My first, perhaps superficial, reaction to yet another report claiming that marriage is good for your health – by the Aston Medical School in Birmingham, saying marriage helps to survive diabetes, high blood pressure and strokes – was, why does everything have to be measured in health terms? Try proposing to someone on the grounds of the wellness benefits and see how that goes down.
My second reaction is that there is a big difference between a marriage and a happy marriage. Other studies have shown that a stressful marriage can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. My final reaction was, what is a happy marriage? Because it’s misguided to divide marriages into happy or unhappy. “Happy marriage” has a fairytale ring, implying that after the nuptials are completed, every day will be the first day of spring. No one but an idiot believes this. It’s a very wide spectrum from happy to unhappy.
But why take a risk and march down the aisle? One possible answer might be the accrual of meaning. Marriage is a kind of meaning, even if painful – like a job you don’t much like but would be lost without. Even to argue with someone is an act of asserting meaning.
Meaning is also bestowed through belonging. I remember telling a married friend that I, too, was getting married, and he was delighted, almost unnaturally so. I asked him why he was bowled over, and he said it was because I was “joining the club”. This gave me the creeps – I had no desire to join any club, not on a conscious level, anyway.
Which brings me to another point. Once a purely practical arrangement, marriage has become an arena in which desires and needs, conscious and unconscious, are played out. The unconscious part is crucial because we don’t know what we’re doing half the time. Who hasn’t walked out of a heated exchange thinking: “I don’t know why I said/did that.” Only too often, marriage is the blind leading the blind.
Which isn’t to say marriages that are broadly happy don’t exist – although it is hard to work out which ones they are, as the public face of marriage is a theatre of status, because if a marriage doesn’t “work”, it is deemed to have failed, and who wants to fail in the eyes of others? So people assiduously conceal the faultlines in their relationship for public consumption. Married people are consummate PRs.
My eldest daughter, Jean, now 23 – shaped, herself, by her parents’ divorce – has an interesting if cynical take on marriage. She says it takes a “certain emotional ignorance to successfully get through a marriage – or a supreme level of tolerance. Only nice, boring people have successful marriages.”
There may be an element of rationalisation in her view, compensation for the fact that she had to suffer the pain of a broken family. Yet I can’t help but think there is something in it – perhaps because it emotionally reassures me, too.
On her analysis, a marriage can’t make you happy and, if the wrong kind of temperaments are involved, can’t be redeemed by effort. Rather, if you are two happy, even-tempered, reasonable people in the first place, your marriage is likely to have much the same quality. And I would probably run a mile from a happy, even-tempered, reasonable person, as I would think there was something seriously wrong with them.
On this reading, marriage can’t really do anything for you. It can’t keep you healthy or make you happy. It can give you meaning, but sometimes at a very high price. It isn’t a proof of love – but more like a boast. So why get married? That one, I’m still trying to work out.