Hitherto we had not even considered the possibility of submitting ourselves to the common customs and observances of our society, and in consequence the notion of getting married had simply not crossed our minds. It offended our principles. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
, p. 76)
Marriage is so central to so many people’s life experience and journey that it must surely be included in a guide that explores the essential, existential features of the human condition. Unlike birth, however, which is unavoidable for the person born, or death which is ultimately inevitable, marriage is not in fact an essential feature of the human condition.
Lots of people don’t marry or even cohabitate as though they were married. Some people make a choice to remain single while others are simply never confronted with marriage related choices. Unlike birth, death, time, being-for-others and so on, which are existential givens in face of which all people must choose themselves, marriage is a convention, a construction, that need not necessarily figure in a person’s life at all.
Of course, because the convention of marriage is so widespread people often find themselves having to make serious, life defining choices with regard to it: to marry or to stay single, to marry this or that person, to marry for love or money, to stay married and so on. Marriage is perhaps the single most significant human convention there is, but still it is not a fundamental given of human existence. Marriage is a bit like Christmas, an artificial construction that so dominates events that most people are obliged to make choices with regard to it whether they want to or not.
As previously argued, in love the Other chooses
to be possessed and can therefore abandon this choice at any time. The love the Other gives is always subject to his freedom
. This makes the lover, whose desire is to be loved, insecure. Despite her insecurity, however, the lover wants the love of the Other to be given freely, because a love that is not freely given is not love. Marriage appears to offer the perfect solution to this dilemma.
The ideal
of marriage is that it should secure love once and for all, happily ever after, while also preserving the freedom from which all true love must flow. Marriage appears to offer a gilt-edged guarantee
that the love of the Other will always continue to be freely given and never withdrawn or given to another. So lovers make their solemn vows before family, friends and God, seeking to cement with rings and rituals oaths that can only ever have the value their makers choose to give them at any time in the future.
High divorce and adultery rates are testament to the fact that commitment is nothing in itself, that it consists entirely in the constant reaffirmation of a certain choice set against the ever present, lurking possibility of a change of mind. Existentialists tend to view marriage as a somewhat desperate attempt to transform the love of the Other into something fixed, reliable and certain, precisely because love isn’t something fixed, reliable and certain.
In many cases marriage certainly supplies the conditions in which true love can thrive. Shared interests arise from a shared daily life while other would-be lovers are formally excluded. Not least, there is ample opportunity for intimacy and mutual reassurance, set against reduced opportunity and incentive to betray the relationship on a mere passing whim. ‘Marriage’, as George Bernard Shaw notes, ‘combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity’ (Man and Superman
, p. 510).
In many other cases, however, marriage steadily undermines love as the basis of the relationship shifts from being a free choice by the Other to be possessed, towards mere habit, ingratitude, fear of change and material and financial entanglement. As the comedian Bob Monkhouse once joked, ‘I’d never be unfaithful to my wife, I love my house too much.’
In championing freedom above all else, existentialists stress that all personal relationships should be based on freedom. That is, they should be entered into freely and maintained as a matter of mutual, ongoing choice. Hence, existentialists would certainly disapprove of any marriage that was arranged or coerced or where either party felt obliged to enter into it for fear of the consequences of not doing so.
Existentialism eventually led Simone de Beauvoir to feminism. In her most important and controversial work, The Second Sex
, a work that heralded a feminist revolution, she considers the secondary role assigned to women by society. She argues that the position of most women throughout history has been one of dependency upon men. Thanks partly to the feminist movement, matters have improved somewhat in some places. Some women have the economic independence that de Beauvoir argues is so vital to personal independence. Nonetheless, it remains the case that millions of women the world over are without freedom in any real, practical sense. Their existential freedom remains inalienable, they cannot not choose, but their freedom does not amount to much if their only choice is between starvation and entering into a marriage where they are little more than the property of their husband.
Undoubtedly, there is often mutual love, affection and respect in such marriages but these qualities are a fortuitous bonus to the marriage rather than its raison d’être.
Of course, it is also true that many marriages entered into
on the grounds of mutual love persist when that love has utterly gone and divorce would be a blessed relief to all. As Woody Allen says in the film, Play it Again, Sam
, ‘My parents never got divorced, although I begged them to.’ The reasons why such marriages persist are complex, but certainly in most cases material entanglement, habit and even stubbornness play no small part.
The overall existentialist position regarding marriage is something like this: marriage entered into as a result of social expectation coercion, obligation, fear, poverty etc. is entirely at odds with the existentialist ethic of individual freedom. Marriage entered into in the absence of any determining factors other than mutual love, affection and respect is okay if such a ‘marriage of true minds’ (Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 116’) is ever possible. But not marrying at all, or even cohabitating, is by far the best option.
Paradoxically, in the existentialists’ view, true love is only possible when both parties remain single
and make no emotional claims upon one another. As love is only love if it is given freely then a genuine loving relationship can be based on nothing else but freedom. A relationship can only hope to remain genuinely loving by preserving the conditions that keep it free and avoiding the conditions that would tie it down. This inevitably means being uncomplaining if the beloved has intimate relations with others. As the true existentialist makes no claims upon her beloved in the first place, it would be incorrect to say that she allows
him to have affairs. He is simply free to have affairs without reproach if he wants to, openly and honestly, and must not be made to feel the need to deceive anyone.
Having spent years teaching in the provinces, Sartre and de Beauvoir finally obtained teaching posts in Paris. They had been lovers for a long time, despite or because of their various affairs, and the predictable thing for them to do was to get a place together. Indeed, the respectable, bourgeois thing for them to do at the age they had now reached was to ‘tie the knot’ and get married. But despising the predictable and the bourgeois, and viewing them as pretty much indistinguishable, they remained single and took up separate accommodation in the same hotel, a move that preserved the vitality of their relationship by preserving its essential freedom. As de Beauvoir writes: ‘Sartre lived on the floor above me; thus we had all the advantages of a shared life, without any of its inconveniences’ (The Prime of Life
, p. 315).
Throughout their lives and their lifelong relationship Sartre and de Beauvoir maintained that marriage is basically a bourgeois institution that seeks to bind people into an intimate association that ought, instead, to be freely chosen day by day.
Lovers should resist the false security offered by marriage vows and material entanglements and accept that the love they currently enjoy is based, and can only be based, on nothing more than the freedom of the Other. To live like this may well be a source of great anxiety, but anxiety is the price of freedom. The true existentialist would rather endure anxiety than seek in bad faith to impose artificial and stifling limits on her own freedom and her lover’s freedom simply for the sake of her peace of mind.