Why We Need to Talk About Marriage

It’s an institution that informs the tax code and the disposition of wealth—while also shaping the idiosyncratic goings on within households. What could it be, at its best?

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” So says Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” a novel that explores the many different ways in which the institution of marriage can be a site of discovery and delusion, proximity and estrangement, comfort and misery. Dorothea’s insight is informed by her own ill-advised marriage, to Edward Casaubon, a desiccated scholar and the blocked would-be author of a “Key to All Mythologies.” Dorothea’s words, which arrive close to the end of the novel, are addressed to Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s daughter. In Rosamond’s marriage to Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch, Eliot provides another illustration of curdled marital expectation, with each spouse disappointed and embittered by the other’s intransigent sense of selfhood. Between these two poles, Eliot offers refracted perspectives on more or less successful marriages: the complacent bourgeois harmony of Mr. and Mrs. Vincy, Rosamond’s parents; the sometimes contentious equality struck between Caleb Garth, an honorable land manager, and Susan, his frequently wiser wife; the secrets and lies that underpin the smug union of Mr. Bulstrode, a banker with a dark past, and the willfully unwitting Mrs. Bulstrode. In “Middlemarch”—as in the wider world the novel still speaks to—marriage is the default social arrangement; despite its omnipresence, it is too little questioned, often flawed, and only occasionally satisfactory.

How is marriage unlike everything else? And why is it sometimes so very awful? These are questions raised by the British critic and filmmaker Devorah Baum in her nimble new work, “On Marriage” (Yale). There is, she writes, “something enigmatic about the marital bond lying in excess of Enlightenment reason or easy description.” Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within Baum’s household, or mine, or, quite possibly, yours. Yet Baum finds that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers, who have left the field to novelists, filmmakers, and other artists and theorists. When marriage does make an appearance in the philosophical canon, Baum suggests, it is typically only a subsidiary topic. Philosophers lose their minds a bit when trying to address the subject of the marital condition, she says, citing the unmarried Kant’s insistence that marriage is founded upon “the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.” (She notes that “long-term married people, at least, would surely have been able to reassure the moral philosopher that marriage isn’t chiefly about constant reciprocal sex.”) Baum asks whether the relative lack of philosophic interest in marriage could, in fact, be the key to understanding what marriage means philosophically. Is marriage, she asks, “what you only do when you do not ponder it too much?”

Baum, who teaches English literature and critical theory at the University of Southampton, has made a specialty of pondering marriage. The author of an earlier work of criticism, “Feeling Jewish,” in which she artfully explored themes frequently associated with Jewishness—such as self-hatred, alienation, and smothering mother love—Baum has collaborated with her husband, the filmmaker Josh Appignanesi, on two feature-length comedic documentaries that, in an autofictional mode, chronicle their domestic life in times of crisis. “The New Man,” from 2016, takes up Appignanesi’s infantile fears of being displaced when Baum becomes pregnant, though the film takes a darker turn when the pregnancy becomes endangered. “Husband,” from 2022, is about Appignanesi trying to make a movie about Baum’s New York publicity tour for “Feeling Jewish”: book parties with academics, a Q. & A. with Zadie Smith at the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, all with their two small children in tow. (As they walk through a bustling Washington Square Park, Appignanesi badgers Baum for not enjoying her success more while bemoaning his own sense of being eclipsed: “I want to ride on your coattails and at the same time ruin it for you—is that O.K.?”) In both films, Baum is restrained and precisely intelligent, especially in contrast to her excessive, neurotic spouse. “Husband,” with its jazzy soundtrack and its talky sidewalk excursions, might have easily been called “Manhattan,” had that title not already been taken.

