Marriage as a Way of Life
American Marriage.
by Ruth Shonle Cavan.
Thomas Y. Crowell. 490 pp. $6.95.
“He’s your fella.
You’re his woman—
That’s all you need to know” (Carousel, Act II).
The appearance of a volume like American Marriage acts to remind one that there are colleges in the United States offering courses in how to have a happy marriage. The book is a textbook, complete with discussion questions and suggested readings at the end of each chapter—designed, as the author states in her preface, “primarily for young people with middle-class backgrounds, since experience has shown that these young people are very numerous in college courses and discussion groups on preparation for marriage.” All the possible problems arising for someone of marriageable age are examined here: dating, premarital sexual intimacies, love, picking the right mate, engagement, wedding arrangements, marital adjustments, budgeting, birth control—and, interestingly enough, mixed marriages (both religious and racial).
It seems to be a characteristic of our civilization that only its most precious artifacts can be taken for granted, while elementary biological functions and social institutions so universal as to be almost a condition of nature must now become objects of full consciousness. The same young people of middle-class backgrounds who are so “numerous” in marriage classes will drive automobiles, live in the newest style of housing replete with the very latest in electrical comforts, and engage in revolutionary forms of work and recreation without giving it a second thought—certainly without imagining that they have any other choice. But it is only with the aid of innumerable guides, texts, discussions, and classes that these young people approach marriage and sex. And they may even devote years of study to the matter of conceiving and giving birth to a baby and to the question of how most effectively to love their children. (Nothing, I think, indicates more clearly the lengths to which self-consciousness has driven us than the recent popularity of the movement to reinstate “natural” childbirth.)
Nor need it be regarded as ironic that within ten or fifteen years probably one out of five of the marriages and families so carefully considered will break down. Marriage has in fact become something of a mystery; and like all mysteries, the power of its image is only strengthened by a measure of internal contradiction. One can very easily imagine, then, that the dean or professor who decides to include family living in a college curriculum does so not out of any simple progressive belief in his obligation to “fit the students for life,” but rather in response to a popular need for some non-technical specialization in a knotty subject.
In any case, the student who takes up American Marriage will find that he has enrolled in a hard and elusive course—one that involves the flexing of every last bit of his will and personality and yet whose conditions he can do nothing about. “You may place yourself in the sequence [‘step by step from early dating to the early stage of family building’],” Professor Cavan tells him, “review your past experiences, and look forward to the logical future steps.”. The end of his studies—his final examination, as it were—is to be his own happy marriage, and this in turn (he will learn from the discussion of “Enduring Love”) depends on his successful adaptation to a “we-group.” Moreover, while Professor Cavan assures him that his preparation for marriage consists of “all [his] experience from birth on,” he will not be able to earn an A in the course except precisely by doing violence to what must have been his experience had he ever been permitted to have any. For the happy marriage he must achieve is no longer that institution, founded on solid rock, which creates a rational economic organization for the family; nor even that shakier institution whose function is to thrust him into adulthood and responsibility. In fact, it is no institution at all, but a “relationship”—the expression of his capacity for “we-feelings”: on the basis of which he is to create a family and a home; to the furthering of which he entirely gives over his choice of friends, recreation, habits, hobbies, his professional aspirations, standards of conduct, and his values; in which he must find his “deepest sexual expression” and otherwise bear witness to a constant and unfailing love. Perhaps most important of all, marriage is the mirror in which he must see the only reflection of himself as a valuable, decent, mature, and happy person. And all of this—at least according to the unrevised official rules—with one mate.
(If, in addition, our student is a male, he will quickly learn that the whole enterprise—like the games of “potsy” and the skipping ropes of his childhood—has been set up to disadvantage his natural talents. In parked cars, and later in the marriage bed, his virtues as a lover will be found in his ability to submit to female terms and desires; and those as a father will be measured by his capacity for participating in his wife’s pregnancy, delivery, and physical care of the children. His success in the world of affairs will be credited to him insofar as they contribute to the welfare of his family, and in that event, will be credited equally to his wife. He will be working hard, as he has been taught, to support his household, and then will happily and considerately cast his one vote in its democratic process of making decisions.)
The young seekers-after-the-good-marriage, however, are apt not to cavil at the unreality of these teachings, just as Professor Cavan finds little occasion to take note of the phenomenal divorce rate in this country—and for the same reason. Most likely teacher and class will be engaged in a peculiar conspiracy of silence on the matter. That the kind of marriage so precisely delineated here is more and more leading to divorce—or at the least to a restlessness and discontent and dislocation staggering in their dimensions—is beside the point: which is, that it will certainly lead to something. This book, for all the sociological studies it cites, makes no attempt to contend with the real problems that have been afflicting marriages in the last generation; what it does succeed in doing is to project the terms by which everyone can convince himself that the abstraction “marriage” is something worth contending with, deserving of the greatest effort and highest aspiration. Professor Cavan’s course is after all a form of training for citizenship; what she and her students really discuss together is a Way of Life (the subtitle of the book) that will bring them willingly into the neat little houses and neat little destinies society has prepared for them. By making that way of life marriage, particularly marriage at its most problematical, thousands of young Americans may be persuaded that living in the organization and in front of the television screen is not the void it seems: it wants only a little more digging into the self, a little more intensification of personal preoccupation, to take on meaning. Who would not—in exchange for having some sense of purpose—be willing to occupy himself with marital bliss? It seems a small price to pay.
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