The tyranny of loving marriage

Straits Times, 3 August 1998, page 27: a sugary story of a couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. Same day, in the Life! Section, the feature story was of middle-aged divorce. Heterosexual ones of course.

Bitterness makes more engrossing reading. In the divorce feature, two middle-aged women told their stories of shock and hurt when their husbands walked out on them for other women. Looking back, they could see now that their husbands had been distant for years. They blamed it on careers, the pressures of raising children and lack of communication. The accompanying article had a counsellor giving the usual advice, ending with the pious homily: to make marriages work, there must be love and commitment.

Love and Commitment. The trouble lies in the "and". In the old days, marriage only required commitment. Even then they had problems galore. Now in our more advanced era, we have raised the stakes. Marriage shall contain both love and commitment. If it doesn’t, you’re a failure.

These stories of heartbreak are often told with the tacit moral that it’s such a waste for a marriage, especially one that has lasted 20 years, to fall apart. Such a waste for love to die. But hang on, it’s not the only way to see the issue. It’s not that the men don’t love anymore. They do, they just love somebody else. Secondly, just because a loveless marriage has gone on this long does not mean he should stick with it any more. It could well, and even more logically, mean that he is wasting his life away in an unhappy marriage for too long! "Get out, you stupid fool", he could be saying to himself.

It is remarkable how we have conspired to deceive ourselves about happy marriages. We set this norm up – life-long marriages, 60th wedding anniversary and that kind of thing – and shake our heads about the pity and calamity (the downfall of civilisation) if the great majority of marriages don’t turn out that way.

 
For centuries, we've not needed life-long, loving marriages

Well, I’ve got news for you. Great civilisations have been built without the need for happy life-long marriages. Through most of history, in all sorts of cultures, marriages were arranged by their families. Let me also add that Chinese culture used to look up to the man with a string of concubines in tow, whom he would have picked up one by one in series. He didn’t continue to love them, only the latest one, but he had the obligation to keep them. It’s like paying alimony to the women you once loved and deflowered, only that here, you pay alimony without first going through divorce. The lawyers don’t get rich.

Historically, one-to-one love and happiness forever between husband and wife was never an expected outcome, only a notable tale now and then. In those cultures, they had no delusion that marriage was an arrangement whose chief role had to do with property and economics – who was responsible for the upkeep of whom, who were the legitimate inheritors of the estate, and who could take revenge on whom for violating his wife (another form of property). With such important functions, it didn’t need love for glue.

We, on the other hand, think that marriage is love, and yet, despite the well-recorded fickleness of love, at the same time expect the traditional permanence of the marital vow. Are we mad?

Looking around the present day, many long-lasting marriages aren’t exactly filled to the brim with passion. What happens in many cases is that through the years, people get habituated to each other, and after a while, it is no longer clear when love ended and habituation began. Not a few couples in their fifties and sixties simply keep up the fiction of being married, but have little to do with each other any more.

Of course, there are the lucky ones who have found absolutely the right person in their lives, and they live to celebrate their 60th and make the pages of the Straits Times. But really, they’re part of the problem. They are instruments of propaganda, setting up an unrealistic norm, and instead of creating happiness, I wonder if all these rosy stories achieve is a greater epidemic of inadequacy and depression.

That epidemic is seldom more evident than among gay men.

 
Are gay relationships more transient?

There is a very common perception that gay male relationships tend to be transitory, which is a big word for saying they don’t last. Well, on the whole I think it is true, though a generalisation like that is unfair to the many gay men who are in relationships of many years' standing. Still, it is probably statistically correct to say that only a minority of gay men will ever find a life-long love. That is no surprise to any observer. What is remarkable, to me at least, is the extent to which gay men flagellate themselves for this shortcoming. It only indicates the tyrannical way in which the norm of life-long loving marriage rules over our psyches. But how valid is that norm?

As I have pointed out, even the present-day heterosexual model of marriage contains inherent contradictions, as expressed in the Love and Commitment prescription. But at least there is (sometimes) commitment to the institution and to the children within it, to hold the jalopy together even when the engine has petered out. There is also the economic cost of dividing the shared property and having to pay alimony. Unless you’ve found a new someone really worth jettisoning the old for, the alimony should make you think twice about saying goodbye to the Mrs.

Let’s face it. Gay men’s relationships are completely different affairs. Don’t kid ourselves. They’re not built on love and commitment. They’re love or nothing. What commitment there is comes out of love. You can’t pull commitment out of yourself (let alone out of your partner) in the absence of love. There’re no children, there is no legal basis to shared property, and no fear of alimony. Love or nothing.

 
Gay relationships usually last as long as love lasts. Straight marriages last as long as the paper says it does

It’s no wonder then that gay male relationships tend to fall apart within a few months or years, not because their love is more hollow, but because quite often for men, whether gay or straight, that's about how long love lasts. Nevertheless, despite this knowledge, the pain is terrible still. And then the misery is compounded by comparing ourselves with straight marriages that seem to last forever. Anything more than 10 years is forever. In fact, we’re not comparing like with like, but we don’t even realise it. It’s not that the majority of straight men remain in passionate love for ten years. They just get used to the wife, and enjoy the compensations of children, comfort, security and social esteem. If we want to compare, then compare how long we remain in love with how long straight men remain in love. Don’t compare ourselves to a piece of paper called a Marriage Certificate.

In straight marriages, when love subsides, many simply fold up their hearts and carry on the routine. It would need a cataclysmic event, like violence or a third-party affair, to wreck the facade and bring on the prospect of divorce. Few gay men would wait that long. If love has drained away, there's little reason to remain tied up. They'd rather say goodbye and have a monsoon of a cry. But that is the difference between the tyranny of the norm and freedom from it. One risks deadened existence, the other the exhilarating peaks and devastating dumps of living.

But isn’t it still a shame that we seem to go through this endless cycle of ecstasy and heartbreak? It is. Maybe no one knows heartbreak better than gay men. Maybe this accounts for the great music and great writing produced through the ages. But to say that it shouldn’t be like that, to beat our chests and cry, why can’t we have relationships as stable as straight marriages, is to fall victim to the norm of a heterosexist society. And even then, it is highly debatable if the trade-off demanded by that norm is such a great bargain: Love once and consummate it by marriage. If love lasts, fine. If it doesn’t, the marriage should reign, and you must never love again.

© Yawning Bread 

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