That the primary end of marriage
is community of life with a view to the procreation of children: The husband
and wife, he used to say, should come together for the purpose of making a life
in common and of procreating children, and furthermore of regarding all things
in common between them, and nothing peculiar or private to one or the other,
not even their own bodies.
Part two in an uncomfortable series on Musonius, on
the bits that no self-respecting post-modernist will touch with a ten-foot pole.
As a young fellow, I was deeply confused about what
it meant to be married, since I ran into so many different approaches and
attitudes. My own generation was at a sort of a threshold, where we somehow thought
that the stale old ways were giving ways to vibrant new ones. Beaver Cleaver
was slowly on his way out, and Roseanne Conner was just around the corner.
Were those the only options I had available to me?
Was that all there was, a choice between a nuclear family and a nuclear
fallout?
For many people, marriage was just a social institution,
something that self-respecting people were eventually expected to do. If you
aspired to the upper middle class, you went to school and jumped through all
the hoops. Then you got a nice job, and you made some money. Then you somehow
arranged a classy wedding with someone else just like you, and you posed for
pictures with big smiles. Then you had a carefully planned child or two, and you
continued posing for smiling pictures with them while you were on vacation. Then
you retired in comfort, and posed in more smiling pictures with your
grandchildren on the holidays. Then you died, and everyone said how happy you
had been for the whole time.
I know, that sounds like a rather nasty way to put
it, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t make it any less true, or any less sad. How empty
and tiresome!
There were other people who disparaged marriage constantly
and they told me how it was a complete waste of my time. In the refined and
progressive circles I eventually found myself in, divorce was a badge of pride.
It almost seemed like the inability to make love work was a sign that you were
going somewhere. The power to “move on” from another person, someone you had once
promised to care for until you were parted by death, made it clear that your
priorities were firmly centered on your own gratification. Was there a
fundamental disagreement? Remove the offender, and go find someone new. Was
there a serious hardship? Make it easier by throwing out the bathwater, and the
babies along with it.
Does it seem nasty for me to say it? Not nearly as
nasty as if I chose to do it. How selfish and vain!
I could not come to terms with either model, since
neither embraced unconditional love. The one told me that my attachments were a
soulless obligation, and the other told me that my commitments were a throw of
the dice. Is it any wonder, a few decades later, that fewer and fewer people
want to marry anymore?
I took my own terrible missteps, of course, in
trying to find love. It felt bad enough to be thought of as a dull, awkward,
and unattractive fellow, and it felt far worse when I latched onto the first
person who paid me any attention at all. My romantic illusions had nothing to
do with love either; it was hardly my place to throw stones at the yuppies and
the libertines.
After I had rather dramatically abandoned my search
for any deeper companionship, it somehow came to me while I wasn’t looking. There
were struggles, and there were fights, and there were times when everything
seemed wasted, and yet there was always something that remained constant. That “something”
involved two parts, exactly the ones my own family had vainly tried to teach
me, and exactly the ones Musonius praises as the joined ends of marriage.
The passage above can sound trite if you just mouth
the words, and yet they are deeply moving if you attend to their meaning.
Nature does nothing in vain. There are all sorts of friendships, but nothing can
be as complete as the bond between a man and a woman, as each was made for the other,
in all possible ways.
I give some things to some people, and that is good,
but I give everything to my wife, and that is better. “Community of life”,
where nothing is private, is not just a phrase.
And it is no accident of Nature that a total
sharing of life is necessarily ordered to a stewardship over new life.
During that frustrating time when I was in college,
and through almost all of what I call my later Wilderness Years, one of the most
popular sitcoms on television was Married. . . With Children. It
could be rather funny, and yet it was also quite cynical and depressing. I do
wonder if a whole generation was inadvertently turned off from the very idea of
family by some of the entertainment we consumed.
I recall sitting around in someone’s dorm room one night,
and most everyone was busy getting drunk. My girlfriend was also busy, flirting
with the new handsome, and rich, transfer student. That show came on the
television, and I actually listened to the lyrics to theme song for the first time:
Love
and marriage, love and marriage
They
go together like a horse and carriage
This
I tell you, brother
You can't
have one without the other
I know the show was making fun of it all, and maybe
Frank Sinatra was originally making fun of it all as well, but I suddenly felt
ashamed that any of us thought it was worth making fun of to begin with.
Whenever anyone “dated” anyone else in college, the
first question was always if you had “done it” yet. The second question was
always if you had worn a condom. Sex without love, and sex without children,
without a glimmer of commitment to be found anywhere.
How much more unnatural could you possibly get?
Written in 12/1999
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