Marriage and anxiety in the USA

Posted on | June 14, 2009 |

Yesterday I was interviewed by Garima Singh for her documentary-in-progress on the nature of love and our attitudes to it. Garima is a wonderful person, and was born in India so she brings a double-culture perspective to the topic that is fascinating. India still has a high number of arranged marriages, for example, and even though this is a custom that has run into some resistance of late it still carries the weight of accepted tradition.

One of the things that came up was that in a world such as ours where we are free to choose our partners and free to divorce if all does not go well we should, by rights, be more at peace with our emotional lives. In fact, though, the opposite is true. Americans are desperate about their emotional lives, in ways that we don’t find in more restrictive cultures, and they’re terrified of getting it wrong. So why is this?

Well, years ago when societies were smaller (think: ’small town’) and divorce was rare, then you had a limited choice of mates, and once you had chosen you were stuck with the relationship. If it soured after a few years you had the comfort of knowing that you were in a group that probably comprised at least half of your acquaintance. So, the inner dialog was likely to be something like this: OK, it didn’t work out. Oh well. These things happen. And one got on with loving one’s kids, or playing golf, or something that was a reasonably healthy compensation.

Today, however, if one doesn’t manage to have a reasonable relationship there is likely to be a rumbling of opinion. People will say that of course it didn’t work because he or she isn’t easy to get on with, that work was too important, that there was too much childhood trauma, too much fear…. you name it. The failure to achieve happiness is often seen as a psychic failure, or even a moral failure (”He should have worked through that in therapy years ago…”).

Some people do come into that category of being morally and personally at fault. But certainly not all. Some people are unlucky, after all. Yet the prejudice remains, and the effect of that prejudice is to make Americans even more anxious.

We do the same thing with monetary success, of course. In a wealthy society such as ours the failure to make money is seen as a personal failing, not as the result of bad luck or bad timing. The auto-workers laid off this year are, on the whole, feeling pretty bad about themselves right now, and not just because of the loss of income. They know the prejudice that is coming their way is a moral prejudice. When I was out of work as a young professor I felt the same thing, when it was an economic downturn that had turned my hard-learned skills to ashes, if only temporarily. Friends of mine who are artists and musicians may be world famous, but many of them haven’t ever made much money. And pubic attitudes to them, and their choices to do what they love rather than what paid well, have been, well, puzzled.

Which brings us back to love. I personally think that love is what we’re on earth to do, no matter how successful or unsuccessful our earnings and our romantic attachments. For love reaches further than romance. Perhaps we should assess others by how well they love.

Garima’s documentary will give us a much-needed nudge in that direction.

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