Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (35 page)

Faced with this reality, repressive authorities always eventually surrender in the end, bowing at last to the inevitability of human partnership. But they don't go down without a fight, those pesky powers-that-be. There is a pattern to their surrender, a pattern that Mount suggests is consistent across Western history. First, the authorities slowly glean that they are unable to stop people from choosing loyalty to a partner over allegiance to some higher cause, and that marriage is therefore not going away. But once they have given up trying to
eliminate
marriage, the authorities now attempt to
control
it by establishing all sorts of restrictive laws and limits around the custom. When the church fathers finally surrendered to matrimony's existence in the Middle Ages, for instance, they immediately heaped on the institution a giant pile of tough new conditions: There would be no divorce; marriage would now be an inviolable holy sacrament; nobody would be allowed to marry outside of a priest's purview; women must bow to the laws of coverture; etc. And then the church went a little crazy, trying to enforce all this control over marriage, right down to the most intimate level of private marital sexuality.

In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. "Sexual activity," Brother Cherubino instructed, "should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation." The wife could look at her husband's private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and "never allow yourself, woman, to be seen in the nude by your husband." And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not
anywhere
! "The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife," Brother Cherubino lamented. "He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment . . ."

Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once the lovemaking was over--and this was perhaps the most threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression.

In the end, the couples tend to win.

Once the authorities have failed at
eliminating
marriage, and once they have failed at
controlling
marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. (Amusingly, Ferdinand Mount calls this the signing of a "one-sided peace treaty.") But then comes an even more curious stage: Like clockwork, the powers-that-be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the Western world for several centuries now--acting as though they personally
created
the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values.

This is the pattern that happened with the Soviets and with the twentieth-century Chinese, too. First, the communists tried to eliminate marriage; then they tried to control marriage; then they fabricated an entirely new mythology claiming that "the family" had always been the backbone of good communistic society anyhow, don't you know.

Meanwhile, throughout all this contorted history, throughout all the thrashing and frothing of dictators and despots and priests and bullies, people just keep on getting married--or whatever you want to call it at any given time. Dysfunctional and disruptive and ill-advised though their unions may be--or even secret, illegal, unnamed, and renamed--people continue to insist on merging with each other on their own terms. They cope with all the changing laws and work around all the limiting restrictions of the day in order to get what they want. Or they flat-out
ignore
all the limiting restrictions of the day! As one Anglican minister in the American colony of Maryland complained in 1750, if he had been forced to recognize as "married" only those couples who had legally sealed their vows in a church, he would have had to "bastardize nine-tenths of the People in this County."

People don't wait for permission; they go ahead and create what they need. Even African slaves in early America invented a profoundly subversive form of marriage called the "besom wedding," in which a couple jumped over a broomstick stuck aslant in a doorway and called themselves married. And nobody could stop those slaves from making this hidden commitment in a moment of stolen invisibility.

Seen in this light, then, the whole notion of Western marriage changes for me--changes to a degree that feels quietly and personally revolutionary. It's as if the entire historical picture shifts one delicate inch, and suddenly everything aligns itself into a different shape. Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an
institution
(a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate
concession
(a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals).

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around
us
. Because "they" (the powers-that-be) have never been entirely able to stop "us" (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so "they" eventually have no choice but to legally permit "us" to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.

So perhaps I've had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It's like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth.
We
invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented
privacy
.

To a certain extent, then, Felipe was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules.
And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

Do I sound like I'm trying to talk myself into something here?

People, I
am
trying to talk myself into something here.

This entire book--every single page of it--has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself. Such comfort is not necessarily always an easy thing to find. On my friend Jean's wedding day over thirty years ago, she asked her mother, "Do all brides feel this terrified when they're about to get married?" and her mother replied, even as she calmly buttoned up her daughter's white dress, "No, dear. Only the ones who are actually thinking."

Well, I have been thinking very hard about all this. The leap into marriage has not come easily for me, but perhaps it shouldn't be easy. Perhaps it's fitting that I needed to be persuaded into marriage--even vigorously persuaded--especially because I am a woman, and because matrimony has not always treated women kindly.

Some cultures seem to understand the need for feminine marital persuasion better than others. In some cultures, the task of vigorously enticing a woman to accept a marriage proposal has evolved into a ceremony, or even an art form, in its own right. In Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere, a powerful tradition still dictates that a young man who wants to marry a young woman must publicly serenade his lover outside her home. He must beg for her hand in song, right out there in the open where everyone can witness it. Of course, a lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.

The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved's house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman's window and belt out--in loud, rough, local dialect--a song with the decidedly unromantic title
"Roma, nun fa'la stupida stasera!"
("Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!") Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn't dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it's too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.

"Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!" the young man sings beneath the girl's window. "Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!"

When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-participation portion of the evening's entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, "Rome, don't be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!"

Then the young woman herself--the object of desire--comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.

"Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!" she implores in song. "Please put those clouds back across the moon! Hide your most brilliant stars! Stop blowing, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Hide the perfumed air of spring! Help me to resist!"

All the women in the neighborhood lean out
their
apartment windows and sing along loudly with the girl, "Please, Rome--give her some help!"

It becomes a desperate duel between the men's voices and the women's voices. The scene becomes so pitched that it honestly starts to feel as though all the women of Trastevere are begging for their lives. Strangely, though, it feels like all the men of Trastevere are begging for their lives, too.

In the fervor of the exchange, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the end, this is just a game. From the first moment of the serenade, after all, everyone knows how the story will conclude. If the young woman has come to her window at all, if she has even glanced down at her suitor in the street, it means she has already accepted his wedding proposal. By merely engaging in her half of the spectacle, the girl has demonstrated her love. But out of some sense of pride (or perhaps out of some very justifiable sense of fear), the young woman must stall--if only to give voice to her doubts and hesitations. She must make it perfectly clear that it will take all the mighty powers of this young man's love, combined with all the epic beauty of Rome, and all the brilliance of the starlight, and all the seduction of the full moon, and all the perfume of that son-of-a-bitch Western wind before she concedes her
yes.

Given what she is agreeing to, one might argue that all this spectacle and all this resistance is necessary.

In any case, that is what I've needed, too--a clamorous song of self-persuasion about marriage, belted out in my own street, underneath my own window, until I could finally relax into my own acceptance. That has been the purpose of this effort all along. Forgive me, then, if, at the end of my story, I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount's reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive. I received that theory as a great and soothing balm. Now, maybe that theory doesn't work for you personally. Maybe you don't need it the way I needed it. Maybe Mount's thesis isn't even entirely historically accurate. Nonetheless,
I will take it.
Like a good almost-Brazilian, I will take this one verse of the persuasion song and make it my own--not only because it heartens me, but because it actually also excites me.