Why We Get Married

Grown-Up Marriage
by Judith Viorst

Although marriage is for grown-ups, very few of us are grown up when we marry. Here, the bestselling author of Suddenly Sixty and Necessary Losses presents her life-affirming perspective on the joys, heartaches, difficulties, and possibilities of a grown-up marriage — and no, that's not an oxymoron!

Featuring interviews with married women and men, the findings of couples therapists, the truths offered by literature and movies, and a bemused exploration of her own marriage, Judith Viorst illuminates the issues couples struggle with from "I do" through "till death do us part." Examining marital rivalry, marital manners, marital sex (extramarital, too), marital fighting and apologies, what kids do for (and to) marriage, and the boredom and bliss of everyday married life, Viorst leaves no marital stone unturned. From the early years when we wonder "Who is this person?" and "What am I doing here?" to the realities of divorce, remarriage, and growing older (and old) together, Viorst offers insights and advice with honesty, humanity, and humor — all the while recognizing how tough it is to be married and, when it works, how very precious it can be.

Chapter 1

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

— Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

Most of the women of my generation probably married too young to have grown acquainted with the dread of loneliness. Most of us were taught, however, before we left our teens the dread of unmarriedness. One of my aunts, who remarkably got a Ph.D. in physics at a time when most of her peers went no further than high school, was perceived by my mother and father and other relatives as our family's tragic failure because she never achieved a husband and kids. Another of my aunts, who was seen as a lesser tragic failure because, although divorced, she at least had been married, was still an object of pity because she needed to earn her own living instead of being supported by a man. Earning a living was something a woman aspired to be relieved of. A solid middle-class marriage was a marriage in which a woman did not, thank God, have to go out and get a job.

So we married because, for a woman, there was no higher attainment. And we married to be taken care of financially. We also married in order to have safe sex, which — had we been pressed — we would have defined as sex that wouldn't make getting pregnant a vast catastrophe. We also — most of us — married to get pregnant and raise a family. Of course what we said was that we married for love.

As for the men who married us, why did they do it? Why in the late 1950s were men, at the average marrying age of twenty-three, in a rush to become our economic providers? Part of the answer, I think, is that they were brought up in a culture that equated becoming a man with settling down. Maybe no one whispered words like "breadwinner" or "responsible" in their ears, but most of them knew what they were supposed to do. "A young college-educated bourgeois male of my generation who scoffed at the idea of marriage for himself... laid himself open to the charge of 'immaturity'...," writes Philip Roth in My Life as a Man. "Or he was just plain 'selfish.' Or he was 'frightened of responsibility.' Or he could not 'commit himself'... to a 'permanent relationship.'"

And so these young men committed themselves, receiving in return the approval of society plus — very important — sex on a regular basis. Of course what they said was that they married for love.

We all meant it — well, most of us meant it — when we said we married for love, and we knew what kind of love that ought to be: Romantic love. And lustful love. And tender love. And giddy love. And you are my one true love, my destiny. And love-song love. And movie love. And happily-ever-after love. And baby, baby, you belong to me, so let the beguine begin because I've got you under my skin. Dreamy, steamy, now-and-forever love.

We all married — well, most of us married — for love, for some version of Sinatra and Casablanca love, for a love that would light up our lives and cast out fear, for a Romeo and Juliet love (except with a better ending), for a love that the poet John Donne once wrote "makes one little room an everywhere." And if our feelings were, as they doubtless were, a bit naive, a bit adolescent, I don't intend to disparage them, for there can surely be nothing sweeter than a man and a woman marrying for love.

And most of us did. But whether we consciously knew it or not, most of us also married — let's be honest here — for the sex, the kids, the security, the approval of our community, and marriage's other pragmatic benedictions. There were plenty of reasons to marry back in my day. But that was then. Why get married now?

Now that the state of unmarriedness isn't the disaster that it used to be. Now that women are raised to be economically independent, and actually want to go out and get a job. Now that unwed sex and unwed living together seem to be widely tolerated, and even unwed parenthood no longer shocks. Now that two people who love each other can freely, and some would say fully, express their love without doing something drastic, like getting married.

Why not simply live together as long as love survives, without insisting on "always" and "forever"? Why accept the constraints, the obligations, the routinization, the rut of marriage?

Especially when so many marriages fail.

Certainly, with 45 percent of first marriages ending in divorce, marriage today is a high-risk occupation. For those who have divorced once and those whose parents have divorced, it is even riskier. Divorce, the experts tell us, occurs more often in second marriages than in firsts — the current figure is 60 percent of the time — which surely says something dismaying about our ability to learn from past experiences. Even more dismaying are the statistics on children whose parents have divorced: compared to the children of parents who have not, the chance of their marriage breaking up is currently said to be two to three times greater.

Some of these children of divorce are, not surprisingly, wary of getting married.

