When marriage wasn’t about love
“Life is short. Have an affair” claimed the catchphrase of the first dating site addressed to married people, Ashley Madison. Founded in 2002 by the Canadian Darren Morgenstern, the site reaches today 47 countries and counts almost 53 million members. Its success has inspired other businesses too, for there are now a host of websites inciting committed people to cheat on their partners.
For instance, Gleeden with its sensuous blonde biting the “forbidden apple” on the main page boasts to be “the first extramarital dating site made by women”; while the site Love dating 24 recommends an affair to those “with very little intimacy in your marriage”.
Although the reasons why people subscribe to extramarital dating sites may be as different as chalk and cheese, a common denominator comes into light, however, when glancing through some of Gleeden’s testimonials. Whether it’s sexual fulfillment, the need of emotional attachment or the excitement of new encounters, all these individuals seemingly search for the missing factor of their primary relationships.
Lauding the beneficial effects that his adulterous adventures have had on him, one married man is persuaded that “cheating is part of his life balance now”, as “one person cannot give you everything you need”. One woman vaunts the adrenaline that the love of another man brought her, but also appreciates the anonymity the dating site offers its members. For, as she states in her confession, this privacy guarantee enables her to act freely without disturbing her family life which, she claims, “makes me happy and I didn’t want to change anything to it”.
The desire to engage in extramarital liaisons under the cover of anonymity might stem from the stigma attached to infidelity, a moral transgression largely condemned by society. Citing a study led by Blow and Harnett in 2005, the webpage Psychology today notes that most people in the U.S. and Europe consider “infidelity to be wrong”. Yet it is widely spread.
Defined as “the act or fact of having a romantic relationship with someone other than one’s husband, wife, or partner”, infidelity holds a steady ground in western countries. The findings of the 2014 Ifop research study on infidelity indicate that, in Europe, the champions of illicit relationships are the Italians and the Germans, their countries presenting national infidelity rates of 45 percent. Immediately after come the French with 43 percent. Great Britain fares a bit better in this perspective since it has a national rate of adulterous affairs of 36 percent.
In all the mentioned countries, men cheat more than women. 55 percent of the interviewed Italian men said to have had sexual intercourse with a person other than their official partner, against 34 percent of women. But in Germany particularly the gender gap loosens up as the difference between men and women is only of three points: 46 percent of the questioned German men admitted to double-dealing against 43 percent of German women.
Even in the U.S., one of the most sexually conservative countries of the industrialized world, conjugal disloyalty isn’t a rarity. The webpage Statistic brain points out that 57 percent of men and 54 percent of women were unfaithful “in any relationship they’ve had”. And 41 percent of American marriages experienced infidelity, with one or both spouses admitting to betrayal.
The non-negligible percentage of infidelity rates registered across Europe and the U.S. may reinforce some people’s beliefs that we are living in a decaying society that has no consideration for values and moral principles.
Add to this the now common stories, which you may have already heard of or experienced firsthand, of broken hearts, ruined families and individuals reluctant to reset their loving lives for fear of experiencing unfaithfulness once again.
TV shows like Cheaters where private detectives spy on individuals whose partners suspect them of illicit affairs might have as well exacerbated the view that finding a loyal partner can be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.
When dealing with such unhappy narratives, inadvertently we tend to think that never before has humanity reached so low levels of baseness. Lamenting the promiscuity of our society, we create ourselves an idealized projection of the bygone days. In most cases, the decades-long marriages of our grandparents terminated by death and not third partners, help portray infidelity as an evil that has just come out of the nest.
Yet, as Stephanie Coontz argues in her book Marriage, a history. How love conquered marriage (Penguin Books, 2005) loyalty is a rather recent appearance on the expectations list of a marriage. As is the case with other three elements vital for today’s unions: love, personal satisfaction and the pursuit of happiness.
Taking us through the journey of marriage, Coontz meticulously traces the evolution of marrying practices from the ancient Greeks and Romans till the present times. Perhaps one of the great merits of the book is the deconstruction of myths. People didn’t marry for love, until very recently in history, is probably the most revealing idea of the book.
Refuting the hypothesis that marriage was initially created as a means destined to offer protection to women and children to men, Coontz interprets marriage as an economic and political institution. The seal of a marriage was to a king what a signature on a treaty document is for a chief of state nowadays. In other words, in the Europe of kings and queens, the aristocratic marriages functioned as a web of connections, thanks to which the monarchy could make alliances, spread its power and hinder conflicts.
The middle and lower classes of the echelon also pursued practical calculations when concluding unions, but those implied mainly survival concerns. In a society where labor was divided by gender, a man and a woman had to come together as to share the chores of the household. Men ploughed the fields and cut logs, while women cooked and waved clothes.
