Marriage

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BBC Sounds. Music radio podcast. This is the Arts and Ideas Podcast with me, Shahidabari. Allo, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a radio presenter

in possession of a good Jane Austen quote about marriage, must mangle it in want of a clever introduction to their programme. Sorry about that. But since it is two hundred and fifty years since the birth of Everybody's Dear Jane in December, We're celebrating that great chronicler of courtship by popping the big question, as it were, asking what Off the back of this week's budget.

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So what is marriage and what is it for? What do our guests think? And will tonight see a marriage of their true minds or an acrimonious split? Let's find out.

Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst and author of How to Live, What to Do, How Great Novels Help Us Change, among other books. You'll have lots of literary examples for us I imagine of interesting marriages, good or bad, but j just one to get us started. Yes, uh to get us started I'm going to choose a writer that I don't I have a much more kind of ambivalent passion for than others, but Lawrence.

Because I think he has some really interesting things to say about marriage. The example is the second generation of the Brangwins in The Rainbow. in rural Nottinghamshire, very much my manner, obviously. And you go through this extraordinary narrative arc from erotic trans fiction in which they can't get out of bed because, you know, they're

limbs are glued to each other and their eyes are magnetized by each other. And at w some point in this honeymoon period in bed, one of them decides they have to get up and that's when the trouble starts. Okay. Trouble enters paradise. There are competing stimuli and excitements and demands and necessities and a certain kind of tension creeps in. Okay. And that tension then becomes mediated by Lawrence in a kind of Psychoanalytic way.

I think this is such an exciting way to begin. Erotic transfiction and glued limbs. Let's keep up that spirit in our conversation about marriage. Listeners might have heard journalist and writer Zoe Strimple reflecting. on the state of the family, past and present, in a five part series, the The End of the Family, which has been airing on Radio Four this week. Uh Zoe, have you got an example of an interesting marriage? For me?

Well I mean I actually find almost every marriage interesting to read about'cause it's the relief of it not being my own. Which I don't I don't have one, may I just say for the record. But Um the one I was thinking of for this is um He Knew He Was Right, which is an Anthony Trollope novel from 1869 which um was funnily enough recommended to me to read. Years and years ago when I was in the throes of a kind of heartbroken obsession with some young

fling I'd I'd had and and funnily enough the friend said, Well, you know, read this and and and I think the theme was obsession. That was what made the recommendation kind of work for me. And basically it's it m it's about a marriage between um Lou Louis Tre Trevelyan and Emily Trevelyan. And Louis Trevelyan become they they have a child together and Louis Trevelyan soon becomes um very jealous over the visits paid to Emily Trevelyan by a captain Osborne.

Um, nothing improper happens but he gets it into his head that there's, you know, a a whole world of impropriety going on, but it soon becomes unclear if it's anything specific he's worrying about. Or rather just a you know, i it it kind of un triggers or uh unleashes or sparks a whole interior architecture of unease and possessiveness and jealousy. The upshot is that the marriage goes um to Hell in a hand basket.

and um'cause his his wife Emily um stands her ground and continues to receive Captain Osborne and um this drives Trevelyan almost well actually it drives him mad and he goes off to Italy and he actually kidnaps his son. So I choose this example because I think it shows how quickly marriage, which is supposed to, you know, people interpret as being about love, can flip into all sorts of other things, including hate and how the child can end up

you know, the one of the big victims of it. Well, this is also a promising start. Such drama. Um Dermid McCulloch, historian of Christianity and author of Lower Than the Angels, a history of sex in Christianity, where would you have me look in in fiction or or history for an interesting marriage.

Well mine is a sort of combination of both history and fiction, because it's the legend of a saint from the seventh century, uh and she was an Anglo Saxon princess and she's called Ethri. that we normally nowadays call a Sint Etheldrida. Okay. And the marriage I'm looking at it was her second marriage. Both they were both the kings, uh but this second one was to an equally delightfully named a man called Eggfrith Eggfrith the King of Northumbria.

