Love once thought the death of marriage

By Blake Sittler

SASKATOON — Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History, was the opening speaker for a national marriage conference held in Saskatoon March 19-20.

Coontz set the foundation of a conference focused on hope in and for marriage by assuring her audience that she was not going to change history to fit the mood of the gathering.

“I certainly don’t want to minimize the tensions, the losses, the temptations that make it so hard to sustain commitments in today’s world,” she said.
Coontz’s research maintains that there was never a period in history when marriage was the romantic, altruistic ideal often associated with a brief period in the mid-20th century.

“For thousands of years, marriage was not about love. Throughout most of history, marriage redistributed wealth and services from the weaker members of society to the stronger, from women to husbands and children to fathers,” Coontz reminded the audience.

The earliest historical practice of marriage was mainly a form of social organization — less about a relationship between a man and a woman than about forming alliances with other groups in order to create peace between factions divided over a territory or resource or simply to gain political influence or financial increase.

“As strange as it may seem to us today, the main point of marriage throughout history was to get in-laws,” said Coontz.

Illegitimacy was the creation of rich families who had married other rich families who did not want their children marrying outside the clan without permission from the authorities that protected the status quo.

Coontz described the role of the Catholic Church as one of the first major institutions, political or religious, that allowed a degree of personal choice to an individual to decide for themselves whom to marry or even to marry at all.

The church raised the respect of being an unmarried, celibate person and also recognized the legitimacy of a couple who chose to marry through mutual consent.

Coontz explained that the relatively recent development of marrying for reasons of love challenged the old factors of financial and political stability. Those worried about the change wondered what would keep people in a marriage when the love disappeared.

“Love, they were warned, may be the death of marriage,” remarked Coontz. “There was an old European saying, ‘He who marries for love has good nights and bad days.’”

Changes that made marriage more loving and egalitarian also destabilized the institution, she noted. Marriage has become more about a personal decision based on love than about the greater good of the community and particular families.

Coontz argued that the sexual revolution, civil rights reforms, lessening religious influence, women entering the workforce and other factors have ensured that marriage will never again be the primary way that we organize society.

She also delivered the good news in contemporary matrimony: the increasing number of people who marry of their own accord, growing equality between the genders and declining divorce rates. “When marriage can be made to work, it has higher emotional expectations, is more fulfilling, more intimate and more beneficial for all its members than ever before in history,” she said.

The factors that make marriage more about personal choice and fulfilment have made bad marriages more difficult to stay in, especially without the exterior social controls that existed a few decades ago.

“Marriage is no longer the only game in town,” she warned. “We are going to have to live with the fact that some people will not marry and some people will not stay married.”

Coontz also addressed some of the most recent research about what factors point to the best marriages, including men who have a more egalitarian attitude toward women, including their willingness to participate in basic housework, and the ability of couples to react positively to each other’s interests.

Rather than idealize marriage, Coontz proposed a need to encourage broader social ties beyond the couple, in order both to enrich public life and to stabilize private life by reducing the unrealistic expectation that spouses can be all things to each other.

Some 350 people attended the national marriage conference organized by the diocesan office of Marriage and Family Life and the Task Force on Marriage in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon, with support from a number of other organizations and groups.