It may come as a surprise that there is quite a lot of polygamy in the Bible. Some of the better-known polygamists, each with several wives or concubines, include Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Moses, David, and Solomon. That said, biblical polygamy usually had a bitter ending. According to the Book of Kings, Solomon had ‘seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines’, but ‘his wives turned away his heart’. ‘For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God…’ (1 Kings 11:3-4).

Incest, bestiality, and prostitution

The Bible also features a fair bit of incest. Lot’s daughters both became pregnant by inebriating their father and raping him (Genesis 19:30). Ham ‘saw the nakedness’ of his father Noah. When Noah ‘awoke from his wine’, he ‘knew what his younger son had done unto him’ (Genesis 9:22,24). Tamar dressed up as a harlot and had sex with her unsuspecting father-in-law Judah in exchange for a goat. ‘And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt (Genesis 38:34).’

Leviticus prohibits incest: ‘None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness… (18:6).’ It also prohibits bestiality: ‘Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion (18:23).’ Deuteronomy condemns prostitution: ‘There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:17).’ St Paul also condemns prostitution: ‘Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid (1 Corinthians 6:15).’

Monogamy

The idea of exclusive monogamy goes right back to Adam and Eve. In Genesis 1, God seems to have created man and woman at the same time: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’ After blessing them, the first thing God tells them is to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth’. However, Genesis 2 finds Adam alone in Eden. God says that ‘it is not good that the man should be alone’, and creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Adam seems to consider Eve as another self: ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh… Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.’ This pronouncement implies marriage and monogamy as the norm for man. Much later, the Apostle Paul advised that a bishop ‘must be blameless, the husband of one wife… (Timothy 3:2)’. The serpent that draws Eve, and through Eve Adam, to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is seductive, and phallic in form, and may represent sexual temptation or adultery. To punish Eve, God curses her to the pangs of childbirth, and to marital subservience. He clothes Adam and Eve in skins and tosses them out of Eden.

Romantic love

The concept of romantic love, which is, in fact, fairly modern, barely exists in the Bible. All love is directed at God, and the love for the spouse and more generally for the other is subsumed under the love of God. In the Binding of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for Isaac his own son, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commands it.

Today, the most popular reading for weddings is Chapter 13 of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Here is a quick run-through:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way: it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things … When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways … And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

The problem in this context is that Paul is not referring to bleary-eyed romantic love, but to Christian love for our fellow men. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which is the source of the passage, gives the Greek agape as ‘love’, but the King James Bible prefers to render it as ‘charity’: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ Faith, hope, and charity are called the three theological virtues—‘theological’ because they are born out of the grace of God, and because they have God for their object. Charity in particular is the love of man for God, and through God, for his fellow men.

Even the Song of Songs (the Song of Solomon), which appears to celebrate sexual love, is read by the Jewish tradition as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, and by the Christian tradition as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his ‘bride’, the Christian Church. ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste (Solomon 2:1-3).’

David and Jonathan

So it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the two greatest love stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman. David rivalled Jonathan, son of King Saul, for the throne of Israel. After slaying Goliath, he appeared before Saul with Goliath’s head in his hand: ‘And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul … And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle’ (1 Samuel 18).’ Much later, upon learning of Jonathan’s death on Mount Gilboa, David lamented: ‘I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women (2 Samuel 1:26).’ One evening, Saul rebuked Jonathan for favouring David over his own father and family: “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother’s nakedness?” David and Jonathan both had wives and children, and we are to believe that the love between them was homosocial rather than homosexual.

Ruth and Naomi

In the Book of Ruth, Naomi is married to Elimelech. A famine leads them and their two sons to move from Bethlehem to Moab. In time, Elimelech dies, as do their two sons, leaving Naomi and her two daughters-in-law destitute. Naomi returns to Bethlehem, entreating her daughters-in-law, who are Moabites and thus from a different ethnic group, not to follow in her barren footsteps. But Ruth insists upon following her, telling her: ‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried…’ This sounds more like a marriage vow than anything else. When the pair arrive in Bethlehem, Naomi tells the Bethlehemites: Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara (‘Bitter’), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.’ Ruth takes to gleaning in the barley fields of Boaz, who it transpires, is a kinsman of Elimelech, Naomi’s late husband. With Naomi’s encouragement, Ruth marries Boaz, who bears Ruth a son, Obed. Interestingly, it is as if Obed is the son of Naomi: ‘And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the Lord, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous in Israel. And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age, for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him. And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it. And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi…’ For the genealogy, Obed was the father of Jesse, and through Jesse, the grandfather of David.

Celibacy

Is married life better than celibacy? Jesus did not marry, and neither did Paul or most of the Prophets. Paul clearly favours celibacy and chastity, but accepts that most people ‘cannot abide even as I’ and that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’:

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband … But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn … He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.

