A rchive Date
[ 22-02-2005 ]
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[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
A year's experience, a lifetime of advice
By Herman Goodden - London Free Press
February 18, 2002
Thirty-year-old Pamela Paul has been working the American talk-show circuit this month, flogging her first book, The Starter Marriage and The Future of Matrimony.
After her first marriage clapped out after less than a year's not-so-scintillating co-habitation, Paul started work on this book, burrowing through her network of friends and basing her findings (such as they are) on interviews with more than 50 other 20- and 30-something refugees of similar matrimonial shipwrecks.
The Starter Marriage is a catchy and slightly subversive title. Paul has taken a demeaning adjective we associate with rundown houses and rusted-out cars and applied it to that most intimate, powerful and challenging of human institutions.
Paul interviews one horrifyingly shallow divorcee named Isabel, whose marriage was apparently driven by nothing more than peer pressure and consumer greed: "Once one person gets engaged, everybody has to get engaged," Isabel recalls, as if procuring a husband was as solemn an undertaking as buying a set of Beanie Babies at a yard sale. "And then you get so wrapped up in whose ring is bigger and who's getting married where and how much everything costs." To contemplate such vacuity is to weep.
"Starter marriages usually start young," Paul writes. "While the age of Americans entering marriage has increased slightly over the past century (the average woman today marries at age 25, the average man 27), many people still marry in their early and mid 20s. Starter marriages end young too, with divorce papers often delivered before the 30th birthday candles are blown out."
Paul acknowledges starter marriages are an "unfortunate phenomenon," but counts as two compensating blessings that such fractured unions are usually childless and could prepare divorcees to make a better go of it the next time around.
Where have we heard all this before? These are the same arguments bandied about 30 years ago when "shacking up" in trial marriages became all the rage among the Aquarius set. What was then supposed to be a test drive often became a stalling tactic that made real commitment more distant than ever.
So, when in this desolate scenario does the real marriage begin? Well, maybe never. Paul suggests, what with smaller families, delayed childbirth and all-round increased longevity for human beings, it may eventually become routine for people to marry four different spouses over the course of their lives. First, we'll have the starter marriage, then a marriage that produces a maximum of two kids, perhaps another to see the kids through college and then we'll cap everything off by negotiating a final retirement marriage to see us through our dotage into the grave.
In this vision, marriage partners are reduced to interchangeable commodities, lined up like drinks along the great bar of life, designed to give periodic jolts of rejuvenation just as boredom sets in and appetite starts to flag. "We are setting up marriage as this idealized institution," Paul told the Washington Post last week. Drawing on almost one year's worth of tentative experience, she arrogantly declared, "Marriage is not a transformative act. It does not make you more successful or more balanced."
Well, actually, it is and it does. Or, at least, it can. Paul should check out Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's recent study, The Case For Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially. As demography and sociology, it mops the floor with her book.
But the great transformation only happens when two people care for each other enough that they're prepared to throw off adolescent self- absorption and finally give themselves up to the great mutual adventure of a true marriage of bodies, minds and fates. It's Earth-shattering stuff, definitely not recommended for timid starters or wimps.
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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