Marriage is Dead, Long Live Marriage!

Marriage is Dead, Long Live Marriage!
Does our approach to marriage need to be redefined?

by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

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It requires no particularly original or keen spirit to discern that family and marriage are today caught up in a state of dissolution, even though many people still get married with great enthusiasm. But in all countries where laws do not make it too difficult to obtain a divorce, many marriages are being dissolved.

It would be tiresome to give statistics on frequency of divorce in various countries, cultures, and social strata. It is much more impressive for the individual to let pass through his mind acquaintances, relatives, and friends who are somewhat over forty-five years old. In doing this one realizes with sadness - or with secret satisfaction if one is himself divorced - that many marriages which began auspiciously are no longer in existence. Often the marriages ended, childless, after several years; often there were already children present. Everyone also knows married couples who dissolve their family after fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years of marriage. And just when one has calmly concluded that at least that old school friend Jack and his wife Louise are enjoying a happy marriage, the telephone rings and Jack shares his decision to get a divorce.

All these divorces would not be so bad if one could at least discern unalloyed happiness and joy among the undivorced. But this is not the case. One knows from general studies as well as from personal experience that many married people manage to hold the family together only with great difficulty, be denying themselves everything that is dear to them. Here and there, nevertheless, one does meet married people who are genuinely satisfied with each other. At least they themselves think that this is the case. The objective observer often has another opinion: the marriage seems to function so well only because at least one of the partners sacrifices himself completely and neglects his own development. Either the wife sacrifices all of her personal and cultural claims for the sake of her husband's professions and comfort; or - and this is becoming every more frequently the case - the husband serves his wife and hardly dares express his own opinions in her presence. He sacrifices his friends and his professional opportunities and practically allows his power-addicted wife to use him as a servant. How often one observes how interesting, witty, and animated the married person is when alone, but then with the marriage partner present, every sign of liveliness vanishes. Many marriage partners who have a good marriage from an external point of view in fact virtually cripple one another.

Despite armies of psychologists and marriage counselors, not only do divorces continue to occur with great frequency, but even the marriages that still exist often seem to be nothing but growth-stunting situations. It is often doubted whether marriage and family in their contemporary form are still meaningful institutions. Is not marriage, as social revolutionaries explain it, mostly just an instrument of society used to stupefy the people?

Even psychiatrists and psychologists who do not share this radical viewpoint add debits daily to the case against marriage and family. In the cases of most neurotic patients, the cause of emotional suffering is traced back to the sick marriage compromises of their parents, to a suppressed mother or to a henpecked father, to every kind of unhappy family constellation.

If one looks at the institution of marriage and family with complete impartiality and fairness, the following picture emerges: if, using great psychological acuity, one were to dream up a social institution which would be unable to function in every single case and which was meant to torment its members, one would certainly invent the contemporary marriage and the institution of today's family. Two people of different sex, usually with extremely differently images, fantasies, and myths, with differing strengths and vitality, promise one another to be with each other night and day, so to speak, for a whole lifetime. Neither of them is supposed to spoil the other's experience, neither is supposed to control the other, both of them should develop all of their potentials fully. This mighty oath is often declared, however, only because of an overwhelming sexual intoxication. Such an intoxication is wonderful, but is it a solid groundwork for a lifetime together?

It is well-known that most people get on each other's nerves even when they undertake only a fourteen-day trip together. The two marriage partners, however, promise to live their whole lives (thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years) together in the greatest physical, spiritual, and psychological intimacy. And this lifelong commitment they make to each other in their youth! Perhaps in ten years they are both completely different people. They make this promise at an age when they neither know who they are themselves nor who the other is. Above all, no one knows how one or the other is later going to develop. The charming, adaptable young girl turns into - who would guess it? - a power-intoxicated matron. The romantic young man with such lofty plans for the future behaves later perhaps like an irresponsible weakling.

That a decent, responsible society not only allows, but actually encourages, young people in their complete ignorance to bind themselves permanently to the psychological problems which their vows entail, seems incomprehensible.

