Can we bring form to marriage?

 I saw the following comment on social media this week:

To me this is importantly true, but in a particular way. It is a kind of higher truth, an aspect of Logos, or the divine order, the one that is available to our higher intelligence and that expresses a kind of ideal harmonising or fitting together of things.

It is not true in the sense that it is always present in the way people act in real life. To be present, there needs to be a polarity between the sexes. Men need to have a sense of what is required from them for women to relax into a feminine role. It helps if men project something like a masculine aura, and this is more likely to happen if men have a knowledge of their own role in creating the structures - including the religious and cultural structures - within which a woman might "feel" the masculine and respond to it. Men need to project their own masculine strengths and competencies for women to be receptive to and to allow their femininity to come into play.

Feminism, of course, rejects all this, seeking instead the aim of autonomous freedom in which we develop solo, through the efforts of our own independent will alone. Feminism has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. Even so, it's interesting to observe when the outward forms changed, i.e., when men stopped presenting masculine form and women feminine form. There was some change in the 1920s with the flappers - women who wore their hair short and who wore straight lined dresses which de-emphasised the contours of their bodies.

But I think men changed even more in the 1960s and 70s. Here, for instance, is a picture of street life in Perth in 1946:

The men are dressed to project a certain kind of masculine presence. In the 1970s there were still businessmen who wore suits, but nonetheless clothing for men had generally become more informal, i.e., lacking masculine form:

Notice as well that the woman in this photo is dressed much like the men. Again, you can still find examples of women dressing distinctly, but androgyny was becoming more common - there was a decline in outward polarity.

And women? I suspect that girls reach an age, sometime in their teens, when they have to choose whether to retain a feminine persona, or whether to pivot instead to a more masculine approach to life. Do they allow themselves to be enveloped by, and protected within, the masculine, while they themselves bring emotional warmth and care to those around them? Or do they become psychologically harder and self-protective and seek to control their environment?

Most women in modern life reject the feminine. Sometimes it's for personal reasons. Perhaps they had a poor relationship with their own father and so do not trust men. Sometimes it's for political reasons. They have been raised to be feminist and therefore an independent modern girl who does not need a man. Sometimes, it's spiritual. It is a non-serviam - I will not serve - response to God. 

It can lead to an impasse in relationships. It is common now to hear women say that they can do everything themselves and so if a man is to have any chance with them he somehow has to figure out a way to "add value" otherwise "what is the point?". 

Men, for their part, have started to ask women "What do you bring to the table?". The question itself betrays the underlying problem. If both men and women are the masculine part of the equation, then neither brings something that the other party does not already possess. What men would really like a woman to answer to their question is the answer to the polarity problem. They would like a woman to bring her "softness, emotion and warmth" to the table and to appreciate the masculine strengths that he provides.

It is unfortunate that today it is sometimes the least competent or even mentally unwell women who present to men as needing masculine support. It means that the masculine instincts in men can lead to a poor choice in a spouse. It would help if higher quality women could find a way to signal to men an openness to polarity, through some expression of the feminine. 

This is an issue that will always need tending to, no matter the era. It is one of those human condition problems. It needs to be addressed both at the individual, personal level and more generally at the level of the wider culture. It is part of the need to create workable structures, a frame that can uphold human communities.

Orbiting ourselves vs being needed

I saw the following post on social media and thought it worthwhile recording it here. It describes, I think, a type of archetypal experience that we have as men and women.

It reminded me of a passage I read years ago from a biography of Alice James, the sister of the novelist Henry James. She lived alone as a spinster. In 1889, she was visited by her brothers:

As the three of them sat and talked, as they exchanged memories and opinions, the afternoon became for Alice a soul-quickening experience wherein the family itself seemed to come richly back into being, a revived and reintegrated presence. Her isolation was overcome for the moment by the sense of being once again a surrounded and nourished member of that family.

When her brothers left, Alice was plunged again into solitude:

she confessed with bleak clarity that she could never allow it to be "anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and 'do for' daily is not only a sorrow but a sterilizing process."

As the "Feminist Turned Housewife" points out, modern liberal culture is pushing people toward this kind of solitude. In part, this is because the aim of life is held to be a freedom defined as maximal individual autonomy. This assumes that we can develop solo, outside of relationships with others, and that stable relationships can be sacrificed to autonomous choice.

Another reason is that the dynamic described in the post, one in which the man feels that his masculine qualities and efforts are needed by his family, and the woman feels that her feminine nurturing presence is needed, requires higher aspects of our nature to be successfully maintained. We have drifted a long way from a concept of virtue, of cultivating the higher qualities of our nature. Instead, there is an ethos of "empowerment" in which we are encouraged to act in any direction we choose, without negative judgement, as long as we uphold the same right for others. In this modern ethos, it is assumed that individuals are pursuing their own wants and desires, and therefore rejecting the idea of service to others.

And so there is little concept of a common good of family life that a man and a woman might deliberately seek to uphold. After all, for men to commit to the role described in the post, they would need to have some confidence that their wife would be both loyal and appreciative (and, also, to have some level of respect for him as a man). The wife, for her part, would need some confidence that she would be loved and supported, and that the man would use his position within the family for the good of its members (i.e., that he really would achieve a strength and steadiness in his presence within the family).

This represents a mission for both the husband and wife, one that tests their character and their commitment to the higher goods of family life. And it requires that both spouses deliberately orient themselves to this mission, rather than one alone.

It can be done, because it is such a deeply embedded aspect of our natures as men and women. But it's not easily done within the current cultural frame. 

Tupper & early Victorian marriage

In 1865 Karl Marx wrote a "confession" in which he set out his personal likes and dislikes. His responded to the category of "aversion" with the name of a long forgotten Englishman, Martin Tupper. 

Who was this man Marx disliked more than any other? He was a poet who wrote an immensely influential work called Proverbial Philosophy (first published in 1838 it went through forty editions and sold over 200,000 copies in the UK).

Tupper as a young boy

For the early Victorians Proverbial Philosophy was regarded as a source of lessons in life and was sometimes gifted to young couples on their wedding day. I thought it might be interesting to read the section on marriage in the book, to gauge the quality of advice being dispensed. I did so and I'm pleased to report that Tupper's approach to marriage is generally very insightful: I think many modern readers would consider him "based" to use a modern term. 

Tupper was a sincere Christian. He is therefore something of a role model for Christians, in the sense that he was able to combine his faith with a high degree of worldly wisdom. He combined an idealism about marriage with a grounded realism. 

Tupper aged 40

I'd like to go through his advice section by section, with some commentary of my own. This will take some time, but I'm confident that readers will find points of interest along the way. 

The advice begins as follows:

Seek a good wife of thy God, for she is the best gift of His providence;
Yet ask not in bold confidence that which He hath not promised:
Thou knowest not His good will:—be thy prayer then submissive there-unto;
And leave thy petition to His mercy, assured that He will deal well with thee.
If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the earth;
Therefore think of her, and pray for her weal; yea, though thou hast not seen her.
They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not:
They grow up leaning on each other, as the olive and the vine.
Youth longeth for a kindred spirit, and yearneth for a heart that can commune with his own;

The significant part of this begins with the line "They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not". It is an observation that at a certain age our youthful passions propel us to want a close connection with the opposite sex and that we are less hardened into a separate self and more able to blend into a common life together.

