Mystification about (gulp) marriage

The Future of Marriage. Jessie Bernard (World, $9.95). Marriage: For and Against. Ed. Harold H. Hart (Hart, $7.50 and $2.45)

Glomph is bad. Glomph is good. Everybody ought to have a glomph. Glomph will kill you and make your toes fall off. Glomph is the only way to lead a normal life.

There is something quintessential, ineffable, mystical, and inexpressible about glomph – sorry, I mean “marriage” – but what in God's name is marriage? If you were a Martian and read these books, you couldn't tell. Like the old warnings about sex (which never told you what it was) controversy about marriage nowadays escalates instantly into the Dance of the Seven Obfuscations. Definitions of marriage are either economic-cumrole- playing or they are mystifying. Still, the fight goes on, as if “marriage” were substantive, unalterable, monolithic, and autonomous. I don't understand what they think they are talking about and I've been married.

Marriage as an economic contract and a promise to undertake certain role behavior has been taken to pieces and condemned by many feminists. This version of marriage is not an interesting one. What is interesting is the intense emotionality that surrounds the subject. People seem to react to “marriage” as they react to “youth” or “immorality”; these are contentfree terms and the discussion of them tends to be content-free, but the sheer quantity of upset that surrounds all these topics shows that the discussants are talking about something very dear to them, even though nobody seems to know what it is.

As far as the ostensible subject goes, Marriage For and Against is worthless. Even Jessie Bernard's The Future of Marriage provides only one analytic tool – the distinction between “his” marriage and “her” marriage – and is otherwise quite baffling. Dr. Bernard cites all sorts of studies about who marries whom, when, how many times, what they say about each other, who does what domestic chores, and so on, but none of this seems to clarify or illuminate the subject. Talking about marital behavior without deciding what marriage is is like compiling statistics about where and when people take their vacations without ever deciding what play is.