The Changing Meanings of Marriage

This is my first sermon. I was invited to preach at the First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist Church in 2005, shortly after my book titled Reinventing Marriage was published, and then I gave this version of the sermon at First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Arlington less than a month after joining the congregation. If you would like to consider my sharing this service with your congregation, please contact me.

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Music:

If possible, it is extremely helpful for the congregation to hear these two songs before the sermon:

“Everything Possible,” by Fred Small

“Do You Love Me?” from “Fiddler on the Roof,” by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock

Opening Hymn: #299, “Make Channels for the Streams of Love,” from Singing the Living Tradition

Sermon:

First, I want to thank all of you for welcoming me here today and welcoming me to this congregation. I grew up Unitarian Universalist, but for almost eighteen years I wasn’t able to be part of a church community. I am new here, to this particular congregation, and I have a lot of names and faces and local traditions to learn. But in another way I feel like I am finally coming home, and that is a wonderful feeling.

So thank you. It is truly a great pleasure to be here today.

My goal here this morning is to share with you some of the history of how marriage has evolved over the years, and some suggestions about how that history is relevant to people today.

I suspect we’re all aware, at least to some degree, that what people want and expect from marriage has changed a lot over the generations.

We need only look at two of the songs we heard here this morning.

Fred Small tells his listeners that “everything is possible” for you. “You can be anybody you want to be, you can love whomever you will.” “You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around, you can choose one special one.” It’s all up to you, he says.

But this isn’t the anything-goes world it might sound like. There is a measure of your words and your deeds, Fred Small tells us: It’s how much love you leave behind when you’re gone. And there is, I think, another measure of your words and your deeds that is implicit in the song: It’s whether you are true to yourself.

Anything is possible for you, precisely because you are responsible for shaping your life into the best life that it can be – the best life for you, for who you are. If you are true to yourself, and you both love and are loved in abundance, then you are living a good life.

Think about what that would sound like to Golde.

It wouldn’t make any sense. For her, living a good life is doing what you’re supposed to do and having it all work out OK. A good life is having enough to eat and seeing your children grow up strong and healthy and having children of their own. It’s knowing your place in the world and doing what God intends you to do.

So when Tevye asks Golde whether she loves him, she doesn’t know what to do with the question. She has given him children, milked the cow – what more can he want?

And still, at the end of the song, Golde acknowledges that she, like Tevye, wants to be loved. “It doesn’t change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years it’s nice to know.”

But think about that line. “It doesn’t change a thing.” Who here, in this room, would be able to say that it doesn’t change a thing if a married couple loves each other or not? We live in a society that celebrates love, and that considers love one of the central things that makes a marriage a marriage. Golde considers love icing on the cake … nice if you happen to get it, but not worth risking anything important for.

Now, of course, I do know that Golde and Tevye are characters in a play, not real historical people.
But I also think that they reflect something real about how people used to look at marriage, even in this country.

If you go back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, most Americans looked at marriage in primarily practical terms. Most people lived on farms, and there was too much work on a pre-modern farm for any one person to do. So parents taught girls one group of skills and boys another group of skills, and assumed that when they grew up they would find somebody of the other gender with whom to start a new farm and a new family.

So the most important questions about a possible marriage partner were practical. Would this person work hard? Would they bring money or land or at least good linens to the marriage? Would they be a responsible spouse and a responsible parent?

If someone lost their spouse while their children were still young, as many people did, it was not uncommon for them to re-marry within a few months, or at most a year or so. Unless they were unusually wealthy, and could hire lots of servants, it was very difficult for a single man or a single woman to maintain a household by themselves. Once again, marriage was primarily practical.
Most Americans hoped that married couples would love each other too. But it was accepted that love often came after marriage, not before.

In fact, many people felt a distrust of love before marriage. Young people who were swept away by love often made decisions they later regretted. By the end of the eighteenth century many couples were getting married because they were pregnant, but their elders did not consider that a good approach. It was considered much more prudent to like somebody and approve of them, and then get married and assume that love would grow.

By the early nineteenth century, however, this system was breaking down. Industrialization changed the balance between men’s work and women’s work. It used to be that people understood that men and women, husbands and wives, were interdependent – that both of them needed the other for survival. As the nineteenth century went on, however, more and more people thought of it as men being independent and women being dependent on men.

Children also became more expensive. On a pre-modern farm, children were a good financial investment in a workforce. As you know, nowadays children are many things, but a good financial investment is not one of them. So in that way too women’s contributions became less valuable.
And a lot of men started to be pretty ambivalent about this idea of taking on a dependent wife and then who knows how many dependent children.

So marriage was in trouble. And out of that trouble grew a new focus on the emotional side of marriage.