He meditateth night and day, doting on the image of his fancy.
Take heed that what charmeth thee is real, nor springeth of thine own imagination;
And suffer not trifles to win thy love; for a wife is thine unto death.
The harp and the voice may thrill thee,—sound may enchant thine ear,
But consider thou, the hand will wither, and the sweet notes turn discord:
The eye, so brilliant at even, may be red with sorrow in the morning;
And the sylph-like form of elegance must writhe in the crampings of pain.

This is good advice. Men sometimes do not vet a future wife well, despite the importance of doing so. They can fall for false charms, or their infatuated minds can project qualities onto the woman that aren't really there, or they can be charmed by overly superficial qualities.

O happy lot, and hallowed, even as the joy of angels,
Where the golden chain of godliness is entwined with the roses of love:
But beware thou seem not to be holy, to win favour in the eyes of a creature,
For the guilt of the hypocrite is deadly, and winneth thee wrath elsewhere.
The idol of thy heart is, as thou, a probationary sojourner on earth;
Therefore be chary of her soul, for that is the jewel in her casket:
Let her be a child of God, that she bring with her a blessing to thy house,—
A blessing above riches, and leading contentment in its train:
Let her be an heir of Heaven; so shall she help thee on thy way:
For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil.

This is the kernel of the advice that Tupper gives. He believes that a genuinely godly wife is more likely to bring "a blessing to thy house". He uses a poetic line to express this "For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil". It is similar to the advice given by a much earlier English poet, Sir Thomas Overbury in his poem of 1613 titled "A Wife". Overbury thinks a man should most value "good" in a wife rather than birth, beauty and wealth: "For good (like fire) turnes all things to be so./Gods image in her soule, O let me place/My love upon! not Adams in her face....By good I would have holy understood,/So God she cannot love, but also me".

It is difficult to disagree. Marriage cannot rest on ordinary feeling alone, as this is prone to be unstable. When our commitments instead are tied to our deeper faith, then they are much more likely to be durable. 

Take heed lest she love thee before God; that she be not an idolater:
Yet see thou that she love thee well: for her heart is the heart of woman;
And the triple nature of humanity must be bound by a triple chain,
For soul and mind and body—godliness, esteem, and affection.

The first line is also good advice. If a woman loves you "before God" she is likely to expect the things from you that rightly belong to God - and that you cannot possibly deliver. I have written about this previously - that there are women who expect a husband to be a divine therapist who can release her from core childhood wounds (omnipotence), or who expect a husband to intuit her needs before she herself knows she has them (omniscience). This places too great a weight upon the marriage, a weight it will not be able to bear. 

And the last line is also well expressed. There ideally will be godliness when it comes to the soul; esteem (respect) for the husband when it comes to the mind; and affection (physical love) when it comes to the body. If any of these are missing there is a weak link that will prove detrimental. Think, for instance, of women who settle for men they have no physical affection for, and what kind of marriages usually result. 

How beautiful is modesty! it winneth upon all beholders:
But a word or a glance may destroy the pure love that should have been for thee.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price:—it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
If the character within be gentle, it often hath its index in the countenance:
The soft smile of a loving face is better than splendour that fadeth quickly.

He is being realistic here in acknowledging that men are attracted to beauty in women. He is warning, though, that physical beauty eventually fades, and he notes something that others have observed, namely that a gentle character in women comes to be written on the face. The famous author Roald Dahl wrote along similar lines that,

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Tupper continues,

When thou choosest a wife, think not only of thyself,
But of those God may give thee of her, that they reproach thee not for their being:
See that He hath given her health, lest thou lose her early and weep:
See that she springeth of a wholesome stock, that thy little ones perish not before thee:
For many a fair skin hath covered a mining disease,
And many a laughing cheek been bright with the glare of madness.

The Victorians were aware of hereditary traits. Tupper is warning that we are to consider the traits we will pass on to our children. We should look for physical health in her family, but also an absence of mental illness (the word "mining" is used here in an older sense of "ruin in a subterranean way").

Mark the converse of one thou lovest, that it be simple and sincere;
For an artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
Observe her deportment with others, when she thinketh not that thou art nigh,
For with thee will the blushes of love conceal the true colour of her mind.

This is an early version of "see how she treats the wait staff". Tupper hits on something important here in the last line. Most women will treat a man well in the early stages of courtship, when you are promising her something that she seeks, and when her disposition to you will be at its most favourable. What is more revealing are the longer term trends in her character, as revealed in her past history (though it can be difficult to estimate this history based on her own testimony). 

Hath she learning? it is good, so that modesty go with it:
Hath she wisdom? it is precious, but beware that thou exceed;
For woman must be subject, and the true mastery is of the mind.
Be joined to thine equal in rank, or the foot of pride will kick at thee;

Interesting. Tupper thinks it good for a woman to have learning and wisdom, but that it can be a problem if a woman exceeds her husband in this, because if she is mentally superior to her husband he will not be able to lead. What Tupper is getting at here is something like the concept of hypergamy, in which a woman wants to marry up, i.e., to be with a man she can look up to and admire. If she cannot do this, there is a risk she will lose respect for him and with it her capacity to love.

And look not only for riches, lest thou be mated with misery:
Marry not without means; for so shouldst thou tempt Providence;
But wait not for more than enough; for Marriage is the DUTY of most men:

He strongly cautions against marrying for money. Men should have some resources before marrying, but not wait too long. The one thing I'd note here is that this runs against the feminist narrative that marriage at this time was based on financial considerations alone - here we have a leading Victorian influencer telling his readers that money should not be a primary concern.

Grievous indeed must be the burden that shall outweigh innocence and health,
And a well-assorted marriage hath not many cares.
In the day of thy joy consider the poor; thou shall reap a rich harvest of blessing;
For these be the pensioners of One who filleth thy cup with pleasures:
In the day of thy joy be thankful: He hath well deserved thy praise:
Mean and selfish is the heart that seeketh Him only in sorrow.
For her sake who leaneth on thine arm, court not the notice of the world,
And remember that sober privacy is comelier than public display.

This is a more difficult passage. One message here is to turn to God in thanks for your blessings in marriage, rather than only turning to God when things are difficult. The last line perhaps reflects an earlier belief that public displays of affection are unseemly and should be kept private.

If thou marriest, thou art allied unto strangers; see they be not such as shame thee:
If thou marriest, thou leavest thine own; see that it be not done in anger.

The first line reflects an earlier ethos in which poor individual behaviour reflected badly not only on the individual, but might also damage the reputation of the family. So Tupper wants his readers to consider the character not only of the wife, but also of her wider family that the husband will be associated with.

Bride and bridegroom, pilgrims of life, henceforward to travel together,
In this the beginning of your journey, neglect not the favour of Heaven:
Let the day of hopes fulfilled be blest by many prayers,
And at eventide kneel ye together, that your joy be not unhallowed:
Angels that are round you shall be glad, those loving ministers of mercy,
And the richest blessings of your God shall be poured on His favoured children.
Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen,
And reverence well becometh the symbol of dignity and glory.

