The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (13 page)

Man-bashing is no part of the recipe for happy love. But letting cynicism spoil your happy ending isn’t only about casting a jaundiced eye on the male sex. It’s also about giving up on love.

It’s no coincidence that the characters in Jane Austen’s novels most subject to Romantic illusions are also the quickest to give up their hopes for real love—to be willing to “settle.”
¹⁵
So it makes a strange kind of sense that after two centuries of the ebb and flow of Romanticism, modern women are reduced to the point where at least some of us are ready to give up on marriage for love. Bizarre but true, centuries after Western civilization adopted the love match and decades after the Sexual Revolution and Second Wave Feminism, arranged marriage is getting a second look. From jokes on
The Simpsons
,
¹⁶
to reality TV where women abdicate their choice of mate to their friends, families, or the audience,
¹⁷
to relationship advice premised on traditional matchmaking,
¹⁸
Americans seem to be taking arranged marriage more seriously today than at any time since the colonial era. And while it may be hard to see these cultural phenomena as anything but desperate cries for help, Lori Gottlieb has made a serious and widely discussed argument—in the pages of the
Atlantic,
no less—that women should give up on looking for true love and “settle” with a guy who will be a responsible husband and father, even if he doesn’t really float their boat.
¹⁹

Would the eminently practical and realistic Jane Austen agree? Absolutely not. She might have advised Lori Gottlieb to be less Romantic in the
early stages of her dating career,
²⁰
but Jane Austen would never get on board with cynical advice to marry a man you can’t really love. Gottlieb is a classic case of “the romantic refinements of a young mind” giving way, with more experience of the world, to sad cynicism.

Jane Austen never lets her heroines settle for anything less than real love. Marianne’s “strong esteem and lively friendship” for Colonel Brandon—which is at some elevation above Gottlieb’s endorsement of looking in the “older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway)”—is the absolute bare minimum she lets any of her heroines marry on the strength of. And Jane Austen leaves us with mixed feelings about that marriage. And with entirely unmixed bad feelings about the choice of Charlotte Lucas, the Jane Austen character who settles for Mr. Collins “without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony.” Jane Austen is solidly against “sacrific[ing] every better feeling to worldly advantage.”

It’s not that it never makes sense to marry a guy with less hair (or more waistline) than average. You can fall in love with a man who’s fat or bald, but not if that’s what you’re mostly noticing about him. (When my cousin was worrying about whether she really wanted to marry a guy who was losing his hair, our grandmother said she shouldn’t do it: “Your grandfather was bald when I married him, and I didn’t even notice!” If my cousin had to ask the question, the answer was no—she obviously wasn’t excited enough about the guy, or she’d have been thinking about something besides his bald spot.) Love Jane Austen-style may not hit you all at once with the force of a Romantic tidal wave. At the beginning, it can be as tentative as Elizabeth’s “never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him.” But it has to be love, not calculation.
²¹

We know what Jane Austen thought of marrying without love not just from the novels, but also from her own choices, and her real-life advice. She wrote to advise her niece on a marriage proposal, “I ... entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection; and if his deficiencies of Manner &c &c strike you more than all his good qualities, if you continue to think strongly of them, give
him up at once.”
²²
And Jane Austen herself once had thought she could marry without love, but quickly changed her mind.
²³

Austen herself wouldn’t—and her heroines never do—marry without what she calls “disinterested attachment.” Why? It’s very simple. To “marry without affection” is “wicked.” Yes, that’s right.
Wicked.
As in, morally wrong. Not to mention “wretched” and “unpardonable.” It’s hard to think of anything else that Jane Austen has one of her heroines condemn with adjectives as strong as these—all of which Fanny Price applies to marrying without love. And it’s not just Fanny, Jane Austen’s most moral heroine, who sees marriage in the absence of affection as an issue of right and wrong. When Jane Bennet tries to defend Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr. Collins, Elizabeth answers, “You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness.” Anne Elliot thinks just the same: “In marrying a man indifferent to me,
²⁴
all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.”
²⁵

Why does Jane Austen condemn marrying without love in such very strong moral terms? Interestingly, for the same reason Megan McArdle, also at the
Atlantic
, called “the obvious critique” of Gottlieb’s thesis: “There’s, like, another human being involved in all this.”
²⁶
“Settling” isn’t fair. It’s a breach of integrity because it means being dishonest about the most intimate things to the person you ought to be closest to. He wouldn’t want to marry you unless he honestly believed you had feelings for him. So if you’re only settling for him, he’s being “duped,” as Jane Austen calls what Maria Bertram does to Mr. Rushworth. Settling is a kind of selling yourself—if not for money, then for security, or the chance to have a family.
²⁷
It’s a way of grabbing at happiness that’s offensive to the “delicacy of mind” that Jane Austen heroines cultivate. Achieving the dignity of an Anne Elliot depends on respecting the autonomy of the man you’re involved
with, not cynically using him as a means to your own ends. Grabbing like that won’t make you happy, anyway. What happens when a guy you
can
love comes along, after you’ve already committed yourself to a man you can’t? As Jane Austen warned her niece, “Nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound
without
love—bound to one, and preferring another;
that
is a punishment which you do
not
deserve.”
²⁸
As Fanny and Elizabeth and Anne all know, marrying without love is as “hopeless” and “dangerous” to your happiness as it is wrong.