“On Marriage” shares the cerebral sensibility established in those movies; the book is characterized by an affinity for wordplay and by an awareness, informed by psychoanalytic theory, that wordplay is seldom wholly frivolous. Baum’s opening pages are groaningly laden with marriage-centric puns. “Writing about marriage wasn’t my idea—someone eligible proposed it to me and I said yes,” she reports. Her point is that marriage lends itself irresistibly to metaphor, being an inescapable framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others. Working on her own, and on the page, rather than collaborating with her husband on film, Baum makes the exposure of her own marital arrangements secondary to her preferred activity of analyzing books, movies, and television shows. Her selections are mostly of the sort produced and consumed by members of the transatlantic cultural cognoscenti who appear in “The New Man” and “Husband”—including work by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the theorist Slavoj Žižek, and the screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (For Baum, the figure of the “hot priest” in Season 2 of “Fleabag” is a representation of “marriage’s singular ability to conjugate those things within us that otherwise cannot abide in a world with no patience for contradictions, such as love and hate, morality and obscenity, the orthodox and the liberal, the secular and the religious.”) Ingmar Bergman is a touchstone, as is Stanley Cavell, that rare philosopher who has taken marriage as a topic for serious consideration, especially in “Pursuits of Happiness,” an account of Hollywood’s screwball comedies as remarriage stories. Like Cavell—and like George Eliot, who also gets a look-in—Baum is convinced that marriage, over all, might provide a moral and social good. Of “Middlemarch,” the greatest novel by the most philosophically inclined of novelists, Baum offers the ingenious interpretation that marriage itself is the key to all mythologies, and that “Middlemarch” was meant to be the all-encompassing work that Edward Casaubon was unable to write.

Among the scenes from her own marriage that Baum describes is a moment in which she’s sitting with her husband on the couch while watching the unnervingly intimate sex represented in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People.” She begins by underlining how, for parents of small children, the co-watching of television represents a precious opportunity for adults-only time. “We look forward to looking forward together and there are few things we look forward to quite as much,” she writes. She goes on, though, to consider just why the encounters between Marianne and Connell, the two young people at the story’s center, should be so especially squirm-inducing, given the quantity of explicit content readily available to the contemporary viewer. Recalling the acute embarrassment she would feel as a child when, while watching TV with her parents, a bout of onscreen sex would occur, Baum draws upon the Freudian concept of scopophilia, or the pleasure of watching: those unsought glimpses were, she says, a kind of displacement of the primal scene, and a reminder that the people inside the family home have “their own bodies, their own histories, their own feelings, their own desires, their own dreams and fantasies and lives to live.” She enlists an observation by the psychoanalyst Darian Leader that “one starts looking for things only once they are lost,” and proposes that the depiction of intercourse between beautiful twentysomethings in “Normal People” may evoke in each of the co-watchers a nostalgic desire for a lost past that, crucially, may not be a shared one. In a final critical turn, Baum considers the way in which the show illustrates the evolution of Marianne and Connell’s own intimacy: at first, they look into each other’s eyes while making love, only later to lie in bed companionably with an open laptop. For the characters onscreen, no less than for viewers at home, watching together is one way that a relationship matures as its participants come of age—or, in Baum’s phrase, as love enters history.

“On Marriage” is characterized by this kind of agile curiosity: to Baum, no couch is ever just a piece of furniture, even when a couple collapses upon it exhausted at the end of a day devoted to family management. Every scene from her marriage is offered up in the expectation that it will be understood in the spirit of Bergman’s 1973 miniseries, “Scenes from a Marriage”—a work that episodically chronicles the dissolution of a marriage between a professional couple who claim, at the outset, to be “indecently” fortunate in their bourgeois union. By the story’s end, divorced and remarried to other people, they reunite for an extramarital affair, having, Baum says, “finally arrived at their marriage’s indecent happiness in true form.” Like the critic Laura Kipnis, whose 2003 polemic, “Against Love,” advanced an arch Marxist analysis of marriage as alienated labor, Baum is good at unpicking clichés about marriage. She considers, for instance, the horse-and-carriage trope, a conjunction usually trotted out to suggest that love and marriage are a harmonious pairing. Baum points out that the metaphor actually demonstrates the opposite, with love as the libidinal force restrained by harness, bit, and yoke: “You don’t need to be an animal expert to deduce that horse and carriage aren’t likely to be in the most unimpeded of relationships.”