I like the line here "Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen". The word "earnest" means "a foretaste of what is to follow". 

Keep thy heart pure, lest thou do dishonour to thy state;
Selfishness is base and hateful; but love considereth not itself.
The wicked turneth good into evil, for his mind is warped within him;
But the heart of the righteous is chaste: his conscience casteth off sin.

There is a lot in these four lines. First, that marriage requires both spouses to consider the good of the other. I have argued this many times on social media, often without success. For instance, there was a trend a while ago for women to argue that wives should never do things for their husband. I objected as follows: 

But I failed to persuade my opponent:

Even more significantly, Tupper is aware that much hinges on the quality of mind of the spouses - that a mind can be "warped" and so turn good into evil. This is why the original choice of spouse is so important, as the goodness of one spouse can fall onto barren ground and the marriage can fail regardless of their efforts. This is a much more realistic view than the commentary you sometimes hear that "all you have to do is to be nice and your efforts will be rewarded many times over".

If thou wilt be loved, render implicit confidence;
If thou wouldst not suspect, receive full confidence in turn:
For where trust is not reciprocal, the love that trusted withereth.
Hide not your grief nor your gladness; be open one with the other;
Let bitterness be strange unto your tongues, but sympathy a dweller in your hearts:
Imparting halveth the evils, while it doubleth the pleasures of life,
But sorrows breed and thicken in the gloomy bosom of Reserve.

The first part of this passage is about marriage being a high trust institution. This is why the experience of betrayal hurts the institution so much - it leads to "emotional unavailability" and an unwillingness to make the commitments that marriage requires. In the second part of the passage, Tupper counsels that the spouses be open with each other. I think this is true in the context he gives: that issues should be aired and communicated rather than held in reserve and allowed to fester. But it may not be true that men should communicate everything about themselves openly to their wife. Women sometimes find it more attractive if the man retains a part of himself that is more difficult to read. 

YOUNG wife, be not froward, nor forget that modesty becometh thee:
If it be discarded now, who will not hold it feigned before?

Froward means "difficult to deal with". Tupper is suggesting to young wives that if they change in this way after the marriage that people will assume that a kind of underhanded "bait and switch" has been employed. 

But be not as a timid girl,—there is honour due to thine estate
A matron's modesty is dignified: she blusheth not, neither is she bold.
Be kind to the friends of thine husband, for the love they have to him:
And gently bear with his infirmities: hast thou no need of his forbearance?

The last line is interesting. Tupper is reminding women that they should be a little forgiving of their husband's faults, as he surely must also be forgiving of hers. 

Be not always in each other's company; it is often good to be alone;
And if there be too much sameness, ye cannot but grow weary of each other

This is good advice - that there is a right amount of time to be together and time to be apart. I would add to this that in a balanced life we would spend a certain amount of time in male spaces (or for women female spaces) and a certain amount of time with our families.

Ye have each a soul to be nourished, and a mind to be taught in wisdom,
Therefore, as accountable for time, help one another to improve it.
If ye feel love to decline, track out quickly the secret cause;
Let it not rankle for a day, but confess and bewail it together:
Speedily seek to be reconciled, for love is the life of marriage;
And be ye co-partners in triumph, conquering the peevishness of self.

You sometimes hear the claim that until very recent times marriage was just about property and that women were nothing more than chattel. Yet here we have a very influential Victorian era writer asserting that "love is the life of marriage" and that it is therefore important not to allow resentments to build that might undermine this love.

Let no one have thy confidence, O wife, saving thine husband:
Have not a friend more intimate, O husband, than thy wife.
In the joy of a well-ordered home be warned that this is not your rest;
For the substance to come may be forgotten in the present beauty of the shadow.
If ye are blessed with children, ye have a fearful pleasure,
A deeper care and a higher joy, and the range of your existence is widened:
If God in wisdom refuse them, thank Him for an unknown mercy:
For how can ye tell if they might be a blessing or a curse?
Yet ye may pray, like Hannah, simply dependent on His will:
Resignation sweeteneth the cup, but impatience dasheth it with vinegar.
Now this is the sum of the matter:—if ye will be happy in marriage,
Confide, love, and be patient: be faithful, firm, and holy.

There is a positive attitude to parenthood here, as a blessing that brings both a deeper care and a higher joy and that widens the range of existence.

That concludes Tupper's advice to newlyweds. Tupper, like other early Victorian writers I have read, took marriage very seriously, enough to think through what was required to make a marriage work. There was no easy Disney "happily ever after" that was simply owed to someone. Marriage required prudence in choice of spouse, and thereafter it required an active orientation to virtue and faith.

Finally, please note that Tupper did not believe that women were incapable of moral guidance. Tupper appealed to both sexes in giving his advice and understood women to have a share in the mission to create loving marital unions.

Trying to set things right

The issue of marital stability is an important one but is often treated simplistically on social media. The argument is often that a husband just has to be nice to his wife and she is certain to reciprocate, or else he just has to be masculine and she will revere him for life.

I was reading a particular case study recently, that of Dr Ashley Solomon, an American psychologist. She gave what seems to me to be a more typical account of modern divorce, at least amongst the professional classes: 

A few friends joked that a decade or two beyond the wedding season of life, we were now in the divorce era. As I looked around at the community of newly single women around me, that certainly seemed to be true. We weren’t all the same age, but there were some other obvious similarities. We all had children, mostly ones that were potty trained but still quite dependent on us. We all had careers, not just jobs, and we cared a lot about the work we did. And, with some particular exceptions, we had exes who by and large were decent humans, but were not the right humans for us. And, I realized, we’d all been the person in our marriages to choose to divorce.

Her circle of female friends all chose to divorce largely decent men when the youngest child was becoming semi-independent (toddler/preschool age). That is also the pattern I have observed amongst my own colleagues.

What is particularly interesting about Dr Solomon is that she is determined to make her second marriage more successful than her first, and so she gives an honest account of where she herself may have gone wrong. 

Her first insight is the most significant. She writes of her efforts to improve her own relationship skills that,

I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.

One of the hardest things to acknowledge about my experience of my last relationship was that I struggled significantly to honor the fullness of who he was. I knew conceptually, of course, that he was his own person, but in practice, particularly in moments of tension or intense emotion, that reality could easily disappear.

I’ve had two teachers in this area – the infamous Esther Perel and the wise Jordan Dann. Dann talks often in her work about differentiation – the ability to see our partner as distinct rather than merged. And Perel talks about the importance of holding paradox, the space where two truths can co-exist at the very same time.

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I had skills for both, I would have said yes, and I would have been wrong. When I became triggered through upset or conflict, I’d regress to a place where I could only really see my own truth. I’d need him to understand it, to validate it, and ultimately to hold it up as the final and real truth.

Growing for me has meant being able in the midst of hurt to regulate my own emotions enough to see – fully see – that there is another human on the other side whose thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were valid, even when in seeming opposition to mine. I’ll be honest, it’s annoying AF to do. But it’s been the only way to have a mature partnership.