By the 1830s, popular culture was celebrating the experience of romantic love, that intense feeling of intimacy, of knowing and being known by another person. For the first time, writers and ministers and parents agreed that courting couples should try to make sure they loved each other before they got married.

By focusing on romantic love and intimacy, couples could see themselves as being in balance, both of them giving to each other rather than just men giving to women.

This focus on emotion went along with a big expansion in the role of mothers. Before that, women ran households and nursed infants, but taking care of babies and children was a job for girls. A grown woman’s time was too valuable for child-care.

By the 1830s, however, advice books began to say that mothers should be emotionally close to their children. Being a good mother was no longer primarily about being a good manager and running your household well and keeping your children alive. It was much more emotional and much more intensive.

In the eighteenth century, on those pre-modern farms, men mostly worked in their home or very close to home. While they worked they often interacted with their children, especially but not only the older boys.

In the nineteenth century, however, men increasingly went away from home to work in offices or factories. They were not nearly as engaged in home life as they used to be.

So men and women lived very different lives. People at the time talked about men and women having “separate spheres.” Each gender had its own work and its own interests. And it was assumed that you would find companionship and understanding and friendship among your own gender.

This made a real problem for romantic love. It was very difficult to keep up the emotional intensity of being “in love” while living separate lives. Some couples did so, but many did not.

This contrast between people’s expectations of marriage and people’s real experiences of marriage led to a second big change.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, some married couples began to describe themselves as “best friends.” Husbands and wives began to expect to be interested in each others’ activities, to enjoy each others’ company, and to spend a lot more time together.

Implicit in this image of marriage as a close friendship is the idea that men and women are more similar than different. If you are thinking separate spheres all the time, if you really believe that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then there isn’t enough common ground to keep alive a friendship. To be friends with someone, you have to feel a basic similarity.

It took a while for these ideas to percolate through society. Historians often look at divorce cases to say, OK what does this society consider part of the essential definition of marriage? What do you need to have to make something a marriage?

In the nineteenth century, there were basically only three reasons for divorce: adultery, desertion, or extreme physical cruelty. And I mean extreme.

By the 1920s, however, some couples began to ask for divorces because they didn’t love each other any more, or because living together made them unhappy. Judges just threw out the first such cases – like Golde, they considered love icing on the cake, not an intrinsic part of marriage.

By the 1970s, however, every state allowed couples to get divorced on the grounds of incompatibility. In other words, we now consider love and compatibility and happiness and companionship part of the definition of a “real” marriage. If people say they don’t love each other any more, we consider that a good reason to end their marriage.

Remember those words … “You can be anybody you want to be, you can love whomever you will.”

What is important is loving people and creating a life that is true to who you are. Even if sometimes that means saying goodbye to who you used to be.

But love isn’t all there is to marriage, even now. People still have feelings of obligation and responsibility … things they feel they should do for the person they are married to, and things they feel that person should do for them.

When people weave their lives together, they become vulnerable to each other in all sorts of ways, including practical ones. It still matters whether the person you married is hard-working and financially responsible. It still matters whether they pull their weight around the house. We may not talk about these issues as explicitly as our ancestors did, but who you choose to marry still greatly affects the shape of your life.

And then there are the more intangible things. The words “wife” and “husband” and “married” have all sorts of symbolic associations and emotional meanings. Some people get married precisely because they want those associations and meanings. Other people get married and then discover that they are falling into roles that they did not intend to take on. And other people do not get married precisely because they do not want to accept all the connotations of being a husband or being a wife.

Many people nowadays try to create relationships that fit their values and their beliefs, and I’m all for that. But I also think there’s only so far that self-creation can go. We don’t get to step outside our culture, or step outside our history. Even when we try to change ourselves, we can’t just pretend that our past didn’t happen. I’m sure I’m not the only person here who has sometimes realized … Oh, I’m acting this way because of a belief or an assumption that I didn’t even realize I had.

So marriage is still a combination of love and duty and tradition. We may not talk about the duty side as much as we talk about the love side, and we have a lot more disagreements than we used to about what should be included in the duty side. And sometimes two people who get married discover that they have such different assumptions about what marriage means that they end up getting divorced.

But if you talk about marriage as just being about love – or just being about companionship and pleasure – you are missing something very important about the nature of marriage.

This is, I think, related to why some people reject the argument that if two people of the same sex love each other they should be able to get married.

Many opponents of same-sex marriage – not all of them, but many – are saying that they don’t want to live in a world in which love is the definition of marriage. They don’t want to live in a world in which love is all it takes to make a family.

Instead, they want to live in a world in which men and women, husbands and wives, know that they have different and inescapable responsibilities. They want to live in a world in which people have duties that come to them from the outside, not from their own self-definition. They think that a good society is not a society in which people try to be true to themselves, but a society in which people do what they are supposed to do.