Unlike Kipnis, however, Baum writes from within the institution she is examining. She is interested not only in the ways marriage might be repressive and regressive—a force to sustain the patriarchy and maintain the capitalist social order—but also in asking what is at stake in continuing to characterize marriage in this negative light. Baum is especially interested in marriages that adapt the institution’s conventional trappings for subversive and playful ends; the quarrelling of couples in Shakespeare’s plays or in Hollywood’s screwball comedies, she maintains, reflects “the pleasure of a relationship that, though it might look like a battle for mastery, is really thrilling to the dynamics of equality.” Baum writes of how Maggie Nelson, in her memoir “The Argonauts,” conjures a rapturous vision of coupled happiness with her spouse, the video artist Harry Dodge, who is trans. Able to pass as a heteronormative family unit when they wish to, Nelson and Dodge partake in the consolations and the pleasures of marriage while also upending the institution. “The happily married,” Baum says, “are the ones who’ve simultaneously killed and reinforced the institution by making it suit themselves.”

How marriage underpins social inequality is the subject of “The Two-Parent Privilege” (Chicago), by Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kearney’s approach to the subject of marriage could hardly be less like Baum’s. Kearney is not interested in marriage as a “meet and happy conversation,” in John Milton’s still persuasive formulation, or as an arena for the consensual, revolutionary blurring of identities—each of us our own Titania and Bottom. The possibilities of marriage that preoccupy Baum—the space it offers spouses for self-realization, for evolving intimacy, for the unconscious replaying or conscious resolution of childhood experience—don’t get attention from Kearney. Marriage is, instead, considered solely as an arrangement for the raising of children. Kearney is almost touchingly apologetic for the dryness of her analysis; early on, she writes, “Other people and experts are trained and experienced at eliciting the deeply personal stories of others through extensive interviews and powerful vignettes. That is not my particular expertise.” Her expertise—her “comparative advantage,” as she puts it in the language of her trade—is in analyzing large sets of data to produce quantifiable findings about the effects of marriage upon society at large.

Kearney begins by setting forth what she acknowledges is a difficult argument to make, at least if one does not want to be accused of being a doctrinaire social conservative: that the decline in marriage rates and the corresponding rise in the number of children being raised in one-parent homes “has contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore—but may not be able to reverse.” There has been a dramatic rise in births to unmarried mothers: almost half of all babies born in the U.S. in 2019, up from eighteen per cent in 1980. Of those unmarried mothers, more than half have never been married, rather than having been married and subsequently divorced. Kearney highlights the racial disparities revealed by the data: seventy per cent of unpartnered Black mothers have never been married, compared with thirty-eight per cent of unpartnered white mothers. She also points out the perhaps surprising stability of marriage among members of the educated class: of the children whose mothers are graduates of four-year colleges, eighty-four per cent lived in homes with married parents.

Having two parents who are married to each other, Kearney argues, provides offspring with an advantage that is “becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society.” By joining their particular strengths, a married couple can give their progeny more than the sum of their parts. “As a concept, this principle mirrors the genius of the assembly line in production and manufacturing,” she writes. She also acknowledges that her calculations about the relationship between “partner resources” (parental income, wealth, time, and emotional energy) and a child’s “outputs” (the level of education she attains, and her own ultimate earning power) may present a cognitive challenge for readers “who aren’t accustomed to thinking about raising children in the same terms that are used to describe a car factory.”