The more life-expectancy increases, the more grotesque this situation becomes. Two hundred years ago people did not grow so very old, and most marriages ended after ten or twenty years with the death of one of the marriage partners. Today many unbroken marriages last fifty, or even sixty, years.

Marriage as conceived under the image of well-being has become, for countless people, the greatest disappointment. The so-called happy marriage is unequivocally finished. Marriage as a welfare institution has no justification anymore. Psychologists who feel themselves committed to the goal of well-being would do better, if they really took their standpoint seriously, to recommend and suggest other forms of living together, rather than to waste their energy trying to patch up a fundamentally impossible institution with a lot of technical treatment modalities.

The tenacity of marriage as an institution, the fact that it continues to be popular despite its pain-inflicting structure, becomes easier to understand if we turn our attention to images that have nothing to do with well-being.

The central issue in marriage is not well-being or happiness; it is salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people who are trying to individuate, to find their "soul's salvation."

The concept of salvation is familiar to us from its religious context. The Christian religion, for example, sought to bring salvation to mankind. This has to do not simply with a happy, relaxed, earthly existence. In the context of religious language, salvation means seeking and finding contact with God. In philosophy one speaks of the search for meaning, for an experience of the meaning of life. Salvation involves the question of life's meaning, and this question can never be ultimately answered.

Just as there are innumerable philosophies and religions, so there are innumerable ways to salvation. In the last analysis, every individual person must seek and find salvation in his own way. All paths to salvation have, nevertheless, certain features in common. I know of none in which a confrontation with suffering and death is not necessary.

We can hardly every say precisely, or even imagine, just what salvation is. We know only the various pathways. The state of salvation as such can perhaps only be intuited in a human life during the brief moments of religious or philosophical peak experiences. For just a few seconds, while watching a sunset, or standing in the shower, or in a church at a baptism, or at an annual festival, one believes suddenly that he knows the meaning of life; one makes contact with his own spark of divinity.

As goals, salvation and well-being contradict each other. The path to happiness does not necessarily include suffering. For the sake of our well-being we are urged to be happy and not to break our heads with questions that have no answer. A happy person sits at his family table among his loved ones and enjoys a hearty meal. A person who seeks salvation wrestles with God, the devil, and the world, and he confronts death, even if all of this is not absolutely necessary at that precise moment. The civil state is obliged to concern itself with the well-being of its citizens, but it is not in a position to offer anyone salvation. It can only provide each citizen with the freedom to seek salvation as the spirit moves him to do so. It is the churches and religious communities that occupy themselves with salvation.

In Jungian psychology and psychotherapy a fairly sharp distinction is drawn between well-being and salvation. To promote well-being involves helping the patient to adapt to his environment and to learn to make his way successfully through the world. It also has to do with freeing him so far as possible from neurotic patterns. But we speak further of "individuation" in Jungian psychology. This does not necessarily concern mental health, well-being, or a sense of happiness. Individuation involves the striving of a person to find his own pathway of salvation.

For us the question is, has marriage to do with well-being or with salvation? Is marriage, this opus contra naturam, a path to individuation or a way to well-being?

The following may give us a clue: all marriage ceremonies contain certain religious elements and overtones. A purely civil marriage, so-called, is practically nonexistent. One may object that in most cultures a great many undertakings are accompanied by some kind of religious ceremony, such as merely eating, embarking in a ship, etc. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that not much in the course of life is as surrounded by religious ceremonies as is marriage; only birth and death are taken with equal seriousness.

Is the presence of references to transcendence in most marriage ceremonies perhaps an indication that marriage has much more to do with salvation than with well-being? Is this why marriage is a kind of difficult "unnatural institution"?

The lifelong dialectical encounter between two partners, the bond of man and woman until death, can be understood as a special path for discovering the soul, as a special form of individuation. One of the essential features of this pathway is the absence of avenues for escape. Just as the saintly hermits cannot evade themselves, so the married persons cannot avoid their partners. In this partially uplifting, partially tormenting evasionlessness lies the specific character of this path.

