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CHAPTER 1
The Holy Cow
For some reason, we see divorce as a signal of failure, despite the fact that each of us has a right, and an obligation, to rectify any other mistake we make in life.
— Joyce Brothers
Meet the Cow
The Holy Cow is the most self-righteous of the Sacred Cows. She believes that divorce is a personal failure and that married people are better than divorced people. Her mission is to sell everyone on the idea that the commitment of marriage should trump personal happiness, and she uses spurious data and anecdotes to shore up her argument. She believes that marriage is critical to a stable society and works to keep marriages intact for the sake of society rather than for the sake of individuals.
Caveat: Tipping over the Holy Cow does not mean that commitments are unimportant to individuals or to society. It only means that commitments should not be unalterable over the course of a lifetime.
Divorce = Failure
When asked why all of her marriages had failed, anthropologist Margaret Mead is said to have replied, "I beg your pardon; I have had three marriages and none of them was a failure." This statement (apocryphal or not) highlights our social tendency to equate divorce with failure. Culturally, we believe that divorce reflects weakness and selfishness, and the "failure" label applies not only to marriages, but also to the people who divorce. Our society does not like quitters, and divorce is seen as a form of quitting.
While divorce is unquestionably more socially acceptable today than it was sixty years ago, the stigma of divorce may currently be increasing, at least among educated and upper-middle-class Americans. Laurie Essig, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College, says that among the relatively affluent, "divorce has become a source of shame, a mark of failure, a sign that you just aren't working hard enough."
According to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the 10-year divorce rate for college-educated Americans has fallen to 11%, compared to a rate of almost 37% for the rest of the population. Individuals in this demographic may have few or no friends who are divorced, leading to an attitude that "our kind don't divorce." Those who choose to divorce (or have divorce thrust upon them) may be considered a threat by their married friends or may be stigmatized by former friends who believe that divorce is an act of weakness and selfishness.
The Holy Cow is an energetic promoter of this stigma. She believes that breaking marriage vows makes someone de facto a bad person. Of course, anyone divorcing could be a bad person; some bad people certainly do get divorced. When we reviewed the marital history of some of the most evil people on record, we found a mixed bag of histories. Joseph Stalin was widowed twice, though rumor has it that he drove his second wife to suicide. Adolf Hitler was married for only 40 hours before he and his wife committed suicide together. Idi Amin was a polygamist who married at least six women, three of whom he divorced, and one of whom was found dismembered (though by whom we do not know). Attila the Hun drowned in his own blood on his wedding night. So at least for people generally considered to be "bad," there is little pattern to their choices surrounding marriage and divorce.
Although there does not appear to be a strong correlation between a person's moral character and marital status, this doesn't completely answer the Holy Cow's accusation. In her view, marriage is always good and divorce is always bad. That means that you can prove that you are a good person by agreeing to a marriage contract, but you become a bad person if you break that contract. To explore this Cow's attitude further, let us begin by examining the nature of the contract itself.
When the libertarian social scientist Charles Murray was interviewed on NPR about his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he argued that the educated class of white America has something to teach the poorer, less well-educated class. In his words, upper-middleclass Americans "are getting married and staying married. They work like crazy. They do better going to church. [They should] just say that 'These are not choices we've made for ourselves. ... These are rich, rewarding ways of living.'" One could quibble with all of these value judgments, because going to church or working like crazy might not be rich or rewarding for everyone. What interested us, however, was the tacit agreement between the speaker and the interviewer that "getting married and staying married" is a path to a better life. Really? Many of us know people who have vacationed in Hawaii and have been made happy by the experience. That doesn't mean that everyone in Hawaii is happy or living rich, fulfilling lives, however. Insisting that people go to Hawaii and never leave again is unlikely to cure social ills, and it certainly won't make most people substantially happier. Likewise, pushing people to marry and stay married is unlikely to increase personal happiness or social good.
The marriage contract
The term "marriage contract" is so familiar that nobody bothers to define it, but have you ever asked yourself what exactly is being promised at a modern wedding? Most marriage vows contain some version of "I promise to love you forever," which is generally considered to be the core of the wedding contract. Some marriage vows are more conservative and only promise undying faithfulness, not undying love. This typically takes a form such as "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." The love is usually implied, however. Wedding guests imagine the couple in later years celebrating anniversaries with grandchildren or emotionally supporting one another through periods of unemployment, not saying, "My spouse is an ass, but I promised until death do us part, so I guess I'm stuck."