This is sometimes referred to as solipsism - a difficulty in seeing a reality outside that of your own mind. My own theory is that it is connected to a lack of self-awareness, this being the ability to stand above your own immediate thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites - and to successfully direct and regulate these through the use of our reasoning powers. 

What I suspect is that many women, even obviously intelligent ones like Dr Solomon, can struggle with self-awareness. Their sense of self is centred more in their thoughts and feelings, rather than in the directing power of the mind standing above them, and so it is those thoughts and feelings they need validated to feel secure and "seen" in who they are.

It is not that Dr Solomon does not have self-awareness, but, as she herself puts it, when experiencing "tension" the emotions would take over and she would struggle to regulate them, so that her partner would no longer be perceived to be "distinct" but would be "merged". 

Note too the way that Dr Solomon talks about truth. She talks about "my truth". Even in her attempt to improve her understanding, the best she can offer is to try to balance out her truth with his truth. She is caught in a kind of subjectivism that is different to the way that men generally think about things. Most men would not say "well, this is my truth" - it would not make sense to men to pitch things this way. There is a truth that the reasoning power is trying to grasp, so there is either truth or falsity in doing so. 

What larger conclusion can we draw from this? Well, it is important to recognise that the level of self-awareness that a person has, whether man or woman, will run along a continuum. It will not be the same for each. I think we should acknowledge that when a woman has low self-awareness that this is likely to contribute to the difficulties present within a marriage. If she does not see him as a distinct person, but is caught within her own subjective emotional states and can only frame the marriage through these, then there will be errors in perception that he will have little control over. She might, if she truly merges him with her mind, believe that he is thinking and experiencing the same things that she is - the same unhappiness or discontent or anxiety or doubt.

I think this is why it is so important for a girl to have a loving upbringing in a stable home and with a close and supportive relationship with her father. If she is subject to her flow of emotion, then a marriage is more likely to succeed if these emotions are mostly warm and positive ones, and if there is less of the "tension" that moves a woman away from self-awareness.

The second relationship skill that Dr Solomon is working on is not expecting a husband to read her mind:

I make direct requests rather than expecting him to read my mind or anticipate my needs.

Smart people and relationship experts have been proclaiming this forever, but it took me a while to get over the hump. Writer Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” And therapist Terry Real says, “Great relationships mean more assertion up front and less resentment on the backend.”

When I got messily honest with myself, I realized how little I actually communicated my needs to my first partner, passive aggressiveness notwithstanding...

Relationship books will tout this one often, reminding us to ask for what we want. But I want to go a layer deeper. Because for me, acknowledging the need to ask was part of the challenge. And that was hard for me – and, I believe, for many of us – because I was holding on to a fantasy in which my partner was supposed to be so attuned to me that he could know my needs without me having to make them known. We could think of this as the fantasy of having a fully emotionally available parent, someone who not only meets our needs, but anticipates them. For those of us who didn’t have this, which is perhaps most of us, this need can feel unresolved, and we might be seeking it in our partner. But, of course, because they are human and in fact, not our parents, they will stumble even with the best of intentions.

Resolving this means, to me, acknowledging the wish for a fully mind-reading, selfless partner who will meet every need before I know I have it, and then turning to my real partner and thanking him for just doing his best.

Many married men will have experienced this. The idea is "if you were the right one, you would know what I need even before I do". It does significant damage, because when the husband inevitably fails, the wife then draws the conclusion that he is not the right one after all. 

Where does this come from? Dr Solomon puts it down to a need for reparenting, and that is a very reasonable explanation. Another possible explanation is that the husband is being subject to "apotheosis". Just as men sometimes see the transcendent through the form of an actual woman ("you are an angel"), women can see men as representing some aspect of the divine. The problem is when the balance between the real all too human man and what he represents of the transcendent is lost, and he is expected to become something like a divine therapist who can wash away the sins of the world for his wife. A real husband cannot be omniscient (knowing her wants or needs before she does) or omnipotent (having the power to heal all hurts even those stemming from childhood traumas). 

Again, a woman who grew up in a loving, stable family home and who had a happy childhood will be less likely to need either reparenting or to vainly seek trauma healing from her husband. It might possibly help as well if a woman is brought up with a sincere religious belief so that she places the omniscient and omnipotent power where it truly belongs rather than with her husband.

What I'd like to finish with is the importance of men learning to harness their self-awareness in order to take control of a culture and guide it toward the good.

When we look at a workplace culture it is considered acceptable for there to be a mission for that company, and for there to be professional standards for all employees to respect and adhere to, and even consequences for those employees who act in ways that damage the company and its mission. There exists, in other words, a "form" or "shape" to the company and its culture that people who sign on to that company, and who expect to benefit from it, must adhere to.

I don't think it's surprising that women are, in modern life, often more successful in their role of employees of a company than of being wives. It is because there is a clear form to workplace life, one that gives external direction to what must be done to succeed within that culture. In a corporate culture it is expected that we self-regulate our thoughts, emotions and actions to serve the larger mission of that company.

But in modern family life? This is now understood to be the realm of pure emotion. And so a lack of self-awareness becomes fatal, because there is no external form or shape to keep things in check. It becomes a more chaotic and unstable realm, despite its importance to the good of the individual and the good of the larger community.

How can the family have better shape? Well, we could re-emphasise the significance of the mission of each family. Part of that would be a more positive view of the "offices" of husband and wife and father and mother, i.e., an understanding that these roles allow us to express aspects of our manhood and womanhood that then fulfil a part of our telos in life - our ultimate purposes. 

It would help also if men were encouraged to make the best use of their own faculty for self-awareness, so that they could assume some degree of leadership within the family, one which requires a level of maturity and wisdom to truly achieve.

A genuinely religious dimension might also help. If we are motivated in our duties to other members of our families by a love of God and a desire to serve God, and therefore a deeper sense of doing what is right, then there will be a more stable form to family life.

Finally, it would help if some of the politically motivated attacks on men were to cease. A woman with low self-awareness is always going to have problems with authority because she doesn't have the sense that there is a logos embedded within reality, and she will not then see that a vision of the good might be based on objective reality. And so any assertion of shape or form might seem to her an external imposition rather than something she can discern as an aspect of her own reality. So low self-awareness women have a choice. They can rebel along Jezebel lines or they can submit to something despite it seeming to be external to them. 

Of course, it matters that what they submit to represents a genuine good. And, if it is a genuine good, it matters that these women can respect the men who attempt to lead with it. That is made difficult when there is a "man bad, woman good" narrative, as we currently have, or when there is an assumption that all social interactions are based on the pursuit of self-interest. Men need to act for the good of the communities they belong to, including their families, and to be respected for doing so, if we wish to give family life a shape that pure emotion cannot achieve. 

Forward to Eden?

Why do liberals treat primitive societies as more legitimate than modern Western ones? In my last post, I made an argument that radical liberals have long been dismayed by the Christian claim that human nature is fallen and that it is therefore not possible to return to an Edenic existence of equality, freedom and plenty. Against the Christian view, the radical liberals argued that human nature has been corrupted by power structures through which some humans come to dominate others. If these can be deconstructed, then humanity will return to its original state of innocence.

What this means is that pre-civilised societies have often been treated by radical liberals as examples of original human societies free from class structures or exploitation. 

