What's Love Got To Do With It? - Marriage, A Matter Of Marx, Will And Contract

Marx famously said that man is an economic animal, and he based his theories on that presumption. For all the failings of Marxism, the man was right. 

Expressed another way, human nature - aggressive, territorial, self-defensive, and self-interested - is economic, for we all calculate gains and losses, risks, opportunity, and the forces that determine them as a matter of course.  Everything comes under that particular scrutiny, for there is no sphere of human activity that is not a matter of competing interests. 

Capitalism, said Marx, was a destructive, divisive force that robbed society of its collective potential.  In its competitive individualism, pitting man against man, it sapped productive energies.  If these individual energies could be marshalled together for the common good, mankind as a whole could benefit.  One must work with this universal shared good in mind, said Marxists who embraced the idea of progress, positive social evolution, and the promise of a perfect, harmonious world. 

 

Needless to say Marxism for all its utopian ambitions ignored the profoundly individualistic nature of man, Darwinian competitive survivalism, and the more fundamental nature of human interaction - buying, selling, and trading for benefit and profit. 

However much Marx believed that these individualistic ambitions could be tamed by the state and conformed to its collective vision, he did not deny them.  He was as aware of Darwin as any thinker of the late 19th century and was a keen observer of history.  He must have seen that both individual competition and private economic enterprise were aspects of human society ever since the earliest human settlements, but was somehow convinced that its emergence into a new, modern world could not survive such economic brutalism. 

Long after the demise of Marxism and Communism, the keen observation that man is an economic animal persists.  Despite reformists, progressives, and Utopians, the dirty little secret - man's undeniable individual ambition and his determination to best others at all costs - is no longer whispered but accepted if not embraced. 

Marriage is the perfect example of social Marxism.  It may initially be thought to be an expression of love and caring, but over time it becomes contractual.  Men and women thrown together willy-nilly by persistent Petrarchan notions of romantic love, soon find that without perimeters, conditions, codicils, and caveats marriage cannot survive.

Marriage is not contractual in the purely legal and accounting sense, although most modern marriages are bound by prenuptial arrangements, detailed trust funds, painfully specific and demanding clauses of equal economic and financial rights.  It is contractual in less codifiable ways.  There are so-called moral codes of behavior - fidelity is the most prominent - that are nothing more than extensions of the legal contracts which broadly define the context of marriage.  A woman wants to keep her husband from straying because of a potential loss of economic value, the disruption of a carefully-prepared investment portfolio, and the loss of an additional caretaker, a father. 

As much as one can accuse men of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Perhaps the best fictional depiction of jealousy is in Strindberg’s play, The Father.  For years the Captain has ruled his wife, Laura, and commanded all decisions about her, their home, and their daughter.  When Laura feels that he has finally overstepped his bounds, making arbitrary decisions about their daughter and her education, she decides to refuse and force his capitulation.  

She does so with the psychological canniness and evil intent of Iago, introducing the idea, however subtlety that their daughter is not his. She knows that paternity is at the heart of male jealousy and insecurity – men can never absolutely know whether the children borne by their wives are theirs – and she progressively suggests that their child might not be his.  

Such doubts, especially since they never can be proven, are by nature corrosive, and eventually the Captain goes mad.  Laura commits him to a mental institution, and she takes charge of her daughter.  Adding insult to injury she tells him, “Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father…, you are not needed any longer and you must go.”

Most modern marriages where the old Victorian prescriptions of male and female roles are no longer valid, need to negotiate a new, unwritten contract to assure a proper balance of emotional investment, risk, and reward. Values are calculated subjectively - taking out the trash every so often is not worth cooking daily or worse, cleaning toilets.  

Successful, or at least long-lasting marriages have achieved accommodation and social parity.  Wives' and husbands' duties and responsibilities are negotiated, valuated, and mutually agreed upon.  Whether paying the bills and doing the taxes is actually and objectively the equivalent of cooking dinner is not the point.  Only the mutual economic agreement is. 

Sexual favors are by no means independent of the unwritten marriage contract.  The old rules no longer apply, and intercourse is now a negotiated affair.  Too much or too little demand from either husband or wife can disturb the balance of power, the social contract, the economic status quo. Negotiations over thermometer settings, clattering, taking out the dog, hairs in the sink, the toilet seat up or down are all part of the contract. 

D.H. Lawrence wrote most expressively and insightfully about sexual relationships.  He understood that they were micro-Darwinian in nature, matters of sexual dominance and submission which were stand-ins for the larger context of marriage or partnership.  He never advocated male dominance or female submission or the opposite; but insisted that unless this dynamic were settled, the affair would end without satisfaction. 

 

Yet even if this equation is solved, there must still be limits to the extent of domination.  That must be negotiated, for excess, particularly if it is constant, will destroy the social and economic contract established. 

Henrik Ibsen wrote extensively about will.  A Nietzschean in creative spirit, his plays are about the expression of will as a validation of human identity.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel are all women for whom, a la Nietzsche, such expression is the essence of their existence.  There is no reason other than pure will that Hilde urges the Master Builder to climb to the top of the tower to assuredly fall to his death, nor Rebekka's calculated manipulation of the weak credulous Rosmer; or Hedda Gabler's willful destruction of her former lover and attempts to do so with her husband.  She commits suicide as a final act of will. 

 

Marriage is the place where the expression of will finds its most fertile environment.  As the playwright Edward Albee has said, 'Marriage is the crucible of maturity'.  Within its impenetrable confines the ambitions, energies, and will of each partner must inevitably clash and some accommodation reached - a settlement which will lead to maturity. 

Properly negotiated, this chance alliance of two distinctly different individuals, can provide for reproduction, mutual care, comfort, and support.  What's love got to do with it?  Like Shakespeare's plays, it doesn't matter who wrote them.  They are works of genius.  Whether love actually exists as a separate, higher order of human interaction, or a construct to assure the longevity of an economic partnership, matters not.