Separately Connected and Equal
The logic of love in American relationships
The following is one of a series of pieces on the role of love in American life. Hope you like it. —Jim
I think it would be fair to say that the most important long-term trend of the last century has been the social emancipation of women in Western society. To be sure, the right and ability of women to assert themselves economically, politically, and culturally in the public sphere has been one of tortured struggle for centuries. But the last hundred years have witnessed sharp, if not always steady, gains in this regard. While by no means complete, women have now attained positions of prominence and power in much of the world that would have been almost unimaginable a century ago (and in some cases a mere half-century ago).
That’s certainly true on these shores. The American Dream has always been predominately, but never entirely, a male enterprise. Throughout U.S. history, there have been any number of women—the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet; the eighteenth-century social reformer (Saint) Elizabeth Ann Seton; the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker, to cite three diverse examples—who have realized their ambitions on terrain usually occupied by men. They were exceptional. Nevertheless, by the second half of the twentieth century, the possibility—and, increasingly, the expectation—that females could strive and achieve their aspirations became part of the governing logic of American life. Whatever their gender identity.
It also became the governing logic of family life. Once upon a time, the key criterion in evaluating the suitability of a man as a potential spouse was his prospects as a “provider,” an imperative with strong evolutionary roots. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the work of provisioning was viewed as shared, and marriage became less a matter of separate spheres of responsibility than a partnership governed by pragmatic considerations (like whose turn it is, or who gets home first, or what the other partner—a crucially neutral term—will do instead of this other thing that needs to get done). To a great extent, these developments were experienced less as a matter of ideological choice than economic realities: most households depended on two incomes the realities of daily living centered on paid employment. But they also reflected a new assumption that a woman’s circumstances and hopes merited equal consideration when it came to their situation outside the home. Indeed, the possibility that such hopes could be obstructed—or that a man would fail to pull his weight, economically or otherwise, something increasingly likely as male wages have stagnated and growing numbers of men dropped out of the workforce—is increasingly leading many women to reject heterosexual marriage entirely.
This new egalitarian logic extends to the domain of raising children as well. The terms “motherhood” and “fatherhood” have retreated before the growing primacy of “parenthood,” not simply as a reality but also in many cases as an ideal. Growing numbers of women have decided (or were forced to discover) that they could and would raise children by themselves, while others formed couple-based families on the basis of same-sex relationships. Once unusual arrangements have become unremarkable realities, and are viewed with a level of social acceptance that would have staggered earlier generations of Americans. It is indeed sobering to contemplate the suffering of those who found themselves born in times and places where their deepest hopes were buried under an avalanche of silent repression, violent reprisal, or both. Fate deprived them of happiness later generations would take for granted—and, for all we know, happiness future generations will only envy.
Nevertheless, the transformations of our time, profound as they are, have not fundamentally changed the most basic longings of the human heart: to love, to be loved, to make love the foundation of new lives that will survive us. If anything, these imperatives have grown stronger, not weaker, in the face of changing social arrangements. So it is that marriage, an institution largely driven by economic considerations, is now invested with an emotional intensity that earlier generations might well have found impractical, if not unimaginable.
There are two important reasons for this. The first is that a general long-term trend toward collective affluence, which, combined with a deep vein of institutional skepticism that has always governed our national life, has weakened social and civic ties that once bound us—for better and worse—together. Responsibilities such as child care, elder care, and civic activity are less likely to be performed as a matter of social pressure than they used to be, and more often handled as services delivered as transactions between providers and customers. This is in many ways liberating (even, arguably, for elderly parents who take comfort in not being a burden to their children). But whether or not one likes such developments, it’s clear that they make the personal bonds one does enjoy—bonds more likely than ever to be limited and private—all the more precious.
This preciousness is intensified still further by a second factor: the ethos of expressive individualism that is now, more than ever, the prevailing common sense of our national life. Pursuing happiness is an American tradition. But happiness has not always been understood the same way. For some, it has been a matter of mastery or conquest, of oneself or others. A good life was one of accomplishment, broadly construed. But a good life is not the same as the good life in the popular sense of the phrase—an experience of contentment that’s as likely to be a matter of escaping or transcending the rigors of striving as it is actually attaining a goal other than peace of mind. Sometimes, such peace of mind is understood as a matter of solitude. More commonly, though, it’s a matter of intimacy rooted in a shared outlook. The paradigmatic romantic relationship of our time is of two people sharing a journey that’s more important than the destination in large measure because it’s undertaken together.
Perhaps you sense an air of restlessness, even disapproval, in the way I’m talking about this. I acknowledge it’s there. In part, it’s a matter of self-censure: I’m guilty of much of what I lament, especially as it pertains to community ties. I’m also a hypocrite in that I am a beneficiary of many of the cultural changes that have occurred in my lifetime that make me most uneasy. But the resistance you sense is also matter of the cultural genes I carry within me that are no longer adaptive to the environment in which I now live, genes that nevertheless seek to express themselves (and which will be transmitted to heirs who may or may not find the next environment any more to their liking than I find mine at this perishable moment). In short, I’m an old-fashioned guy. It happens. If it doesn’t before you’re born, it will, sooner or later, after you arrive.
Next: Companionate marriage as the dominant model of matrimony.
