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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Sex gets boring, eyes wander, but according to the author of "I Don't," knowing the history of marriage can help save yours.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Read more: Sex, Marriage, Adultery, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Salon Conversations
Aug. 9, 2008 |
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In Squire's popular history, the idea of marriage in the West morphs over the centuries from a breeding factory for the ancient Greeks to a lust containment facility for early Christians. It takes literally thousands of years for love to be seen as an essential ingredient for a good marriage.
Think married life is challenging today? Squire's breezy historical tour includes wives in ancient Rome taking to the streets in protest, agitating for the right to dress in finery equal to that worn by their husbands' horses. In the sixth century, wives seek absolution for the sin of attempting to stoke their husbands' libidos with magic potions or for performing oral sex on their husbands. And who could forget the 15th century couple who give up their healthy, marital sex life (which had produced 14 children) and choose to live in a "spiritual marriage" after the wife receives a vision from God?
As today's married couples negotiate their own roles, Squire argues that they shouldn't be surprised when old ideas pop up about a husband's duty to rule his wife, or a wife's obligation to manage the home. Equal partnership in marriage is still a newfangled notion. Yet, Squire, whose previous books concerned eating disorders and couples adjusting to parenthood, believes that learning more about the history of marriage might help take some of the pressure off of today's husbands and wives.
Salon spoke with Squire, who lives in New York with her husband of 19 years and their daughter, by phone from her office in Manhattan.
What was married life like for the ancient Greeks?The husbands of Athens divided women into three roles. Wives were for breeding, courtesans were for socializing with and sleeping with, and then there were prostitutes -- male and female. Athens invented organized prostitution, as well as democracy.
The average age of male marriage in Athens was about 25 to 30, and they usually took a wife of about 15. Women were educated in wifely arts, like spinning and domestic pursuits, and courtesans were educated to be culturally and intellectually sophisticated, entertaining and amusing to men.
Men had this menu of sexual services from three different classes of women. The Athenian wives were not allowed out of the house because they would be seen by other men, and that might cause them to stray. It was considered unseemly for men to love women -- either their wives or, more likely, their courtesans -- because women weren't worthy of the highest form of love. The highest form of love was cerebral love between men.
Up until that time, marriage had been viewed as essential for social stability. It was the reproductive factory, essential to protect paternal identity. Women were held to a standard of fidelity that was absolute. But nobody equated sex in marriage, or any pleasure that you would get from sex, as being innately evil.
For early Christians, celibacy was superior to marriage. Virginity was the highest value. Never being polluted by the sexual act was far superior to marrying and reproducing for men and women.
This was a new idea -- that sex itself was sinful, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of whether the social rules were observed. Part of this is because the early Christians expected the apocalypse, and figured that the world was going to end anyway. What was the point of populating it any further?
They grudgingly allowed sex only within marriage as a compromise, not for the sake of reproduction but for satiating lust. And if you were truly a superior being, if you truly wanted to please God, you would eradicate your own lust, or temper it.
As Christianity advanced, what happened to attitudes about sex within marriage?Couples were supposed to be trained to only have sex to accomplish the "task of propagation," in the words of St. Augustine, which makes it sound really deadly, and that was the point. To just have sex because you felt like it -- you'd have to confess that. That was sinful.
The sexual urge was an evil thing, but the sexual act could be justified if the motive was propagation or, secondarily, if the motive was to prevent either partner from fornicating. Fornication is defined as sex anywhere with anyone in any way outside of marriage. People really believed that if you had sex on a Sunday, which was against the church rules, you'd end up with a deformed baby if you conceived. The rules allowed conjugal sex on fewer than half the days of the year.
And it was actually a sin for women to try to stoke their husbands' libidos?The church ended up making all these really intricate rules. A woman performing oral sex was the worst. It was considered less of a sin to sleep with your mother than to go down on your husband.
How did aristocrats rebel against the church's rules about sex and love?The very rarefied movement that we call courtly love was about adultery. Marriage was about preservation of the family, enhancing economic holdings -- property and wealth -- through generations. Especially in the aristocracy, you didn't marry the person you wanted to marry. That had nothing to do with it. You bred with the person who could bring peace to the land, or bring you more feudal servants, or enhance your bloodline.
Since their marriages were not about romance or passion, the aristocracy always located love and passion outside of marriage in adultery. Courtly love is the ritual courtship of a married woman who is not married to you.
It seems unlikely that a code of adultery would become our code of marriage. But what the code did is that it basically said that love between a man and a woman -- forget the fact that they're not married -- is as great, is as spiritual, is as worthy of celebration as love of God, or possibly greater. This was heresy to the church, which said that human love was nothing compared to love of God.
The notion that heterosexual love was something to be put on a pedestal, to value and worship, eventually filters down from the upper class through the middle classes and into the center of the modern idea of marriage.
Wasn't it Martin Luther who helped move it into marriage?By the time Luther came around in the early 16th century there was a lot of hatred of the church -- [its] greed and [its] antisexual notions. Even popes were famous for having out-of-wedlock children and millions of mistresses.
Luther came out of a monastery saying that celibacy was a depraved state and that marriage was a holy state. He said this even while he was still a monk and still celibate. God wanted marriage, because God said "be fruitful and multiply." He was going back to the original Genesis stipulation.
He also said that marriage should not be primarily about reproduction or property, that its highest value was emotional comfort, affection, companionship, not necessarily passion.
Luther popularized this idea that middle-aged men should not marry teenagers, that there had to be some compatibility in age and background, and that the people who were getting married should not be forced into marriage by their parents. This brought up this idea of choice in marriage. Marriages were arranged for many, many, many centuries up and down the classes, because young people were not considered capable of making such a huge choice that was going to impact on generations.
Luther said the bride and groom should have some say in who they're marrying -- at least they should have the power to say "no" to a match -- and that they should be compatible, and that they should work on developing affection, and realizing his concept of married love.
But he went along with all the centuries of thinking that men were superior to women, and that men ruled the family and ruled their wives. Nobody in society up to that point, men or women, could really visualize anything but a hierarchy in marriage. That would have to wait until the democratic revolution.
