From The Wall Street Journal:
Somewhere around 1549, an English priest introduced love into marriage. Sort of. Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VIII’s break with Rome, was the author and compiler of the English Book of Common Prayer, whose marriage rite—containing that familiar “love, cherishe, and to obey” and “til death us departe”—is the basis of the civil formula common to much of the contemporary English-speaking world. In codifying the marriage rite for what would be the new, independent Church of England, Cranmer preserved much of the medieval world’s earlier traditions about what husbands and wives were to swear to one another. But to these he added the promises “to love and to cherishe” (and, to the bride’s portion, more unsettlingly, to obey).
The mention of love itself was not new to English marriage customs. But the centrality of it to the vow, argues the novelist and philosopher Cheryl Mendelson in her fascinating and morally serious “Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite,” represented a new potential for marital intimacy: one in which free choice, romantic affection and robust social commitment all contributed to the establishment of what Ms. Mendelson calls a “two-person, erotically charged society.” Cranmer’s vision of marriage, the author writes, offered English citizens a “quiet reservoir of freedom and equality, encouraging individualism and free choice.”
But the individualism and free choice Ms. Mendelson explores—and sometimes argues for—look very different from the autonomy, independence and self-actualization valorized in contemporary American culture: The institution of marriage—and the dour commitments that any institution entails—is as outmoded as Cranmer’s spelling. American marriage rates have dropped by 60% since the 1970s, while alternative forms of romantic partnership, like polyamory, are now so ubiquitous as to border on the cliché. Today, Ms. Mendelson reminds us, “self-written vows are as common as traditional ones” because couples “have doubts about the traditional ones, especially the promises to love, to be faithful, and to stay together until death. Unsure whether they can or will or even want to do those things, they eschew promising in favor of wishing, hoping, for trying to do them.”
Yet there is something to those old-school words—and something, too, Ms. Mendelson argues convincingly, to the ideals behind them: that we find our fullest, and most flourishing, selves in the interplay of affective freedom and binding commitment. To vow, to commit ourselves for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer or even for uglier or prettier—as the translation of one 15th-century English rite Ms. Mendelson examines would have it—is to accept that the choice to give up some of our power to choose is not only desirable, but foundational to being a human being. At its best, marriage is both about the freedom to marry for love, and about the fostering of that love as something whose reality is independent from our day-to-day emotions.
Part of that reality, Ms. Mendelson suggests, is social. Vows, promises, rituals, rites—these are ways that we have historically fostered the connection between our words and actions; a connection, Ms. Mendelson reminds us, that was all the more vital in eras when reading and writing (let alone contracts) were possible only for a select few. Binding ourselves publicly—and taking that binding seriously—is, for Ms. Mendelson, the foundation not only of having a successful marriage but of belonging to a successful community.
“Vows” is many books in one—and, impressively, all of them are successful. As an academic analysis of the development of medieval and early modern English wedding customs and their significance on our cultural understanding of modern-day marriage, it is at once illuminating and readable. Ms. Mendelson’s prose is crisp without ever being simplistic. She brings us along seamlessly, from a close reading of Anglo-Saxon vows of fealty between vassals and lords—a potential early model for the first English marital vows—to the rather puritanical 1789 decision in America to remove the husband’s traditional promise to “worship” his wife with his body, to the free love ideals of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which figures like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell begin to make the by-now-ubiquitous case that making love obligatory through marriage “is the surest way to cause you to hate him or her.”
. . . .
“Vows” is most successful when it is most ambitious, arguing not only for the use of historic marriage vows but for the ideology underpinning them, in which free choice and binding commitment make possible a love that is both private and public, legitimized by those witnesses who promise to support the marriage as well as its foundations. The book’s best passages make so compelling a case for old-school marriage—albeit between parties of any gender identity and orientation—that they ought to be required reading for anyone considering embarking upon matrimony.
At times the author’s optimism, seemingly bolstered by her second marriage, can seem quixotic. The idea that adherence to one’s vows can virtually guarantee a successful marriage at times falls too neatly into the category of “easier said than done.”
Ms. Mendelson is no knee-jerk reactionary, however. She is honest about marriage’s oppressive potential, particularly—historically—for women. Among the most entertaining sections in “Vows” is a close reading of a set of medieval church records, known as the Sarum Missals, from the area around Salisbury, England. The rites documented there include the promise of the woman—but not the man—to be “bonere” (pleasant), “buxum” (submissive) and to give good “borde”—to be, in other words, a good housekeeper.
Yet, Ms. Mendelson suggests, the traditionally feminine ideals of service and obedience in a marriage should be expanded to all parties, rather than dispensed with altogether. Self-sacrifice and the commitment to focus our energies on the well-being of another rather than our own selves are ideals we need more of, regardless of our gender identity. In the end, it is within those ideals, rather than the individualistic pursuit of erotic pleasure or social fulfillment, that we can find the truth about what it means to love.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)
As PG has mentioned before, he has been happily married to Mrs. PG for over 50 years and regards their marriage as the most important and rewarding act he has ever taken.