"I want to be sure we won't mess up the way you and Mom messed up," Don explains untactfully to his father, who has asked him why he hasn't yet married the woman he has been living with for five years. She is a perfectly lovely woman, Don says. She is everything he wants, but how does he know if he's always going to want it? Living together until he feels 110 percent sure seems to him more prudent, right now, than marrying.

Even without the shadow of divorce in their personal history, those now considering marriage seem a lot more cautious than my generation was. (The New York Times reports on a wedding in which the vows excluded "till death do us part," on the grounds — the bride explained — that "we didn't want to make any promises we couldn't keep.") That caution may help explain, in part, why the median ages for marrying today are the oldest that they've been in American history- — twenty-seven for men, twenty-five for women. Maybe people are trying to wait until they harbor no doubts, until they are 110 percent sure.

Sure that what they want now they'll want ten years from now. Sure that their differences aren't irreconcilable. Sure that there aren't any deep, dark secrets. Sure that this is love, not infatuation. Sure that they won't — like their mothers and fathers — be stuck for life in an inert, juiceless marriage. Sure that, good as this seems, they won't be missing out on something even better.

* * *

Christy, pushing thirty-five, has been telling me about Benjamin, a man she describes as pretty close to perfect — warm and smart and funny and reliable and crazy about her and just as eager as she is to start a family. The trouble, Christy says, is that while she's very fond of Ben, she isn't what she'd describe as madly in love, though the men she's been madly in love with had no interest in getting married and would have made really rotten husbands and fathers. Ben, she's completely confident, would make a great husband and father. And her biological clock is ticking away. Isn't it time for her to say that this is maybe as good as it's going to get? Isn't it time to stop holding out and get married?

I didn't know how to answer her, although I was tempted to say, Marry the man today and start a family. I didn't know if not being madly in love was code for he doesn't thrill me in bed. I didn't know if, by letting Ben go, she'd miss out on motherhood and always regret it, or if, by marrying Ben, she'd miss out on passionate love instead and regret that more. I once watched a woman decide to marry a man with whom everything worked except the sex. She believed they would figure that out eventually. But they wound up getting divorced because she solved the problem with sex by engaging in adultery. Then he found out. And when he told her, It's either your lover or me, she chose her lover. And married him, and lived extremely unhappily ever after because he was a rotten husband and father.

Maybe we simply have to hold out for Ms. or Mr. Right. Remember that Neil Simon movie The Heartbreak Kid?

The heartbreak kid is Lenny, who marries Lila, goes off to Miami Beach on their honeymoon, and falls madly in love — on their honeymoon! — with the girl of his dreams, a golden goddess named Kelly. "I've been waiting for a girl like you all my life," Lenny tells Kelly. "I just timed it wrong." But he doesn't let bad timing stand in his way. Instead, while still on their honeymoon, Lenny tells Lila they're wrong for each other and that he thinks they ought to get divorced, after which he pursues and woos and succeeds in marrying the glorious Kelly. At the end of the movie we see Lenny on his wedding day. He is looking rather uneasy. He is looking much less than 110 percent sure. Has he or hasn't he finally picked the right woman? How do people know if they've made the right choice?

* * *

Perhaps if we find it so hard to decide if we're making the right choice, we ought to commit to something less binding than marriage, some sort of legal arrangement that provides us and our partner with certain protections without signing on until death does us part. France, for instance, now offers a civil solidarity pact — Pacte civil de solidarité — which was intended for same-sex couples but has been seized upon by marriage-shy heterosexuals. It establishes for both partners of the PACS, as it is known, a number of marriage-like obligations and rights.

Because it's dramatically easier to dissolve a PACS than it is to end a marriage, this arrangement appeals to those who wish to formally acknowledge their relationship while avoiding the terrors of making a lifetime choice. It is definitely more serious than the low-commitment arrangement known as "sex without strings, relationship without rings." It is definitely more serious than living together with no sense of obligation. It is definitely more serious than living together with some sense of obligation while refusing to put any promises down on paper. But it's definitely less serious than marriage.

So what is it called if a woman and man decide to be legally bound without being married? What is it called to be sort of, semi, married? Some call it hedging your bets or fear of commitment. Some call it half-assed, halfhearted, or half-hitched. Actually, the Germans have a name, a very, very long name for it. They call it Lebensabschnittgefährte, which means temporary partners or companions through a slice of life.

Copyright © 2003 by Judith Viorst

About the Author

In her long and varied career, Judith Viorst has worked as a garment district model, unappreciated secretary, and children's book editor. She has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1960, when she married Milton Viorst, a political writer. (They have achieved the almost-impossible — working in adjoining offices at home and eating three meals a day together for most of their married life.) They have three sons — Anthony and Nick (who are lawyers) and Alexander (who does community-development lending for a bank); three daughters-in-law — Hyla, Marya, and Marla; and six grandchildren — Miranda, Brandeis, Olivia, Nathaniel, Benjamin, and Isaac.