And there are some real connections here. Let me share with you a little more history …

The word “homosexual” was invented in the 1880s, and this word reflected a real change in the culture. Historians have found some same-sex couples before the nineteenth century, but they were pretty few and far between.

The late nineteenth century was the first time that a significant number of people didn’t have to get married to somebody of the other gender just to survive. There was even a term for two women who formed a life partnership, who lived together and were recognized as a couple by their friends. This was called a “Boston marriage.”

There are a lot more gay couples nowadays than there used to be because we now live in a society that does not require gender for our economy to work. Our society is far too complex to say this is men’s work and this is women’s work, and that’s all we need. Instead, we depend on a huge web of people who do all different sorts of work. Most of us do some specialized task, get paid in money, and buy a wide range of things with that money.

The more people are able to make a living by themselves, the more freedom they have to create personal lives that are based on love and choice, not on economic necessity.

But there are a lot of people who find the freedom of the modern world threatening.

Some of that feeling is existential. If you are responsible for making your life what you want it to be, then you are responsible for the successes and failures of your life.

I suspect most of us have times when we feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of choices our society offers us. I suspect most of us have times when we wish that someone would tell us a bit more what to do, and share the responsibility for making our lives turn out well. It takes a lot of existential courage to keep crafting your own life, to keep exploring everything possible in this great big world of ours. I suspect we all get tired of it sometimes.

But for some people that feeling goes deeper. A lot of people in this country aren’t doing so well.

Our society offers many opportunities for people who have college degrees and graduate degrees, who are healthy and skilled and energetic and haven’t been too badly scarred by their lives. But our society can also be really hard on people who aren’t so talented, or haven’t had great opportunities, or have been damaged by the things that have happened to them.

Some people are benefiting enormously from the modern world. But other people are not. And it’s easy for people who are not to get nostalgic about the past.

In the old days, they think, men did not have to compete with women for good jobs. In the old days, they think, women didn’t have to work outside the home, but could trust their husbands to support them. In the old days, they think, families could afford to have one parent at home with the kids.

Now, this is nostalgia. The past was awfully hard for most people. There never was a time when most women were protected from worry and hunger. There never was a time when most men were kings of their middle-class castles. A lot of people worked hard and died young.

But many people in this country now fear that they are getting left behind by the brave new world of globalization and college education and highly paid professionals and rapid change. They wish they lived in a world in which, if you did what you are supposed to do, things would turn out OK.

And some of these people, I think, see gay marriage as a symbol of all these changes.

They see gay marriage as a statement that there are no more assigned roles, that everything is up to the individual, everything is up for choice. They see gay marriage as a statement that gender doesn’t matter any more, that you can’t count on men to do some things because they are men and women to do other things because they are women. They see gay marriage as a symbol of an individualism that requires each person to make their own life for themselves, not just follow the rules and do what they are supposed to do.

If you have found life hard … if you’re not so sure that you can deal with the challenges that life throws at you … if you see yourself as lacking in skills and options … if you feel like your burdens are more than you can carry by yourself … then it doesn’t help to have people tell you that you are free to create your life for yourself.

Some people know that not everything is possible for them.

Now, it isn’t actually gay marriage that makes the modern world so unstable. It isn’t feminism either. It is the modern market economy and modern technology and our particular variant of capitalism. And it’s the ideas of democracy and liberty and justice and equality on which this country was founded.

These are huge things. They aren’t going to go away any time soon.

But it is no coincidence that opposition to gay marriage is strongest in the places that have the most social chaos. Opposition to gay marriage is strongest in communities that have the highest rates of divorce, of teenage pregnancy, of unmarried and unintentional parenthood, of alcoholism, of drug addiction, of infant mortality, of poverty, of every one of those social statistics that translate into actual people’s lives being hard.

We can understand why people in such communities might want their world to be more stable, more predictable.

But passing a “defense of marriage act” that bans gay marriage isn’t going to do anything to help.
Any group that calls on society to “go back to” “traditional marriage” is doomed to failure. They are not going to make marriage mean what it meant two hundred years ago, because most people are not going to go back to pre-modern farming. It just isn’t going to happen.

When people talk about “going back to traditional marriage” they are usually talking about having strong gender roles. But they also usually talk about having both fathers and mothers deeply involved in family life, committed to creating a home and raising their kids. If you listen to James Dobson of Focus on the Family, for example, he talks a lot about the importance of men being emotionally close to their wives and children.

But this image of marital intimacy, and the family as the emotional center of a man’s life, is only about a hundred years old. It is a new idea, and its implications are still being worked out. It may well be a good idea, but it is not a solid rock to stand on. And it is certainly not traditional.