But this then raises a question. If primitive societies are superior to civilised ones, then why would progressives see history as a march of progress? 

I understood a possible solution to this more clearly after re-reading a post I once wrote about the sociologist Robert Nisbet. Nisbet, writing in the early 1950s, felt that his age was focused on issues of personal alienation and cultural disintegration. He thought these the products of the previous century. In the nineteenth century, there was a "temper of mind" which found:

the essence of society to lie in the solid fact of the discrete individual - autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable - and the essence of history to lie in the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past.

Here already is an answer to the problem I set out above. Progress was held by the liberals of the era to mean an emancipation of the individual from any status not derived from the autonomous, self-sufficient individual. In other words, the progress of society was toward the deconstructing of social hierarchies and distinctions. That is how the primitive could be reconciled with the progressive.

Nisbet wrote further:

Competition, individuation, dislocation of status and custom, impersonality, and moral anonymity were hailed by the rationalist because these were the forces that would be most instrumental in liberating the individual from the dead hand of the past and because through them the naturally stable and rational individual would be given an environment in which he could develop illimitably his inherent potentialities. Man was the primary and solid fact; relationships were purely derivative. All that was necessary was a scene cleared of the debris of the past

What does Nisbet mean by "relationships were purely derivative"? Well, consider the following claim by a Girton College girl in 1889:

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family ... One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

This girl, already by 1889, saw family relationships as merely "derivative" rather than as something constitutive of the self.

You can understand, in part, why the nineteenth century mind moved in the direction it did. There was in progress a disruption of older, more local and more personalised forms of community toward more "massified" forms of urban life. You might think this far from Edenic, but for the radicals it had the advantage of busting up the traditional life they thought was corrupting human nature. Out of the disorder and dislocation, they hoped, would emerge a social life free from traditional distinctions and statuses.

It's worth pondering this, because I think it explains why some traditionalists instinctively wish to push back on some of this "massification" and to recreate to at least a degree more stable, personalised and local forms of community. 

Nisbet then adds the following:

This was the age of optimism, of faith in the abstract individual and in the harmonies of nature. In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, what we are given...is the matchless picture of a child of nature revolting against the tyrannies of village, family, and conventional morality...In the felicities and equalities of nature Huck finds joyous release from the cloistering prejudices and conventions of old morality. Truth, justice and happiness lie in man alone.

In many areas of thought and imagination we find like perspectives. The eradication of old restraints, together with the prospect of new and more natural relationships in society, relationships arising directly from the innate resources of individuals, prompted a glowing vision of society in which there would be forever abolished the parochialisms and animosities of a world founded upon kinship, village, and church. Reason, founded upon natural interest, would replace the wisdom Burke and his fellow conservatives had claimed to find in historical processes of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.

Kinship, village and church are rejected as parochialisms and are to be replaced by the individual following his "natural interest". Nisbet goes on to quote a nineteenth century Russian sociologist Ostrogorski who wrote:

Henceforth, man's social relations "were bound to be guided not so much by sentiment, which expressed the perception of the particular, as by general principles, less intense in their nature perhaps, but sufficiently comprehensive to take in the shifting multitudes of which the abstract social groups were henceforth composed, groups continually subject to expansion by reason of their continual motion."

Ostrogorski sees a shift in which traditional relationships and loyalties were relegated to the merely sentimental. What was replacing these merely sentimental bonds were "general principles" which were applied to continually expanding abstract social groups. Ostrogorski concedes that the newer relationships might be "less intense in their nature" but were nonetheless more comprehensive.

Finally there is this from Nisbet:

Between philosophers as far removed as Spencer and Marx there was a common faith in the organizational powers of history and in the self-sufficiency of the individual...Both freedom and order were envisaged generally in terms of the psychology and politics of individual release from the old.

We see this in the social sciences of the age. What was scientific psychology but the study of forces and states of mind within the natural individual, assumed always to be autonomous and stable? Political science and economics were, in their dominant forms, concerned with legal and economic atoms - abstract human beings - and with impersonal relationships supplied by the market or by limited general legislation.

Above everything towered the rationalist's monumental conviction of the organizational character of history - needing occasionally to be facilitated, perhaps, but never directed - and of the self-sufficing stability of the discrete individual.

History was moving - it was progressing - thought the nineteenth century intellectuals, towards a self-sufficient individual who needed only the resources within himself and who represented "natural man" liberated from the personal and the particular. This was the way that humans were going to travel forward to Eden, leaving behind the "the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past" (which helps to explain the poet Shelley's idea of biological sex - the fact of being male and female - as one of the "detestable distinctions" that would "surely be abolished in a future state of being".)

The hostility to the traditional is here overwhelming and it is not surprising that the political parties which formed by the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth were so little concerned to genuinely conserve.

Why would a woman think this way about marriage?

The latest thing to emerge on social media is the idea that it is wrong for wives to do things for their husbands. Why? Apparently, this represents a wife "mothering" a "man-child". The argument extends even to stay at home wives whose children are at school. They, too, are never to do anything for a husband, and he should take over the domestic work on his return from his paid job.

Here is an example of the mindset:

Now, obviously there is a terrible logic to this claim. If women cannot do wifely things for a husband, because it is "mothering" them, then there is no longer any meaning to the word "wife" - it has been emptied of any real content. It will no longer signify anything of value. And, of course, there is no longer the same level of reciprocity in a marriage. Men will go out to work, will then come home to more work, but cannot expect anything from their "wife" because that would make them a man-child.

How did we get to this point? Well, one reason is that the modernist mindset is to believe that life is about the pursuit of self-interest. When it comes to relationships this means that I should attempt to get my relational needs met to the maximum, whilst only being required to meet the needs of the other to the minimum.

So, specifically this means that a woman will want maximum effort, energy and attention from a man, whilst having few requirements to provide comfort, support or sex; whilst a man will want comfort, support and sex, with the minimum level of effort, energy and attention. Men with this mindset might angle for "situationships" or "friends with benefits", women might want a marriage in which they are not required to do homemaking, or "emotional labour", or to have sex. 

You might ask, if women want marriage to be run according to their own self-interest, why would a man sign on the dotted line? The answer is that women who think the world revolves around self-interest, assume that men think the same way and that marriage has been set up to benefit men. They claim that men get all the benefit from traditional marriage, so they are only righting the scales now to make marriage all about female self-interest. 

To justify this approach, they commonly cite debunked research by Paul Dolan that marriage improves happiness levels for men but sinks them for women. He misinterpreted some data, and has since corrected his original claims (see here). It turns out that married women with children are happier on average than all other categories of women:

To give an example of what these online debates look like, here is an exchange with a woman calling herself Alakazam. She began with the usual claims that wives "mother" their husbands and that men are happier in marriage than women.

I pointed out to her that the research she was relying on had been debunked and then replied with the following:

Her response? Exactly as might be predicted:

I tried to persuade her to retreat from this position by asking her if we should put our own self-interest ahead of our children. But she was happy to answer yes:

There is a positive side to all this. This can be changed. We are choosing to live in a world created by men like Thomas Hobbes. We don't have to. We could return to a different approach, one in which spouses will the good of the other. In a marriage in which both spouses have been formed along these lines, this would mean less focus on what we maximally get from the other, and more on what we have to give as husbands and wives. This is a healthier mindset, because we reach the better aspects of our own nature through acts of familial love. It would allow men to think positively of what they can gift a wife as a man; but similarly it would raise the status of what women might gift a husband as a woman.

