Why the Best Friends Tell us What We Least Want to Hear
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What makes a true friend? Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue—and explains why the finest friends are so rare.
Today, everyone is obsessed with romantic love. Aristotle, however, conceived of the highest human relationship in terms of friendship—the bond through which we learn to value another person for their own sake.
For the Greeks, true friendship was a rare and precious thing. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says, “I would rather have a real friend than all the gold of Darius [the Persian emperor], or even Darius himself.” But today, on social media, we call hundreds of people our friends.
By putting romantic love on a pedestal, we have devalued friendship. Our romantic partner is also expected to be our best friend, confidant, counsellor… As a result, other friendships may be neglected or even treated as threats.
Aristotle’s Three Kinds of Friendship
Friendship is so important to Aristotle’s account of the good life that he devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. In a friendship of utility, we value them for what they can bring us. In a friendship of pleasure, we value them for the enjoyment they provide. These relationships are not necessarily base: colleagues, neighbours, and tennis partners may genuinely like and help one another.
But the limitation of these first two kinds of friendship lies in their reason for being: when the advantage or pleasure fades, the friendship fades with it.
Why Perfect Friends Are Rare
Lasting friendships, on the other hand, are based on character or virtue: each friend values the other, not for what he brings, but for who he is. The friend’s wellbeing and flourishing become part of our own.
Because we are invested in the wellbeing and flourishing of our friend, we owe them the hard truth—and expect the same thing in return. A real friend does not simply accept us as we are, but recognises our potential and helps us become what we could be.
That’s why “perfect friendship”, as Aristotle calls it, is not for everyone. Most people would sooner ghost us than listen to the truth about themselves—particularly now, when there are so many less demanding distractions around. Whereas social media affirms our public image, true friends challenge the person underneath.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.
The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.
It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.
We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?
Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive
The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.
Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.
Can Love Be Divided?
To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.
If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?
Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.
Polyamory as an Experiment in Love
In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.
Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.
Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.
Polyamory in Practice
Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.
Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.
The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.
For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.
The Burden of the One
The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love.
Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.
Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.
Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.
Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.
Love, Jealousy, and Possession
Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.
People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.
Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.
Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.
Triangles Needing to Be Squared
Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.
This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.
The Measure of Love
Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.
But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.
There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Why the Bachelor Party Is the Opposite of What It Appears
The bachelor in his last days of freedom. The Monarch of the Glen, by Edwin Landseer.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Ever attended a bachelor party and wondered what on earth was going on? Let’s investigate, like an alien might.
A bachelor party is an initiation into marriage, which, in modern times, is understood as a celebration, by the groom’s male friends, of the groom’s last days of ‘freedom’.
In the UK, the bachelor party tends to be called a stag (stag night, stag do, stag party…), and in Australia, a buck. The equivalent rite for the bride, attended by the bride’s female friends, is the bachelorette or hen party.
The original meaning of ‘bachelor’ in English is ‘a young knight who follows the banner of another’. ‘Stag’ and ‘hen’ used to be slang for ‘man’ and ‘woman’. The stag, standing proud and alone, has forever been a symbol of virility, with stags (and men with antlers) a common motif in cave paintings. Cernunnos, the Celtic god of life and fertility and a symbol of the masculine, featured the body of a warrior and the antlers of a stag. The stag’s antlers, which point to the heavens, serve to attract mates and fend off rivals. Mirroring the cycle of life and death, they grow and fall back each season, transmuting from soft, pulsing velvet into hard horn.
Although fairly recent in their modern incarnations, the stag and hen party descend from immemorial customs. In Ancient Greece, a bride joined her female relatives and friends in paying tribute to Artemis, goddess of childbirth and protector of young girls. In Sparta, friends marked the groom’s last night of bachelorhood with a banquet. By marrying six times at the cost of his wives, the party-loving Henry VIII (d. 1547) embedded the tradition into English society. For a long time in England, stags involved a formal dinner hosted by the groom’s father or best man, or, in more humble circles, a simple drink among friends.
‘Hen party’, initially ‘a gathering of women’, acquired its modern sense in the 1960s and 70s. The term first appeared in The Times of London in 1976, albeit in quotation marks, in the context of a male stripper fined by Leicester Crown Court for acting in ‘a lewd, obscene and disgusting manner’. Back then, the bride often celebrated with her co-workers, whom she would likely be abandoning for the life of a housewife and mother. In time, hen parties spilt out into nearby pubs and clubs, increasingly resembling stags in their raucousness.
Rites of Passage
A rite of passage marks a transition from one sphere to another, attended by a significant change in social status. According to the ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (d. 1957), rites of passage have three ritual phases: separation, transition, and incorporation.
Separation rituals, such as the matriculation ceremony upon entering university or the crew cut upon entering the army, symbolise detachment from a former life. In French, a bachelor party is called, enterrement de vie de garçon, which means, ‘burial of the life of the boy’. In modern stags, the separation ritual often involves stripping or humiliating the groom.
Western culture lacks formal rites of passage for adulthood. In other cultures, these often feature tests of virility or maturity, which, in the West, tend to be subsumed informally into the stag or hen, often in the form of an alcohol endurance test or a two-fisted activity such as archery, hammer throwing, or bungee jumping. Bungee jumping also represents a leap and separation; it is, in effect, a symbolic suicide.
