell the truth, I’m often innocent of what is going on in the wider culture unless The Atlantic notifies me.
Even so, marriage makes for an easy target of cultural neuralgia. High divorce rates usually stand in as the major indicator of a malaise in American marriage, and often enough as proof of bigger issues for the family or society as a whole. In recent years the decline in marriages has gained the status of a social issue (though, perhaps the marriage decline explains the decline in divorce in recent years). But, on balance, all of the hand wringing and other anxiety rituals around marriage just point us to a fundamental reality of American life. Marriage really does undergird our social networks, our family relations, and our sense of self. Even for survivors of the campus hook-up “complex,” marriage is (or becomes) a life goal and means of placing one’s “self” in the world and in relation to others.
The key to understanding the importance of marriage to us Americans, and also the persistence of the perception of the fragility of marriage is a longer historical view. (But, spoiler alert, that is the key to understanding every other thing in our society and culture.) For most of human history, and probably for most people in the world today, marriage could be recognized as a set of rituals but could not be considered, perhaps not even conceived, apart from family relationships. It would have had no distinct meaning, and no real value, apart from family relationships; and family here cannot really be conceived apart from property. Marriages of cousins make sense in this light in that the two (or more) individuals involved would likely have some acquaintance with their partner’s family, and property would be controlled by some part of the same family. In pre-industrial times, those who fell below the property-owning strata in society, marriage hardly existed as a possibility. For those who married, divorce hardly existed as even a concept when even a king of England had to provoke a social revolution just to get out of a male-heir-less marriage. [There is a rich literature on this that doesn’t rely on the sweeping generalizations I am making here. To recommend just one, John Gillis, For Better, for Worse — see notes below. ]
Marriage became not just a means of adding a legal relationship as the center of family formation but a thing-in-itself as some middle and upper class Europeans began to abandon social norms and make a claim to passion as the compelling basis for life-long commitments. Of course, people in traditional societies knew that passion and courtship could overlap, at times. Just look at Romeo and Juliet. What a disaster! Centuries had to pass between Shakespeare and Tom Jones (the novel, not the singer) for the acceptance of passion and not property as the true force bringing two people together.
In the British mainland North American colonies and in the early United States, where property and status and even residence was in greater flux, passion probably entered the marriage equation more readily than in England or France. By the 19th century Americans in most places could marry with nothing more than a justice of the peace to sign off on the legal documents. Not only did property lose its key role in the marriage equation, some Americans became vocal opponents of any motivation for marriage other than true love (whatever that meant ).
Just as property became less important for marriage, so did family. Most couples still had children, of course, but the size of families declined throughout the 19th century even as infant mortality dropped. By the 20th century, sociologists, and popular author Judge Ben Lindsey, recognized the emergence of “companionate marriages” in which the couple had no plans for children. Rather, the love, companionship, common interests, and sexual pleasure of the couple would serve as the basis for their lives together. The companionate ideal has become so thoroughly accepted that it now stands for not merely one model of marriage but as marriage itself. It would be hard to understand a couple that left out any of the elements of companionate marriage (“wait, you are saying you don’t care about sex”), let alone a couple that had no interest in any of them. (Again, this is American, and mainstream–there are millions of couples in the world who have not met before their families introduce them, and they manage to become friends and sex partners just fine after marriage.)
Here’s where we circle back to what looks like the opening salvo of a marriage panic. Only a little reflection should reveal that a large and complex society that not only allows but insists that marriage be based on an emotional state (especially on one that is so volatile as romantic love – see literally any movie ever made with courtship as part of the plot) that these marriages will be subject to some level of disappointment, disagreement, and (perhaps most fatal) boredom. Free love advocate Stephen Pearl Andrews in a debate with Henry James’ father used the unforgettable metaphor of tying two cats together in a bag to express the potential disaster of expecting two people to live together with no opportunity for any exit.
The romantic marriage, in other words, has been in crisis from the beginning. Crisis is a feature, not a bug. Crisis should be part of the terminology we use to describe marriage in America. And the one social institution we have to manage this crisis is divorce. Divorce rates in the U.S. in the late 19th century were already higher than they were in England, probably higher than anywhere in the world. And those rates kept rising, even accelerating in the 20th century. This came along as some states made divorce more liberal and legally easy (Indiana, strangely, was the Nevada of the mid-19th century) but even in spite of legal hindrances. Well into the 20th century New York allowed divorce only in cases of proven adultery. South Carolina forbade legal divorce until 1949, when the grounds for it were adultery, desertion, physical cruelty, and habitual drunkenness. But U.S. was already on the path to the current divorce rates hovering in the neighborhood of 50%.
Divorce is not the crisis. Marriage built on romantic passion, or even on the dream of a life-long ski partner, is the crisis. The only way for marriage free of a family strategy and property to work is through having a self-corrective, a way out of S. P. Andrews’ bag. Many people find more peace and a better relation to those around them through divorce. Yes, yes, of course, there are many good marriages, good for the people involved, good for their families, and good for the world for the world. Yet even among those couples who never divorce, many live in C- marriages at best, or living Purgatory at worst.
In the 19th century, the free lovers recognized that an institution such as marriage could be volatile, and that many women trapped in marriages with unsavory, alcoholic, or abusive spouses would be more like victims than partners. For most of those who took an interest in free love, the movement meant the freedom to find loving, or even just compatible partners. For some, of course, it means freedom to have more sex partners. And some were probably what we would call serial romantics.
The recent surfacing of open marriage takes on the marriage complex issues with what seems to me like an inadequate diagnosis of the problems at hand. Harper’s review in The Atlantic shows that in More Ms. Winter faces a whole range of issues, many of them stemming from a not very supportive husband, and including being overwhelmed by child care (so what’s the deal, you cannot afford servants?). Interesting sex, in fact, does not seem to figure in her discontent. If so, then “dating” again will at best be a distraction. Marriage therapy, which Winter and her spouse also use, probably poses the more rational approach. But that won’t help much if the spouse and child-care issues do not change.
The modern marriage complex will remain the crisis it has always been until some new cultural revolution replaces it with another kind of partnering regime. Until then, divorce lawyers will have a steady income, something we can all agree on as a social good.
11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States. New York: Alan Gutmacher Institute, 1976.
Davis, R. L. “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage Controversy.” Journal of American History 94, no. 4 (March 1, 2008): 1137–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/25095323.
Gillis, John R. For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Lindsey, Ben B., and Wainwright Evans. Companionate Marriage. New York: Arno, 1972.
O’Neill, Nena, and George O’Neill. Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples. 1st trade pbk. ed. New York: M. Evans, 1984.
Spurlock, John C. Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825-1860. The American Social Experience Series 13. New York: New York University Press, 1988.
———. New and Improved: The Transformation of American Women’s Emotional Culture. The History of Emotions Series. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
———. Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Wade, Lisa. American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, 2018.
Waller, Willard. “The Rating and Dating Complex.” American Sociological Review 2 (October 1937): 727–34.
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