Was marriage about treating women as chattel?

When I debate women on social media it is surprising how often a particular view of the past emerges. There are women who hold firmly to the belief that prior to recent times women were viewed as chattel, i.e., as property, and that marriage as an institution existed as a kind of property transfer of women from one man to another.

I have just finished a book by Judith Hurwich, an adjunct professor specialising in family history. Titled Noble Strategies: Marriage and Sexuality in the Zimmern Chronicle, it focuses on the nobility of southwest Germany in the period 1400 to 1600, though she also makes many comparisons to the family life of nobles elsewhere in Western Europe. 

Recreating the Landshut Wedding of 1475

It should be noted that it is difficult to describe marriage practices exactly as they existed in the European past, because there was variation across time, place and social class. Nonetheless, a solid picture emerges in Judith Hurwich's book about the main motivating factors surrounding marriage in this era.

To summarise, there were two main influences on family life among the nobility at this time. The first was a lay model of marriage based around duty to kin. For the nobility, the main aim was to preserve the noble lineage, both in the sense of producing heirs, but also marrying upward rather than downward. To succeed in this aim was difficult and required a strategy that involved both sexes. 

The second influence, one that apparently grew in power over time, was an ecclesiastical model of marriage, in which the ideal of lifelong, monogamous, harmonious and even affectionate relationships was emphasised. The nobility was less influenced by the Church model than was the urban patriciate, but nonetheless it made inroads into the aristocratic culture of family life.

Dowries & morning gifts

In order for a woman to marry, her family had to pay a very large sum of money, the dowry, to the groom. The amount of money depended on the wealth and status of the family. The bride also brought her trousseau, consisting of clothing, jewelry and silver plate. The groom's family, for their part, provided the bride with a morning gift, usually between one third and one half the value of the dowry. This became the property of the bride and was used by her as income during the marriage. The bride was also entitled to a pension and an estate to live on, if and when she became a widow. The amount of the pension was a return on land equivalent in value to the dowry and morning gift.

The dowry was a sizeable sum of money for noble families - a considerable drain on the family assets. Therefore, it was considered to be a "premortem" inheritance, i.e., an inheritance given to the bride whilst her parents still lived. Daughters receiving a dowry were therefore expected to renounce their right to a postmortem inheritance, though they could do so with conditions attached. For instance, daughters might still inherit the parental estate if they outlived their brothers.

What all this suggests is that financial considerations were indeed an important aspect of marriage, but not in a way that made of women themselves "chattel". 

Noble strategies 

In Germany there was a system of partible inheritance rather than primogeniture. It was considered unfair for the oldest son alone to inherit, and therefore estates would be divided among all the sons. This meant, however, that families needed just the right amount of sons. Not enough and the lineage might die out. Too many and the family estate would lose too much land.

And so there was a system in which many sons were not allowed to marry. The sons who were not chosen to marry might join the church as cathedral canons. They might as unmarried men have concubines, i.e., they might have a long term relationship with a woman of lower social status who would bear them illegitimate children. But these children had no claim on the family estate.

Similarly, a certain number of daughters could not marry. A family had to think strategically. They could give all the daughters a smaller dowry, which meant that they would marry downwards into a lower social caste. Or the family wealth could be concentrated into one or two larger dowries, allowing some daughters to marry upward and gain prestige and powerful social connections for the family.

In general, a higher percentage of daughters than sons were able to marry. What I believe this demonstrates is that marriage was not so much organised around "women as chattel" but around maintaining the lineage and noble prestige of the family. Both sexes were expected to play their role in achieving this aim.

Harmony & affection

Among the nobility marriages were arranged, often through an intermediary, who might be an older relative (of either sex) or a powerful connection. Older bachelors with no living parents might sometimes take on the role of arranging a marriage themselves.

The fact that marriages were arranged does not mean that they were always without affection or even that the parties concerned did not have some influence in the process. The  Christian ideal of marriage as a loving, personal, faithful spousal union gained increasing acceptance in society, albeit more gradually in the noble class:

Medieval German marriage sermons had long emphasized that the goal of marriage was "loyalty, peace and harmony," which could be achieved only through the efforts of both spouses. For example, a sermon of 1449 describes emotional harmony (concordia animorum) as a major goal of marrige and gives a list of commandments on how to achieve love in marriage. (p.149)

Some noble marriages most certainly achieved a genuine marital love:

The Danish princess Dorothea wrote in 1535 to her husband Duke Albrecht of Brandenburg, "I cannot conceal from you how every night, and especially when I have just received your letters, all I dream is that I am lying with my husband, dearest to my heart, and share all joy and pastime with you." The funeral sermon preached for Dorothea in 1547 said, "There was such mutual love between the spouses that one can truly use the old saying, "Though their bodies are two, their hearts are one". (p.151)

There were also unhappy marriages. One historian has estimated that about 10 percent of noble marriages broke down. Interestingly, 69 percent of legal applications made for judicial separation in the ecclesiastical court at Constance were initiated by women (p.166), a number that has changed little from today.

Noblemen of that era had the option of taking a concubine. They could install a woman from a lower social class in a house outside the castle and visit her and his illegitimate children. It was considered socially acceptable among the nobility as long as protocol was not violated: it was improper for the concubine to be treated better than the wife. Interestingly, it was thought a deep violation of the social code if the concubine exercised the type of sway over the nobleman that was thought to be the proper preserve of his wife. Over time, and under the influence of Christian morality, laws were passed against concubinage, but the nobility were powerful enough to resist these measures.

What caused marriages to break down? Interestingly, there are historians who believe that the shift toward companionate ideals of marriage might have played some role:

Stone regards the increase in marital breakdown in the course of the sixteenth century as the product of middle-class and Puritan values - rising expectations of affection and companionship in marriage, coupled with increasing public disapproval of the mistresses and illegitimate children who had previously provided a relief, at least for men, in arranged marriages.

Finally, there is the issue of choice of marriage partners. The extent to which young people had a say in marriage partner seems to have varied. Judith Hurwich cites examples where young nobles had no choice at all, but were expected to follow the wishes of the family. However, increasingly young people were able to exercise at least some choice. By the late 1400s, the children of the urban elite were actively participating in their own marriage negotiations. According to Judith Hurwich, they wanted the potential for affection to exist and could veto parental choices when this was absent (pp. 105-106).

Judith Hurwich summarises recent research on the customs of the English aristocracy as follows:

even before 1550, there was some room for personal affection and free choice of partners, and daughters as well as sons had the power to veto partners they disliked. Many sixteenth-century English peers in their testaments cautioned executors against forcing their daughters into marriages to which the women objected. (pp. 106-107).

