Marriages of the mind

Key Words: history, ideology, household, marriage, private, public. As Andrew Cherlin (2004) has observed, marriage as an institution may be in trouble, but its symbolic standing has never been higher. Marriage is on the rocks, beset by divorce and challenged by rising levels of cohabitation, but the standing of the couple, with or without children, has never been higher. Children play at coupling; adolescent dating rituals revolve around it. To become part of a couple is our culture's sure sign of maturity, the standard now for gays and lesbians, as well as heterosexuals. The conjugal gives status and identity even without a marriage license. Cohabitation is modeled on it, and even those who will never marry imagine themselves living the conjugal life-if not in this world, then in the next. As most Americans now imagine the afterlife, it is one of conjugal bliss. In the contemporary version of heaven, the most anticipated relationship is no longer with God but with a partner (Gillis, 1996). Conjugality is now associated with immortality. We should not be surprised by these developments, for, as Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner pointed out in the 1960s, modern Western culture constructs its primary sense of social reality around the conjugal (Berger & Kellner, 1964). Conservatives tell us that it is the very foundation of civilization; those who support giving homosexuals access to legal marriage argue that it is a basic human right. Everyone agrees that the smallest of all social units is also the most significant, a perspective that runs counter to the valuation of previous centuries when the small was regarded as a lesser form of the big, though not necessarily qualitatively different. Before the modern era, children were not so much different from adults but smaller versions of the same. There was also a lesser version of marriage for those who did not have the rights to or the resources for a big wedding. It was not uncommon for authorities to prevent poor people from marrying and becoming a burden on the parish. To get around these prohibitions, plebeians developed the practice of informal or clandestine marriages, sometimes called little weddings, which they used to legitimize relations that the church or state would not recognize. Slaves, who were prohibited from marriage, resorted to similar practices (Gillis, 1985). It was said of poor people who went through the appropriate folk ceremonies without religious sanctification that they were married but not churched. Prior to the 19th century, marriage was much more than a relationship between two people. It involved the establishment of an economic unit-a functioning household-and it was the household that was understood to be the family unit. Family meant all those living under the same roof, whether they were related by birth or marriage. People lived in a vertically integrated world of households where the roles of parent and child were functionally rather than biologically constituted. The household was governed by institutional rather than by personal imperatives. It was measured by standards set by other public institutions, for it was understood at the time that "a family is a little church, and a little commonwealth, at least a lively representation thereof ... " (Gouge, 1622). Husbands and wives had clearly defined roles, the husband being the master of the household, the wife its mistress. Parent-child relationships were structured in a similar impersonal manner. Just as the small was viewed as the imperfect version of the big, so earthly things could never aspire to the perfection of the heavens above. Catholics had assigned the highest grades of holiness to celibacy, and even when Protestantism sanctified marriage, it was wary of raising the status of conjugal to the point that it would compete with the love of God. Couples were therefore discouraged from perfecting their personal relationships, for nothing earthly could ever measure up to that which awaited in the afterlife. …