Everyone has to search for his own pathway. A painter finds it in painting, an engineer in building, etc. Often people set out on a pathway which later proves not to be the one for them. Many have believed themselves to be artists and later found out that their vocation lay elsewhere.

Is marriage, then, a pathway to salvation for everyone? Are there not people whose psychological development is not furthered by marriage? We do not require that everyone find his salvation in music, for example. Is it not then equally questionable that many think they must find their salvation in marriage? Here one can make the following objection: to be sure there are numerous pathways, but this fact does not apply to marriage; it occurs to no one that the majority of the population should become painters, but it is expected that a normal person will marry after a certain age. Not to marry, it is supposed, is abnormal. Older people who are single are described as infantile problematical developments: older unmarried men are suspected of homosexuality, and women who have not married are thought to be in this position because of alack of attractiveness ("The poor thing couldn't find a man"). There exists a virtual terror about everyone's having to marry. Perhaps in this attitude lies one of the biggest problems with respect to modern marriage. Innumerable people are married today who have no business in marriage.

Despite many modern movements to the contrary, marriage, from the purely social point of view, remains more highly prized than the situation of being single. This was not always the case. In the Middle Ages, for example, the unmarried state was highly regarded. The vocation of nun or priest was approvingly regarded.

It is high time to promote the possibilities of the unmarried life for people who seek their salvation elsewhere than in marriage. This would also function to make marriage more valuable. The social position and the material security of single people must be improved, and it should become possible and acceptable for people to have children outside of marriage. The goal would be to reserve marriage only for those people who are especially gifted in finding their salvation in the intensive, continuous relationship and dialectical encounter between man and woman.

The modern marriage is possible only when this special pathway is desired and wished for. The collective, however, continues to herd people toward marrying for the sake of well-being. Many girls marry to evade the pressure of a career and to find someone who will take care of them. Only a few marriages can last "until death" if marriage is understood as a welfare institution.

But people are continually being taught by psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage counselors, etc., that only happy marriages are good marriages or that marriages should be happy. In fact, every path to salvation leads through hell. Happiness in the sense that it is presented to married couples today belongs to well-being, not to salvation. Marriage above all is a soteriological institution, and this is why it is filled with highs and lows; it consists of sacrifices, joys, and suffering. For instance, a married person may bump up against the psychopathic side of his partner, namely that part of his partner's character which is not amenable to change and which has tormenting consequences for both of them. if the marriage is not to break up at this point, one partner (usually the less psychopathic one) is going to have to give in. Should one of them be emotionally cold, for example, there is no alternative except for the other to continue to show loving feelings, even if the partner reacts to these weakly and inadequately. All of the well-intentioned advice to men and women in the vein of "That just won't do," or "You must not tolerate that," or "A man (or woman) must not let that happen to himself," are therefore false and deleterious.

A marriage only works if one opens himself to exactly that which he would never ask for otherwise. Only through rubbing oneself sore and losing oneself is one able to learn about oneself, God, and the world. Like every soteriological pathway, that of marriage is hard and painful.

A writer who creates meaningful works does not want to become happy, he wants to be creative. Likewise married people can seldom enjoy happy, harmonious marriages, as psychologists would force it upon them and lead them to believe. The image of the "happy marriage" causes great damage.

For those who are gifted for the soteriological (defined as "The theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus") pathway of marriage, it, like every such pathway, naturally offers not only trouble, work, and suffering, but the deepest kind of existential satisfaction. Dante did not get to heaven without traversing hell. And so also there seldom exist "happy marriages."

Marriage is not comfortable and harmonious; rather, it is a place of individuation where a person rubes up against himself and against his partner, bumps up against him in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know himself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths.

by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

excerpt from

Challenge of the Heart: Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Changing Times

edited by John Welwood