Conclusion 

You could not read Judith Hurwich's history and come away thinking that noble marriage was organised around the concept of women as chattel. Rather, both sexes shared the aim of maintaining a noble lineage, and it is clear that marital practices were organised to a considerable degree to achieve this outcome. Nor was the ideal of concord and affection in marriage absent. Much of Judith Hurwich's history is focused on how these two distinct aims were managed and reconciled.

For love alone?

I've been looking recently at ideas within the culture that undermine marriage. One of them is the notion that a husband must "make" his wife happy and if he doesn't that this then justifies divorce (see here). Another idea that is common on social media, and equally destructive, is a variant of the old notion of "free love". It's the belief that women once entered into marriage not for love but for material security. Now society has progressed to the point that women no longer need men for their material well-being. Therefore, they can marry for more "elevated" reasons, i.e., for love alone.

I'll explain why this idea has undermined marriage further on. Here is how the idea is commonly put:

Note the assumption here. The claim is that women did not in past times believe that marriage was about love, but that it was entered into for material purposes alone. There is a more hostile and radical version of this theory, i.e. that in past times women were brutally subjugated and treated like chattels by men, but now women can finally enter into a more elevated vision of marriage as equals:

There is an ugliness to this idea. It wipes out all of the sacrifices men have made for women throughout history, and also degrades the role that women played throughout history as wives and mothers. 

As it happens, it is difficult to summarise the marital practices of the past because they varied according to time, place and social class. However, even amongst the European nobility, in which marriages arranged for pragmatic dynastic reasons were the norm, it is still false to suggest that young people did not want affection and concord within marriage. The historian Judith Hurwich writes that by the mid-sixteenth century:

....children did have a larger role in choosing their spouses...and children had the right to veto. The potential for affection was acknowledged as a relevant consideration even in the aristocracy...interest and emotion were not necessarily opposed to each other and family interests and personal preferences formed what Marshall calls an intricate "mesh of interests and motivations" in the selection of marriage partners...(Noble Strategies, p.129)

I won't dwell on this, because the problem is not really the mistaken notion that marriage was only ever about material interests without any consideration for affection. The problem is the idea that you can base a marriage on "love" alone, i.e. that love alone is a sufficient foundation for a culture of marriage.

This is a problem, first, because of the understanding of what marital love is. There are types of love that do not endure and therefore cannot ground lifelong commitments. For instance, some people associate the heady, romantic phase of falling in love with love itself. When this phase is over, they move on and end up practising something like serial monogamy - which itself cannot last because the human psyche can only endure a certain number of attachments and break ups. 

There is a type of love, namely caritas love, that is more enduring. This is a love that is settled in the will and that wills the good of the other person. I have in the past attempted to explain this type of love to women on social media by using the example of the love that parents have for their children. Our loving commitment to our children is not based on a fleeting feeling, but endures even in times of stress and difficulty. But the women are inclined to scoff at the comparison between this kind of caritas love for their children, and the love they might have for a spouse.

However, even if marital love were understood the right way, it would still not be a strong enough foundation for a culture of marriage. For instance, the lack of distinct roles for men and women harms marriage, because it becomes more difficult to practise a "gift exchange" model of marriage, in which men and women contribute different things for each other they cannot provide for themselves. What you often hear instead is women saying "I can do this for myself, so it doesn't mean much to me if a man does it, he has to find other ways to add value". The ordinary masculine things a man does no longer count for as much; there is less gratitude, and less sense of things being gifted and so more dissatisfaction and greater tension within relationships. Equality understood as sameness (i.e. gender role convergence) doesn't end up purifying or elevating relationships.

A serious level of religious belief within a culture also helps marriage. If we commit to our marriage as part of our commitment to God, then there will be a deeper, inward motivation to hold firm to our vows. Sir Thomas Overbury recognised this in his poem "A Wife" written some time before 1613:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,
The law requires our words and deeds be good,
Religion even the thoughts doth sanctifie

It will also help the cause of marriage if there exists, within the culture, a notion of a common good. If it is understood that we express our own higher nature through the offices of being a husband or wife, then my own good rests on the larger good of the family I belong to. Marriage cannot survive in a culture that is based around a principle of purely individual self-interest, nor goods that are pursued at an individual level alone. There will be, inevitably, a decline in trust in societies that cannot see beyond individual self-interest, and this too will degrade rather than elevate relationships between the sexes.

Some dialling down of promiscuity in youth also helps with marriage. This is true for both sexes, but it is particularly significant with young women, who can most easily garner many different sexual partners. If women have sexual experiences with high status men as young women, it can be difficult for them to avoid a sense that they are settling with the man they do eventually secure commitment from. Again, this does not lead to a pure type of love, beyond material concerns, but to the phenomenon of women marrying men they are not deeply attracted to but who they believe will be stable provisioners.

More generally, a culture needs a normative commitment to the institution of marriage itself. By this, I mean a recognition that the health of the institution is important and should generally be upheld by members of a community. This might include a recognition that stable family life is important for the well-being of children; that it provides an important source of support for individuals; that it provides companionship in old age; and that it provides future generations for the ongoing life of a community. In this context it makes sense that the mores of a society are supportive of those who work hard to uphold family life and that there is some degree of disapproval for those who act selfishly to undermine it. 

So, to return to the original question, is it really the case in the most advanced, wealthy nations that relationships have become more elevated and pure as a matter of human progress? It is surely the opposite. There is a higher level of conflict between the sexes, higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and lower fertility rates. In popular culture, there is a coarser and cruder treatment of relationships that is often focused on hook ups and break ups rather than on elevated love. The narrative is not working the way that it is supposed to and needs to be challenged.

Can we support this type of marriage?

If we were to go back to late Medieval/early modern Germany, what did marriage look like? I recently read part of a book by Judith Hurwich, titled "Noble Strategies". It describes marital practices amongst the aristocratic elite. 

What I found most interesting was the conflict between an older lay German practice of marriage and the Christian one. The lay German practice, at least amongst the nobility, was that a husband could set aside a wife and live openly instead with a concubine (and have children with her). Unsurprisingly, it was then generally expected (amongst lay writers) that it was the wife who had the responsibility of maintaining marital concord. After all, she was the one who risked being set aside if the marriage failed.

The Church gained control over lay marriage by the twelfth century and by the thirteenth was beginning to campaign against concubinage. However, it took some time for municipal laws to change, and for open, co-residential concubinage to be punished. The earliest change to the law in Germany was in Strasbourg in 1337, then Ulm (1387), Wuerzburg (1418) and Frankfurt (1468). You can see that the pace of change was slow, so much so that it was still in play in the 1500s. 

If we describe this earlier understanding of marriage, in which male adultery was permissible, as was the setting aside of a wife, as marriage 1.0, then Christian marriage becomes marriage 2.0. Again, it is not surprising that when both spouses were equally bound to fidelity, that the responsibility of upholding marital concord also shifted. In the 1500s it began to be increasingly considered the role of both spouses to maintain harmony within the marriage.

This more egalitarian view lasted from about 1500 to 1850. From the mid-nineteenth century, liberalism began to aim at the autonomy of women. This too took some time. By the 1970s women were entering the higher professions in larger numbers; no fault divorce was introduced; a welfare state had been created; and there was a level of material wealth in society that enabled women to safely and securely divorce their husbands. In a reversal of the situation in Medieval Germany, it was now women who were empowered to set aside their husbands.

