Marriage Lives On

There are two kinds of women in the world, those who dream of white weddings and those who don't. This summer at the Boston Public Library, an exhibit called "For Better, For Worse: The Contemporary Wedding by Seven Photographers" drew throngs of women from both camps. Featured were some formal and some candid shots of Bostonarea wedding ceremonies and the flurry of activities which occur within their penumbras.

During my numerous pilgrimages to the exhibit, I kept returning to one photograph (which had a certain voyeuristic appeal) of a couple getting ready for their ceremony. The young principals were in relative deshabille--she in a camisole and fuzzy slipers, he, barefoot in trousers and unbuttoned shirt. Their postures suggested the easy familiarity which comes from living together. If this then was the case, why, other than the obvious tax benefits, were they getting married?

In spite of revelations about the increasing pathology of the family, escalating rates of divorce and statistics which confirm that the median duration of marriage is a mere 7.1 years, couples continue to take that leap of faith. More than seventy percent of the population from 18-55 years old is married.

In a culture where the traffic in sex is direct and unabashed, the sanction of marriage for sexual activity certainly is no longer needed.

We are, most of us, skeptical of the promise of a lifetime of happiness, which, to quote Shaw, "no person alive could bear...it would be hell on earth." We're familiar with the legendary tales of the anguish women in 1950's faced upon marriage, the prospect of 45 years of doing exciting things with Tupperware and runcible spoons. We know that Norman Rockwell lied.

Yet the current state of contemporary marital relations is not as reflective of progress as some feminists might like to think. My occasional forays into the Sunday New York Times' wedding announcements has revealed that life is, eerily, more like the fifties than we care to acknowledge.

The staggering numbers of women who inexplicably take their husbands' names left me vaguely queasy, similar to the way I felt on seeing pictures of Hillary Rodham Clinton (the thinking man's pin-up) in Vogue (The First Lady's mother did, however, confess that HRC bought her wedding dress off the rack only days before the wedding.).

The Times' announcements, while useful for discouraging bigamists, perform other functions. A brisk exegesis, like a successful archeological dig, yields a wealth of information about American culture. The announcements trumpet the spawning and proliferation of a new class, the meritocracy, which journalist Nicholas Lemann defines as "a national personnel system that uses higher education to sort and slot a substantial portion of the population."

The dowry system is alive and well. Instead of money or parcels of land, the new dowry consists of at least one advanced degree and the promise of unimpeded progress up the social ladder. Lemann skewered this practice when he observed that a college admissions dean "acts as a de facto marriage broker."

Clinical fellows in ambulatory pediatrics tend to plight their troth to otolaryngologists with thriving law practices on the side. The fathers of these wunderkind tend to head retailing or philatelic concerns. Their children's accomplishments constitute proof that the American dream is alive and well. The mothers, almost always, are psychotherapists or social workers (Now we know where Betty Friedan's original target audience ended up.).

The Times, to its credit, does not exclusively feature graduates of the top universities: second-tier institutions are also represented. These couples tend to be tennis pros or work with developmentally delayed or emotionally disturbed children. Their parents tend to work in retailing concerns with interests in shoes, apparel or health and beauty products or are distributors of plastic resins.

These (admittedly unrepresentative) mini-tableaux provide an accounting of much of American history as well as contemporary snapshots. Beyond that, they also provide the underlying reason for the enduring need to make a public, legal affirmation which a wedding ceremony provides--our faith in new beginnings.