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Christian culture loves talking about traditional marriage. Sometimes this involves waxing poetically about God‘s perfect intentions for the complementary union of man and woman, but more often than not these days it’s a diatribe crossed with a jeremiad. Traditional marriage has taken on apocalyptic significance. It’s presented to us as divine retribution being invoked by humanity‘s willful defiance, which will result in an imminent societal collapse if we don’t repent like the Ninevites and return to the moral-social code by which God justly ordered the world.
Minor problem: what 21st century, Western Christians think of as “traditional marriage” is not very traditional at all. Most of it is a fairly recent invention. Read the Old Testament. Love was a frivolous luxury. Marriage in the ancient world had almost nothing to do with the feelings of affection and attraction. Marriage was about pure survival. It was about strategically sharing resources and creating socio-economic obligations that stabilized tribal identity, political loyalty, and religious uniformity. Sorry ladies, but in that system females were used as currency.
That “ancient” marital framework lasted until 200 years ago when the Industrial Revolution transformed society. With increased wealth and economic mobility, the old beliefs receded and marriage was reimagined. Westerners began seeing the ideal not only as a union of love but of complementary opposites. By the mid-20th century love marriage had become pervasive, but expectations again shifted. Marriage became about love, compatibility, and similarity (i.e. beliefs, values, hopes, dreams, hobbies, personalities, etc.) in order to achieve personal fulfillment.
Eli J. Finkel calls this latest manifestation “The All-or-Nothing Marriage.” In an allusion to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Finkel suggests people now look to their spouse as their primary means of “climbing Mt. Maslow.” Instead of distributing our wants and needs across the village, we now increasingly centralize expectations on our spouse to help us attain self-actualization. If not, the marriage is seen as unhealthy at best or a failure at worst. After all, you only live once. It all makes me wonder, which version of “traditional marriage” prevents the apocalypse again?
The original beatniks were in their heyday just before the cultural pivot to self-actualization through marriage began in the 1960s and 1970s. That may help explain why certain progressive critics have retroactively criticized the Beat Generation for their “antiquated” views on marriage. The cultural gap between then and now is jarring, even for those in the ’50s counterculture. That being said, I’d be willing to bet that various beat writers were well-aware that the cultural ground was beginning to shift beneath their feet regarding the institution of of marriage.