Again, unsurprisingly, this has led to a change in who is considered responsible for maintaining marital concord. In marriage 3.0 it is the men who must uphold marital concord or else pay the price. In its roughest expression, this is simply the idea that a man must try to keep his wife happy or else she is entitled to leave him and he is considered at fault for the marital failure. You can see this mindset in the social media post below:

It is uncommon for this change in marriage to be formally acknowledged. Liberals are committed to an egalitarian ideal, so there would be much cognitive dissonance if it were recognised that the current system of marriage is like the pre-Christian one in reverse.

Marriage 3.0 is well entrenched, to the point that many conservatives, in wanting to defend marriage, assume that this version of marriage is what has to be supported. They sometimes do this by claiming that the task of making a woman happy in marriage is a simple and straightforward one, as in the following social media comment:

I want to particularly focus, though, on Nancy Pearcey, who is an academic I genuinely admire. She has, however, accepted the terms of modern marriage. She thinks we can use scientific research to figure out what men can do to make their wives happy and leans on two researchers for support in this, namely John Gottman and Terrence Real. Here she uses Gottman to claim that it is up to men to make marriages work:

And here she fully embraces the idea that the failure of marriage can generally be attributed to husbands not pleasing wives emotionally. It is a more sophisticated expression of the idea that the husband must make the wife happy.

So is all this right? Do men go into marriage not wanting intimacy or closeness? Is it easy to achieve intimacy or closeness with women? Can science provide some sort of definitive answer to the question of what women want? Is the future of marriage men learning how to make their wives happy?

I'm sceptical. Achieving happiness in life depends on a whole raft of factors, as I have outlined in a previous post (Making Lady Lawyer Happy). A husband can contribute to a wife's happiness, but that's as far as it goes. She can be unhappy no matter what he does.

It is also a little naive to believe that it is simple and straightforward for men to divine their wives' emotional needs. It's useful, as an illustration of this, to turn to a review of one of Terrence Real's books. The reviewer summarises the material in the book as follows:

Real faces head-on the reality that many women come into couples work with fierce anger, frustrated by trying to achieve true emotional intimacy with their man. His premise is that many women's responsibilities and aspirations have grown as part of the women's movement and their resulting, empowered roles, during decades when many men's roles and expectations have progressed less dramatically. As difficult as the tone of the anger and complaint, Real suggests the substance of women's frustrations is right-on, which will provide some much needed vindication for women readers.

This book is full of composite examples of couples-therapy sessions where the woman's attitude sounds in complaint and withering anger. The man in these examples sounds clueless, and deeply hurt by the woman's anger. Real's prototypical woman comes off like a nag, shaming while complaining. It is at this point where men typically recoil avoiding facing women's needs, and their own fears.

The man may think, "what's the problem: I am nice and thoughtful. I don't rage or abuse....."

The husbands are trying to meet their wives' emotional needs but the result is not loving intimacy but an abusive rage by their wives before divorce. Why would this be the case? Well, one reason is that the husbands and wives are most likely understanding the very concept of "emotional needs" differently. The husbands think that it means being loving-hearted and affectionate and supportive etc. And the wives? Well, consider the following piece by a practising psychologist, Dr Steven Stosny. I don't entirely agree with the framework he puts forward, but he does paint an interesting picture of what some of his clients mean by "emotional needs":

There is no question that young children have emotional needs in the development of a stable and cohesive sense of self and need help from adults to so do. It’s also true that toddlers cannot distinguish wanting something from needing it, which is why they can become hurt or tantrum-prone when we say “no” to something they want but obviously do not need, like a toy or a treat. At the moment they want it, it feels like they need it; the stronger the feeling, the stronger the feeling gets.

The toddler's brain is active in adulthood when we misinterpret feelings in relationships and confuse wanting, preferring, and desiring with need. It’s how we create a false sense that a lover (parent-figure) must mirror and validate our feelings or else we can't maintain a cohesive sense of self.

So we are no longer in the realm of freely bestowed love. That is no longer the emotional need. The emotional need is to have one's sense of self upheld via validation and mirroring of our wants and desires. It is not enough to be a loving husband to meet this kind of emotional need - this is the terrain of husband as therapist.

Dr Stosny goes on to explain that when we are feeling bad, it triggers the sense of needing to have or to do something, which, if we believe our spouse has to meet our needs, then means that they are at fault for the way we feel:

The perception of need falsely explains much of our negative experience in intimate relationships. If I feel bad in any way for any reason, it's because my partner isn’t meeting my needs. It doesn't matter that I'm tired, not exercising, bored, ineffective at work, or stressed from the commute and the declining stock market, or if I'm mistreating him or her or otherwise violating my values; I’m convinced that I feel bad because she's not meeting my needs.

It gets worse. Eventually, even if the husband gets things perfectly right, there is little sense of gratitude, only anger if things go wrong:

In terms of motivation, emotional needs are similar to maintenance addictions, those that cause discomfort in withdrawal, with no stimulation of reward centers in the brain when gratified. Over time, there’s little or no reward in “getting my needs met,” and lots of resentment when they are not. I may not even notice when you do what I want, but I'll be angry or depressed when you don't.

The resulting mindset is not based around mutuality or reciprocity:

In my long practice, people who are resentful about not feeling “validated” are not in the least interested in validating anyone’s experience that differs from their own. They’re more likely to invalidate–reject, ignore, or judge–other people’s experience when they decide that it differs from their own.

You can see why those women, in the antechamber of divorce, are so witheringly angry and why the men are so hurt and lost. Love has been interpreted as "meeting my emotional needs" and these needs are not for affection or patient understanding or anything like that, but to meet an intensifying and increasingly unrewarding series of wants and preferences understood subjectively as needs, with negative feelings, no matter what their source, also interpreted as failings on the part of the husband.

What would help move us away from 3.0? Some better metaphysics would help. First, an ontology in which the more that we give of ourselves, the greater the fullness in being. This would help shift the emphasis back to an ideal of mutual service within marriage, or, to put it differently, a model of marriage in which we gift of ourselves to our spouse. 

Second, an understanding of our telos (our ends and purposes) as men and women being significantly realised through fulfilling the offices of husband and wife. In other words, there is a common good within marriage, as by being a husband or a wife I fulfil important aspects of who I am as a man or as a woman. 

Third, it would also help to have a more traditional anthropology in which humans are considered to occupy a special place within the hierarchy of creation by being able to rise upward to higher forms of being or to fall downward to more debased forms. The act of love toward a spouse would then be valued as an expression of our higher nature, as something ennobling in itself. Again, this would hopefully help shift the focus away from "if you loved me you would do x, y and z so that my emotional needs get met". 

Finally, I don't want the aim of all this to be misconstrued. When it comes to marriage, there are higher and lower quality women. There are still men who will have rewarding marriages, even in these times. The aim is to become attractive enough as a man to have options with higher quality women, and to intelligently vet these women. 

What does concern me, in writing this, is the culture. In particular, I would consider it unfortunate if conservatives were to defend an understanding of marriage that does not deserve to be conserved.