Assuming that the contract either states or implies undying love, what does it mean to promise that your feelings for someone else will never change? If you were applying for your dream job, you would never sign a contract that said, "I not only promise never to leave this job, but I promise to be equally enthusiastic about working here for the rest of my life, no matter how this job evolves and no matter how much I change as a person." Yet this is more or less what most of us do when we get married. We promise that we are going to continue to feel the way we do today in perpetuity, even though experience teaches us that our feelings about most things change over time. Anyone who has gone grocery shopping after eating a large meal knows how context affects our prediction of our own future feelings. The return of hunger seems inconceivable, and somehow yogurt and celery seem like more than enough groceries for the week.
Similarly, people who are rapturous on their wedding day cannot conceive of ever feeling differently. As we all know, however, the inconceivable does sometimes end up happening: couples do fall out of love. It turns out that people are not all that good at predicting how they will feel in a decade, and neither can they make themselves feel an emotion in perpetuity simply by promising to do so.
If we took a more clear-eyed view of the marriage contract, what might it look like? Assuming that it is not truly within our power to promise to feel a certain way 20 years hence, what could we more reasonably sign up for? Let's try out a few contracts to see which one you would consider a reasonable commitment to make:
"I, ____________________, do promise to do my utmost to love you, ____________________, for as long as we are married. I promise that if a time comes when I do not love you, I will do everything in my power to try to rekindle that love. If I become convinced that I cannot regain my love for you, I will tell you promptly and end our marriage as elegantly as I can."
"I, ____________________, do promise to act as though I love you, ____________________, for as long as I shall live. I promise not to leave you under any circumstance, no matter how miserable it makes me to stay with you."
"I, ____________________, do promise to love you, ____________________, forever (even though that is not something I can really promise, as none of us has better than partial control over who we love and how we feel). I am leaving unspoken what happens if I can't continue to love you, because that is a highly uncomfortable subject right now, and I hope it never comes up. I understand that having avoided this topic now, we are in some danger of later disagreeing about exactly what I have committed to you and exactly what I need to do in order to remain in compliance with this contract."
In some ways, weddings are an exercise in group denial, or at least group optimism. Most people essentially ignore the fact that the promise of eternal love doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Nobody wants to have to say or hear anything unromantic at weddings, so the bride(s), the groom(s) and their guests just keep fingers crossed, hoping that the love will last a lifetime. Therapist and author Ester Perel summarizes it this way: "The contract shatters the romantic ideal. We are trapped by the fact that we marry for love. The thought that at the beginning of a love story you would already write what would happen if the love story ends is unfathomable to people."
The Holy Cow exploits the ambiguity created by the vague nature of the marriage contract. Few people would agree to a contract that said, "I promise to stay with you until I die no matter how badly you treat me, no matter how much I come to dislike you, no matter how unhappy it makes me to be with you." Yet the Holy Cow will point out that you did in fact promise "until death do us part," and she is not interested in having a discussion about whether or not that was a reasonable promise for you to make. The Holy Cow believes that marriage is more than just a contract between two individuals that can be dissolved by the contracting parties. The Holy Cow believes that without marriage, there would be no foundation for the family, which would cause destabilization of society and ultimately the destruction of civilization itself.
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
— G.B. Shaw, Getting Married, 1908
The glue that binds us
Doubtless there are couples who stay in love for a lifetime, and there are also couples for whom loyalty and security are enough to sustain happiness, even if love doesn't last. Some couples grow apart, however, and become unhappy. Individuals in this circumstance are told by the Holy Cow that they should stay married, because this Cow believes that commitment trumps happiness. The Holy Cow has only one definition of a successful marriage, which is that one spouse gets to bury the other. She doesn't really care what happens along the way (though she would probably object that murder would be cheating) as long as the couple gets to the ultimate finish line, death.