In many traditional societies, the separation ritual for marriage involves initiating the bride into the duties of marriage, including lovemaking and childbearing—a function which, in our culture, has largely been delegated to the stripper, or perhaps to a sex toy or pornography. This reveals an important function of the rite of passage, which is to guide and support us at a critical and challenging time in the cycle of life.
For the bride, another possible function of the separation ritual is purification. In Orthodox Judaism, the bride immerses herself in a ritual bath, or mikveh. In many Eastern traditions, the bride wears intricate henna tattoos, usually on her hands and feet, for decoration, purgation, and protection. In Germany, the bachelor party is called Junggesellenabschied (‘farewell to bachelorhood’), but there is another event called Polterabend on the night preceding the wedding at which guests break old crockery to drive out evil spirits. The modern heir to all of these traditions is, of course, the spa day. Purity, symbolised also by the white wedding dress, serves to reassure the groom and wider society that the seal on the milk bottle has not been tampered with.
Other, more minor functions of the stag and hen may include:
Making a mockery of marriage to make it seem less threatening.
Confronting a loss of freedom by desperately reaffirming it.
Snatching the groom back from the bride’s grasp, and vice versa.
Punishing the bride and groom for forsaking their friends.
Saluting one’s friends.
Saying goodbye to one’s friends.
Tying in one’s friends.
Creating a pretext to spoil oneself or one’s friends.
Creating a pretext for socially sanctioned release and debauchery—not dissimilar to the ancient orgy.
Celebrating the life of the groom or bride.
Celebrating manhood or womanhood.
Inducing social conformity.
The Modern Stag and Hen
In the space of a generation, hens and stags have evolved into elaborate affairs involving various degrees of drunkenness and debauchery, often over several days in some faraway city of sin. Such gatherings have spawned an entire industry, with event planners organising activities such as paintballing and tank driving, and arranging everything from dare lists to drinking games, and stretch-limousines to strippers breaking out of tiered cakes.
Why have stags and hens become so big? From an economic standpoint, travel has become cheap and commonplace. People are marrying later and earning more, leaving them with more disposable income than ever before. From a sociocultural standpoint, our generation is more liberated, and perhaps more self-indulgent, than any that has gone before. The stag in particular may represent a frenetic attempt to reaffirm increasingly threatened notions of masculinity—and, indeed, of marriage itself.
For most of human history, marriage stood as an inescapable familial, social, and economic imperative. But in recent decades, with falling infant mortality and overpopulation, rising life expectancy, and female emancipation, it has become something of an optimistic and atavistic lifestyle choice. Already in the nineteenth century, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: ‘If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both…’ Today more than ever, a part of the bride or groom remains unsure about tying the knot, and the stag or hen is, on some level, a manic defence against a loss of freedom and possibility; and, for the other revellers, against the loss of a friend to an increasingly arcane and remote institution.
There is an irony here. Whereas a rite of passage ought to help us confront and negotiate a difficult transition, the modern stag or hen, in its frantic excess, serves to prevent us from thinking about that transition at all—while making it seem that we have.
The purpose of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of doubt, fear, and sadness from rising into the conscious mind by distracting it with opposite feelings of euphoria and purposeful activity. In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning frivolous events and then preoccupying herself with their prerequisites—in the withering words of Woolf, ‘always giving parties to cover the silence.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why an ancient institution may be outdated.
Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.
With technological advances such as mechanisation, birth control, and long-range warfare, the male advantage has, like the peacock’s tail, become largely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialisation of children, which emphasises 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, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.
Marriage did not create patriarchy, but has long been one of its central instruments, regulating sex and reproduction, transmitting property and legitimacy, and reconfirming the respective roles of men and women.
The Marriage Market
From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating 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 aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned 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…
Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
Have you tried one of those dating apps?
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, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression—like the burqa made sexy. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.
Pop Culture
These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love, are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.
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.
It would be hard to 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…
Now consider these 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.
‘Her Day’
The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolises her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks after she has spent three months starving herself. 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 and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, 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’.
By now, you’ve probably crossed me off the guest list and saved me a lot of trouble.
In Bed with the Church and State
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 legitimising a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who 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.
Two people may love one another, sleep together, live together, raise children together, and grow old together without the state taking much interest. But the moment they marry, their private relationship becomes a public and legal institution.
Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US 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 immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.
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 generates spending equivalent to an annual income, and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the cost of raising a child, let alone two or three. When people point out how much I spend on fine wine, I point out that it’s still much cheaper than having children. Plus I can sleep at night.
The laws that govern 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 almost half of the marriages it sanctions. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.
Collusion
To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.
Until 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 under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.
The 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 middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalisation 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 all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; 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 murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2010, a twelve-year-old Yemeni girl, Elham al-Assi, died from internal bleeding three days after being made to marry a man twice her age; according to her mother, her husband had tied her up and raped her.
Marriage Today
When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just thirty or forty years ago, and men are much 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 and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.
In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritised, 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 afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.
Marriage has undoubtedly changed for the better. But this raises an awkward question. If marriage has been stripped of so many of its traditional assumptions—female obedience and dependence, division of labour, indissolubility, compulsory heterosexuality—what is it that we are still clinging on to?
Is It Really Love?
The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble,’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘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, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness.’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—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 remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession. Romance took the form of ‘What’s for dinner?’ followed by a grump and a stiff drink.
Equality Is Not Liberation
The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared 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 profoundly 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 feminist and 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 such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, 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 rise up to a freer way of living? And could the state please stop penalising those who do?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
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