While Paul permits (but does not command) marriage, Solomon, the apocryphal author of Ecclesiastes, seems—despite, or because of, his 700 wives—to warn against it, as well as against lust, on the grounds that they detract from the path to God:

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.

The early Church Fathers took their cue from Solomon and especially Paul in favouring the freedom of celibacy over the bondage of marriage and family. Noting that angels are single, St John Chrysostom argued that celibacy surpasses marriage inasmuch as angels surpass men (Homily 19 on First Corinthians). Writing in the third century, St Cyprian maintained that, although God had commanded Adam and Eve to multiply, the earth, by now, was full (Of the Discipline and Advantage of Chastity).

Arranged marriages

From the Old Testament, it seems that marriages could be arranged, and that the virginity of the bride was paramount. In Genesis 24, Abraham makes his eldest servant swear to pick a wife for his son, not from the Canaanites but from his own kin. According to Deuteronomy, if a newly wed is found not to have been a virgin, she should be stoned to death in front of the door to her father’s house ‘because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house (22:21).’

Gender and marital subservience

Once married, should a wife be subservient to her husband? Used by God to introduce Eve in Genesis 2:18, the word ‘help’, ‘helper’, ‘helpmeet’, or ‘helpmate’, though possibly a mistranslation, suggests that Eve’s subservience predated the fall and God’s curse of marital subservience. According to St Peter, Sara obeyed her husband Abraham, ‘calling him lord’ (Peter 3:6). In Ephesians, St Paul compares marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church … Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing (5:22-24).’ In Corinthians, he establishes a clear chain of authority: ‘But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God (1 Corinthians 11:3).’

In the Middle Ages, the word ‘obey’ was introduced into marriage vows, but, even so, a wife’s subservience to her husband is not understood to be unconditional. In Galatians, St Paul says that faith levels the field: ‘But after the faith is come… There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:25,28). In his 1880 encyclical Arcanum, Pope Leo XIII states that ‘The woman… must be subject to her husband and obey him; not indeed, as a servant, but as a companion, so that her obedience shall be wanting in neither honour nor dignity.’

Recreational sex

Is recreational sex permissible within marriage? Certainly, lust should not form the basis of a marriage (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). But once married, sex should not be withheld: ‘Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love (Proverbs 5:18-19).’ St Paul seems to agree, albeit it with less grace and poetry: ‘Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife (1 Corinthians 7:3-4).’

Levirate marriage, contraception, and masturbation

The practice of levirate marriage is set out in Deuteronomy 25:5-6. A childless widow should not re-marry with a stranger, but with her late husband’s brother; and their firstborn son will succeed in the name and estate of the late husband. This could concern the brother-in-law, who, by fathering a son in his brother’s line, would be creating a claimant on the larger part of his inheritance. When God killed Er, Er’s father Judah told his second son Onan to marry Er’s widow Tamar and ‘raise up seed’ to his brother. But when he lied with Tamar, Onan, who ‘knew that the seed should not be his’, spilled his semen on the ground: ‘And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also (Genesis 38:10).’ This episode is largely responsible for the ban on contraception and masturbation.

Adultery

Adultery is forbidden in several places. It is, of course, the subject of one of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. David famously lusted after the bathing Bathsheba and impregnated her, leading, ultimately, to the death of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite, the death of Bathsheba’s first child by David, and the revolt of David’s son Absalom. St Paul inveighs against adultery in more than one place, and St Matthew goes so far as to equate it with a lustful thought: ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Matthew 5:28).’ According to Deuteronomy, an illegitimate child and his descendants cannot be admitted into the Church: ‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:2).’

Divorce

In Old Testament times, a husband could easily divorce his wife (Deuteronomy 24). Jesus, however, forbids it: ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication (Gk. porneia), causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery (Matthew 5:32, and echoed in Mark and Luke). Jesus refers back to Genesis 1 and 2 when discussing the indissolubility of marriage: ‘Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Matthew 19:4-6).’ By referring back to Genesis 1, Jesus may be implying that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. Jesus performed his first public miracle at the marriage at Cana, saving the day by turning water into wine. This story has been upheld as evidence that he supported marriage, and also as an argument against teetotalism! St Paul commands: ‘Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife (1 Corinthians 7:10-11).

Homosexuality

Marriage and sex are strictly between a man and woman. Leviticus clearly condemns homosexual acts, as well as touching pork, eating shellfish, and getting a tattoo or a round haircut: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination (Leviticus 18:22).’ The punishment is harsh: ‘they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Leviticus 20:13).’ St Paul seems to echo Leviticus in condemning the ‘abusers of themselves with mankind’ and the ‘soft’ or ‘effeminate’ (1 Corinthians 6:9), and again ‘them that defile themselves with mankind (1 Timothy 1:10)—although, given the original Greek, it could be that he is simply condemning male prostitution.