The Holy Cow is not all doom and gloom, however; that would not be an effective way of getting her message across. She also promotes the positive aspects of commitment, such as the idea that marriage commitment helps people to ride out rough relationship patches, avoiding premature termination of what could otherwise have been a happy and fulfilling marriage.
It is not uncommon to hear married people say something like: "One of the most comforting parts of marriage for me is that it is binding. I know that we will weather tough times and disagreements because we are married." Undoubtedly, people who say this mean it quite sincerely. Yet when you think about it, it's an odd thing to say.
Imagine the following situation: Amir and Jennifer have been married for ten years, and they have a mostly happy life. There are several subjects about which the two of them simply cannot agree, however, and fights erupt over issues like whether Amir is pulling his weight when it comes to keeping the house clean. Their crankiness with one another can last all day (sometimes several days) until one of them initiates an apology, at which point they make heartfelt promises to do better and talk about how much they love each other. Because they truly do love one another.
Now imagine that one day while they are both still in the foulest of moods, Jennifer happens to be cleaning out the filing cabinet. She finds their marriage license and notices that the names printed on the license belong to another couple! They signed the wrong piece of paper, and they are in fact not legally married.
Remember that Jennifer just had a big fight with Amir. What does she do now that she realizes that he is not legally her husband? Does she rush to pack her bags, saying, "Thank the Lord, I can finally run away!!" Or does she bring the paper to Amir, saying, "Guess what, honey, we have been living in sin and now you need to make me an honest woman. And, since I know that you're really sorry for not doing your share of the chores, this might be the moment to buy me that diamond ring I've been eyeing ..."
We are betting the latter. Amir and Jennifer love one another, and they don't want to end their relationship. The comfort that they take from being married is not the existence of the contract, but the fact that ten years ago, they said to one another, "I choose you." Jennifer knows that Amir loves her more than anyone in the whole world, and she knows that she loves him that much too.
Couples who live together without marrying can be just as committed to one another as Jennifer and Amir, but often that's not the case (at least in societies where permanent cohabitation is less the norm than marriage). Often these couples avoid marriage because one or both partners is not completely sure that the other partner is Mr. or Ms. Right. It is uncomfortable to know that you are Mr. or Ms. Good Enough for Right Now, and that your relationship could end if someone better came along. One of the reasons marriage is comforting is because married people have told one another that they are each other's favorite person in the universe.
In this way, marriage is less the cause of wanting to stay together and more the effect. Jennifer and Amir got married because they both knew that they wanted to build a life together. Finding out that they are not, in fact, married does not diminish their desire to be together, nor does it diminish their confidence that they are each other's favorite person. On the flip side, finding out that they are not actually married would not make it much easier to split up if they stopped being each other's favorite person.
To illustrate this, let's look at what happens if Jennifer doesn't love Amir anymore. She does not enjoy being around him, and they become emotionally estranged. During one of their fights, Jennifer finds the false marriage certificate. Does this make it easier to leave? Jennifer is still going to feel terrible for leaving Amir, and it will be no easier to negotiate the division of assets or custody of children if they are not legally married. The impact on their social circle and families will be identical, and if they cannot agree on terms of separation, the battle will be equally if not more difficult than a "real" divorce. We would guess that the probability of Jennifer leaving would be quite similar whether she discovered the false marriage certificate or not.
In the circumstance where Jennifer no longer loves him, Amir probably doesn't find the marriage contract comforting either. If he interprets the contract to mean "I will stay with you always," even if the contract were completely binding, it probably would not make Amir happy to force Jennifer to stay with him. Since the contract is not in fact binding and can be broken unilaterally, it would be no comfort even if he did want to keep Jennifer trapped and miserable. If, on the other hand, Amir interprets the contract to mean "I will love you forever," then the contract has already been broken. By no longer loving Amir, Jennifer has made the agreement meaningless.
If we were honest with ourselves, we would realize that saying, "I don't care whether some time in the future you discover that you don't love me; you are never allowed to leave me" is not a nice thing to say. We would also realize that saying, "I promised, so I'm going to darn well force myself to love you or pretend to love you until one of us dies," is not terribly realistic. Tipping the Holy Cow requires the rigor to sort out what is realistic from what is merely wishful thinking.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sacred Cows"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Danielle and Astro Teller.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
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