Science and technology


Wedded bliss?


Psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose on why we can’t stay away from marriage


apparently, is that they’re there all the time, getting on your nerves, and radically failing to be sexy. How can you desire something you’ve already got? But if there’s so much consensus around the idea that married life can be emotionally and erotically unsatisfying, why do people keep doing it? Is it just the fact that being single can also be horrible – in which case serial monogamy might be an ideal compromise? Or is there something about marriage that people actually like? Marriage itself has such a long history, and


A


has been so important to human beings, that it can be easy to over-simplify. Seeing it as a means of keeping possessions in the family is to ignore the much older, and more disturbing, idea – that marriage exists to stop men killing each other. According to anthropologists, early humans exchanged women between groups – offering sisters and daughters up for marriage to


18 The Amorist May 2017


trip to pretty much any comedy club in the world is likely to confirm the suspicion that marriage can be a bit of a drag. Te problem with spouses,


men in neighbouring tribes – in order to form pacts and stop fights. In this sense, marriage was the highest form of giſt-giving, with a woman being the most valuable thing a man could give another man. Not only did this situation offer massive incentives for the couple to get along (failed marriages might start wars) but the fact that neither partner was likely to make it past 40 was undoubtedly also helpful. For the French structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, some systems of exchange seemed more likely than others to cause unhappiness. What he called ‘patrilineal and harmonic regimes’ – where a woman would lose all affiliation with her own group and go and live


“Seeing it simply as a means of keeping possessions in the family is to ignore the much older, and more disturbing, idea – that marriage exists to stop men killing each other”


with her husband’s people – was so likely to lead to unpleasantness that all sorts of compensatory customs had to be brought in to ameliorate the situation. Quelle surprise. Te idea of marriage as a voluntary union


between equals has come very late in the game. Since Mary Wollstonecraſt’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman it’s seemed less and less acceptable to treat women as objects of exchange. Tis is great, but it’s perhaps in the nature of all solutions to expose new problems. Now, instead of marriage being a form of slavery, it’s actually supposed to be nice. We can choose someone lovely and love them for the rest of our lives. Te problem is that life can be very long and choices can be very difficult. Not only that, but people are extremely strange, especially close up. Te idea of approaching marriage with a grin-and-bear-it attitude would seem ridiculously old fashioned. No, the point in it can only be to make life better. But how? Perhaps the greatest promise of marriage


in our messy, modern times is intimacy. While neoliberalism offers endless choice, the rather retrograde institution of a long-term, legally- sanctioned partner may counterbalance this


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