Until the Church joined forces with the state in the 15th century and made marriage an official institution, the two individuals who wanted to form a family could do so by simply acknowledging their mutual intent or receiving the blessings of a parent. Neither religious nor civil ceremonies were needed.
Today, we seem to witness the revival of this practice, as fewer and fewer people are tying the knot. Instead, many choose to evade religious prescripts and lead their affective lives as they please. In an increasingly secular society, marriage has become rather obsolete and numerous are those who associate it with a “piece of paper”. In this day and age, when love, respect and faithfulness constitute the linchpin of a successful relationship, many disregard the blessings of a priest and the visit to the town hall as mere formalities.
Commenting on the fading appetite that society has for marriage in our century, the demographer Anton Kuijsten remarked that individuals “don’t order anymore from the standard life course menu, as the norm had been for so many centuries, but instead compose their history à la carte. And marriage, the obligatory entrée during the 1950s, has become the optional desert”. As a matter of fact, in the 1950s, 80 percent of the American households were made of married couples. At the turn of the 20th century, the marriage rate dropped to less than 51 percent.
The 1950s represent however a unique period in Western history. The WWII now upended, the decade saw an upsurge in marriages in both the U.S. and Western Europe. The war, with all its devastation and baleful consequences, had prompted people to have a more appreciative look on life. Coupled with an increase in wages and the rise of consumerism, the period was fertile for marriages.
As Stephanie Coontz notes in her book, “by the 1960s, marriage had become nearly universal in North America and Western Europe, with 95 percent of all persons marrying”. This is why historians have baptized this decade “the golden age of marriage”. This was the age when “individuals spent much more time of their lives in marriage than ever before or since”. During this period, people married young and had many children. And divorce rates were unimpressive. Actually, marital unions were more likely to be halted by death than divorce, the average length of a marriage concluded around the 1950s being of 45 years.
It is an eye-popping span of time, unquestionably, that would stir the curiosity of most of us so accustomed as we are with seeing people breaking up only after a few years together. The site Hopes and fears indicates that Americans stay married on average for a period of 8.2 years, the French for 13 years and the British for a little over 11 years. Under these circumstances, it is only natural that we turn our attention toward our grandparent’s past. How were they so successful in keeping the flame burning for decades in a row? What could they teach us? Were they more carrying, faithful and respectful to one another?
One could assume the answer to be affirmative, especially if we keep in line with humans’ intrinsic trait of glorifying the old times. However, once again the research of Stephanie Coontz proves revealing as it deftly dismantles yet another myth: the couples married during the golden age weren’t necessarily happier than the couples of 2017. They lasted longer not because they loved each other more or because they were better at problem solving than we are.
Forced to fit into patterns already established by society, the men and women of our grandparents’ generation had in fact little maneuver over their wedlock. Divorce was hard to get, and even if the two spouses unpleased with their conjugal lives had chosen to split, it would have been badly received by community.
Furthermore, in the mid of the 20th century, compliance with fixed gender roles was still a reality. The husband was the sole breadwinner of the family, while the wife was homemaking. Had they been unhappily married, they would have more likely swallowed their misfortunes rather than defy the norm and opt for a divorce.
Fidelity, so paramount an expectation in today’s relationships that its transgression highly increases the odds of a couple’s separation, wasn’t even a priority of their alliances. And if a man happened to be romantically involved with women other than his wife, his adulterous affairs would have unlikely been met with public or spousal opprobrium. What we now call, by today’s standards, “cheating” would have been seen almost 60 years ago as “male privilege”.
The major events which took place during the last quarter of the 20th century destabilized this traditional view of marriage. Women’s access to legal rights and education, as well as their increasingly large participation into the workforce put an end to the breadwinner family model.
The contraceptive revolution enabled women to have control over their fertility and opened the door to the prospect of a childless couple. And, when divorce became easily attainable, couples no longer hesitated to go their separate ways: thus during the interval 1966–1979, the divorce rate more than doubled. By 1980, half of all married individuals were expected to breakup.
The fact still holds true today, suggests the site Bloomberg, which points out that many sociologists believe married couples to have a 50/50 probability of lasting. Less appealing than it used to be in the past, marriage is no longer a mandatory passage in our lives. Comparing present day trends with the marrying practices of previous centuries, Stephanie Coontz establishes an interesting connection between marriage and high school graduation:
“Few young people go to high school because they expect it to be a deeply fulfilling experience. They go because they need that piece of paper to get entry-level jobs or gain admittance to the more selective and prestigious credentials provided by college. Marriage used to be like that. It was the gateway to adulthood and respectability and the best way for people to maximize their resources and pool labor. This is no longer the case”.
If fewer people get married in this day and age, this may also be due to the high expectations a marriage has to deliver. Happiness, personal fulfillment, companionship and loyalty have never been as vital as they are today. Even though, for the most part, they might be hard to get.