When same-sex couples want to get married, they are looking for stability too. They are asking their communities and their government to protect their relationships, and to protect their children if they have children. I think recognizing same-sex marriages is a simple matter of justice.

But it is also more complicated than simple justice. It is a statement that we as a society, or a religious community, or a democratic government, want to protect and support loving relationships, and we care more about whether something is good than whether something is traditional.

I think we need to be honest about that. Gay marriage is such a heated topic not because two women getting married actually makes any other marriage weaker. That argument just doesn’t hold water.

Gay marriage is a heated topic because it has because it has become a symbol of our society’s struggles over the nature of freedom and duty and what it means to be a man or a woman.

And there can be real tensions between the ethics of duty and the ethics of self-determination. If you live in a society that preaches freedom and choice, then it’s very hard to tell yourself that you have no choice and you have to do what you’re supposed to do. Worse yet, it’s very hard to tell your husband or your wife, or your son or your daughter, that they have no choice and they have to do what they are supposed to do.

When people don’t want strangers to have choices about how to live their personal lives, that isn’t because the decisions made by those strangers will affect them in any direct way. It’s more, I think, that they are afraid of the choices that the people they know might make. They may even be afraid of the choices that they themselves might make.

I personally want the freedom. I like the vision of life in that song “Everything Possible.” I don’t want to go back to a society where women’s lives and men’s lives are defined by rules based on gender.

I believe in the traditional Universalist ideas that love is precious wherever it is found, and that love is universal, able to embrace all human beings.

I also believe in the traditional Unitarian ideas that people are rational beings who are capable of learning and thinking, and capable of making moral judgments for themselves while living in community, and capable of adapting mindfully to a changing world.

But I also think it is important to acknowledge that people can sometimes find freedom unsettling.

And I think it’s important to see the connections between my own feelings of being unsettled, which I sometimes have, and the unsettled feelings of people who take political positions that are different from mine.

And I also want to acknowledge that there are some real problems with modern ideals of marriage.
Think about how much we ask of marriage nowadays.

We ask marriage to give us intimacy and love, understanding and friendship, companionship and lasting sexual pleasure, someone who will share our dreams and encourage us in our personal growth, and someone to just have fun with.

We also ask marriage to give us a sense of community and emotional security. Especially in middle-class circles, where many people move repeatedly in search of education and professional careers, a marriage may be the one truly long-lasting relationship of a person’s life.

We also ask marriage to give us financial security. So many people get health insurance through marriage, or have a middle-class lifestyle only because they pool incomes with another person. And marriage is often the best way to get help if you get sick, or are in an accident, or are suddenly unemployed.

We also ask marriage to take on almost all of the responsibility for children. It used to be that when a woman was having a baby, a group of other women would gather to help her through the birth and with the newborn. Now all of those responsibilities can fall on her husband – on one man instead of a group of women.

We also ask marriage to last a very long time. In the old days, people counted themselves lucky if a marriage lasted twenty or thirty years. Now we can hope to live into our seventies or eighties or nineties, so people can be married for fifty or sixty years or longer.

We also live in a society that encourages people to continue to grow throughout their lives – to continue to learn and to change and to become more themselves. It is somehow assumed that people who are married will change in similar and compatible ways through all those decades. Many of us know from experience that people sometimes change in different ways, but society still expects marriages to be “until death do you part” – even though that may be a very long time indeed.

In short, we ask marriage to fulfill many of our needs for commitment and security at the same time as we ask it to fulfill many of our needs for growth and discovery and freedom and happiness.
The biggest reason many people are getting divorced nowadays, I think, is that people want and expect so much from marriage. Sometimes they get it, but often they don’t.

And then a lot of people are left feeling like they have failed personally, when in fact our expectations of marriage are enormous compared to what our ancestors imagined possible. With these standards of success, I think that what’s surprising is not that so many marriages end in divorce, but that so many people do manage to have good and long-lasting relationships.

I’m not going to conclude by predicting where marriage is going from here. I have my own guesses, but I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that we are not in a stable state and that things are going to keep changing. But I don’t know how. I don’t have the answers.

But I do want us to honor the questions. These are real questions, and real uncertainties.

And real people – some of us here in this sanctuary, and many more outside its walls – are trying to figure out how to make real marriages work well in the modern world. How to make them work well for the people in those marriages. How to make them work well for children, and for extended families and circles of friends. And how to make them work well for the sort of society we want to live in.

I think the words of Rainer Maria Rilke are appropriate here:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you
Because you would not be able to live them,
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will gradually without noticing it
Live along some distant day into the answers.

And now I hope you will join me in singing hymn number 300, “With Heart and Mind.”

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