Kearney insists that she is not blaming single mothers, or dismissing the effects of structural racism, or saying that everyone should marry, or calling for a reinstatement of the model nineteen-fifties household, with a waged father and a stay-at-home mom. She does not suggest, like some cultural critics before her, that the increase in out-of-wedlock birth rates is a signal of moral decline in America, or of a willfully individualistic flouting of tradition. Rather, she points to how the decline of manufacturing in the United States—and the rise of lower-paid, more precarious working conditions—has made it much harder for blue-collar males to sustain an adequate and reliable standard of living, rendering them less inclined to marry or to stay married, and less appealing as marriage material in the first place. In some of the most compelling passages in her book, Kearney explores research on the impact of financial strain on cognitive functioning; there’s evidence that the children of parents who are poorer and more consumed by stress may be shortchanged not only materially but emotionally.

And a certain privilege is no doubt necessary to engage in the kind of exploration of marriage that is Baum’s comparative advantage. If a parent is struggling to maintain the means to support a child, she is less likely to take pleasure in considering, as Baum does in a chapter titled “Creative Accounting,” the contradictory manner in which a child at once confirms a couple’s identity “by naturalizing their relation and proving its profitability according to the accumulative logic of capital” and “subtracts from the unity of the whole by adding its own difference.” At the same time, Kearney’s bloodless analysis can invite subversion of the sort that Baum might encourage. If, as Kearney argues, two parents are demonstrably better than one at maximizing outputs in the form of successful children, does it not follow that adding yet more parental figures into the mix—a stepparent here, a queer known donor there—might lead to still more impressive results?

Such a proposal is not among Kearney’s recommendations for closing the daunting marriage gap. What she does argue for are policy changes that would scale up community-based programs that strengthen and increase economic support for low-income families. But she also places stock in promoting an unfashionable cultural narrative that acknowledges how “in most cases, two-parent, stable families are very beneficial for children.” One way of advancing such a message, she suggests, might be via mass-cultural phenomena such as television shows; a study she conducted in 2015 found that a 4.3-per-cent reduction in teen pregnancies was attributable to the début, on MTV, of “16 and Pregnant,” the precursor to the popular “Teen Mom” reality series. Kearney is agnostic about questions of gender or sexuality as they pertain to the formation of a marriage; what seems to make a difference is the solidity of the union, not the identities of those coupled within it. If in theory cohabitation might provide as secure a family structure, she shows that in practice it does not: in the United States, at least, such partnerships are less stable than those of married couples. Kearney offers one interpretation of this data: “Relationships are inherently difficult, and marriage provides an extra layer of institutional inertia that keeps them in place.” For Kearney, as for Dorothea Brooke, marriage is unlike anything else; for raising children, no other arrangement works quite as well.

Selling the idea of marriage on the basis that it provides a helpful layer of institutional inertia—like a mattress protector for our leaky lives—is hardly the most romantic of pitches. And, given that romance is among the reasons two people—normal people—might choose to pitch themselves into wedded coupledom, as Baum so amply shows, Kearney’s data will be more effective in persuading policymakers of the virtues of the institution than in moving individuals to exchange rings. On the other hand, Baum’s book, though unlikely to have the reach of “Teen Mom,” might convey the salutary pro-nuptial impetus that Kearney calls for—at least in certain circles, such as among maritally hesitant subscribers to the London Review of Books. Kearney proposes marriage as a solution, but Baum holds it up as a seduction. As Baum considers the widespread cultural narrative that insists upon the prevalence of marital misery, she suggests that this downbeat way of talking about marriage might, in truth, be a cover story for people who are happy in their unions. Such a cover story is necessary, Baum goes on to conjecture, because of the shame people experience in having “found an oasis of comfort in an unjust and unequal world, and via the very institution that has founded and cemented so much of that inequality and injustice.” Marriage, despite sometimes being awful in the sense of being terrible, can also be awful in the alternative sense that George Eliot no doubt also had in mind: as a state that can offer, at its best, a sense of awe happily conjoined with joy. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 30, 2023, issue, with the headline “The Marriage Plot.”