What of Sodom, destroyed by fire and brimstone? In Genesis 19, Lot gives shelter to two beautiful angels. The Sodomites threaten to force themselves upon Lot’s guests, and such is Lot’s idea of hospitality that he offers up his daughters instead: ‘Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof (Genesis 19:9).’ It is not clear whether the sin of Sodom was homosexual rape, lack of hospitality, or both or other.

The only reference to same-sex love between women is in St Paul’s First Letter to the Romans. To punish the people for their idolatry, ‘God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural (physikos, ‘produced by nature’) use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly… (Romans 1:26-28).’ It could be that, rather than homosexual acts per se, St Paul is in fact condemning the prostitution and pederasty of the Romans, or the pagan practice of priests and priestesses prostituting themselves out of their temples, or simply those people who go against their nature, that is, against their heterosexual orientation.

Despite David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi, the concept of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is relatively recent. The only possible mention of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is in Matthew 19:12, when Jesus speaks of ‘eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb’.

Closing remarks

Many traditional attitudes have come down from the Bible. But the Bible is not only or even primarily an instruction manual. It is not a unified work. It often contradicts itself. It lends itself to interpretation. It is open to misinterpretation. Choices made in style and translation can reflect the biases of the translator. Still, for better or worse, no single book has exerted a greater influence on the way we live and think.

Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that there are no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being physically stronger, while woman was frequently incapacitated by pregnancy and childrearing, which, through giving birth and breastfeeding, naturally fell upon her. In a modern society, with technology such as mechanization and birth control, the male advantage is largely if not entirely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests.

This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialization of children, which emphasizes man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, activities such as dressing up or baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical figures. From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining the traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor—and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors—but apart from the antiquated ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman. A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve: “Never say never… You just need to find the right man… There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet.”

On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do appalling things like paint their face and wear high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected, they tend to begin life in a doubly subordinate position, which, of course, suits the man just fine. So much is evident from popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous classic pop songs, which on the surface are about romantic love, are in fact systemically sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchy. Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes: ‘I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.’ You couldn’t imagine these lines in the mouth of a man. And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler: ‘Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit nervous/ That the best of all the years have gone by/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit terrified/ And then I see the look in your eyes/ Turnaround bright eyes, but every now and then I fall apart/ Turnaround bright eyes, every now and then I fall apart.’ For contrast, compare some lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China: ‘It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.’

The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy white dress that symbolizes her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that it in the minister’s authority and the woman has none. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains seated and silent. From that day on, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring. Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.

Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens? By legitimizing a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing other forms of life and the people that choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who for various reasons are less likely to marry. Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many U.S. states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as banking, taxation, healthcare, and immigration. In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding alone generates a spend of, on average, £24,000 (~$32,000), and probably that again on the gift list, which pales into insignificance compared to the £230,000 required to raise a child. The laws which govern a marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce. Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on about 40% of the marriages that it sanctions, amounting in the U.S. alone to one divorce approximately every 36 seconds. When a couple divorces, people usually ask what went wrong with their marriage, but not whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself. Here are the closing lyrics of Hotel California: ‘Mirrors on the ceiling/ The pink champagne on ice/ And she said, ‘we are all just prisoners here, of our own device … Last thing I remember, I was/ Running for the door/ I had to find the passage back to the place I was before/ ‘Relax’ said the night man/ ‘We are programmed to receive/ You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave!’’

To partake in the institution of marriage in the 21st century is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name. Until relatively recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma. In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed into those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Marital rape was not criminalized, and yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her. Rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the mid 20th century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalization of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced. Forced marriage is still practised the world over, including in the U.K. and U.S., and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape or so much as talk to another man risk being beaten or even murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2013, an eight-year old Yemeni girl died from internal bleeding after being raped by her forty-year-old husband on ‘their’ wedding night.

When I was a child, it was unusual for a woman to drive when there was a man in the car, because the man just had to be in charge. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just twenty or thirty years ago, and men are more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony. But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband or care for the young, the old, and the sick in the family. Employers look favourably upon married men, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, that they will refrain from colluding with the patriarchy. Because the man brings in more money, his time is valued and prioritized, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench archaic gender stereotypes.

The truth of the matter is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, and social disapproval. But in the longer term, marriage can be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble’ said Charlotte Brontë in a letter to her correspondent (1852) ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’ There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, weakening ties with relatives, friends, and neighbours. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897), ‘Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.’ (Familles, je vous hais! foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.) There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but sex can lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women. In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth noting that man had no need for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession.

The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae said that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it; and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a deeply conservative institution. Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another. In the Second Sex (1949), the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’. At a time of unparalleled social freedom, why should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy? Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot imagine a better way of living?