And so, uh, Ethel Dreada had been through one marriage and now she was in another. Uh and in both marriages the distinctive thing that she did was to diffuse them sex. Ooh. Uh neither of them were very pleased by this, uh bit Egfrith, who'd married her when he was simply a prince, uh became king of Northumbria. And he was particularly annoyed at not getting e sex there, because the point of a wife of a king, uh, is to have children.

to keep the dynasty going. Ah but she simply refused, and cut an extremely long story short, in the end he said, Okay, you win, Go off and be a nun. You clearly want to be a nun, and you want to set up a monastery, don't you? And so she did. She went to Ely. uh which is where she is now buried and much honored as a saint.

Now the interesting thing about this marriage for me, uh is that it shows the utterly different m values of marriage in the past and the utterly different ma values between Ethel Dreeder and her husband. She wanted virginity. And she was uh considered as a saint because of this. And so all the normal rules of marriage were off for her.

She dictated the what the future and it was going to be virginity for her, no children for Egfrith. But it's sort of a peculiarly radical sort of marriage, d isn't it, for for a particularly early example there. Um film historian and philosopher Catherine Wheatley from King's College London. Do you have something in mind for us? Yes, and obviously I'm going for a film. Um the film in question is George Coucour's Adam's Rib.

uh and the couple in question, Adam and Amanda Bonner, played famously by the unmarried couple, uh Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. And so There's something about the overlaying of that real life relationship.

onto this fictional relationship that's very exciting to watch. And they play play warring lawyers, don't they? Warring lawyers. So they don't just live together, they also work together or against one another, which adds a sort of real friction to what seems like a very playful but also quite

Tense and volatile relationship. Yeah. Academic Rita Kervati Sabramenian from the University of East Anglia. You're one of Radio Four's new researchers in residence. Is there a literary example that you should you think we should be keeping in mind. No, I think one marriage that has stayed with me, you know, over the years is actually from a novel written close back you know, from back home, which is in Mumbai in India.

And it's a novel called M and the Big Who by author Jerry Pinto, and it is part autobiographical and part fiction. Uh and it really follows the story of Emelda and Augustine. Uh Imelda is witty, whimsical and also unpredictable because of her underlying bipolar disorder and whereas her husband Augustine is portrayed as this patient and quietly sort of supportive uh and devoted husband.

And what really sets this marriage apart is that it's extremely ordinary in one way or the other. It is not a magnum opus whatsoever. But it's just that it sort of shows that in terms of, you know, in times of when there are external forces that affect you or the household, it's it's this institution of marriage which becomes that fabric

Which takes on these pressures, you know, and in a way the couple in question really reinvent what the meaning and function of marriage really is. So I find that deeply uh interesting and deeply personal. All these examples are very intriguing.

a kind of strategic ploy, sometimes it's an erotic adventure, sometimes it's a a a mystery. Um marriage works in different ways. It means different things to different people at different times, Zoe. It it's usually regarded as a union between two people and an agreement that's recognized by a community and ratified in law, why is that important?

Well uh obviously marriage has a has a long history that for most of it was i intricately and you know, fundamentally tied up with religious structures uh like the church. I think the longer, longer, longer history, which goes back to biblical times and ancient times about concerns about constraining sexuality, uh, you know, female sexuality especially, um, but later, you know, also m male sexuality. I mean the i

history is always toggled between whose sexuality is considered more renegade, men's or women's. I mean it's it's not cle it's not always been men's, for instance, that sometimes people worry about

it's women's um so that it's about constraint and and delimiting what is always feared could kind of run away from itself and cause untold social destruction. And we know from you know just early modern um writing that, you know, there and later Victorian writing that there was, you know, pretty clear sense that y libertinism on one hand, but also specifically female

um sexuality that wasn't properly constrained could literally bring down society. So it's it's fairly obvious historically why that v needed to be officiated upon. um and constrained in quite brutal ways. And I think that was just the way things were. There wasn't a norm of rebellion against the fact that the church was weighing in on these highly personal matters. There was also a huge amount of support for those things among bottom up support among people.

policing sexuality, policing adultery, policing pregnancies out of marriage, the idea of illegitimacy of children, constraining all that stuff wasn't just being done by the powers that be, it was also being done very much in communities.

then we get to this, you know, very interesting period that we're in now, which is what my work has been concerned with, which is when the laws change, for instance, you know, s over a period of, you know, sixty, seventy, eighty years, but in the sixties you know, you do get a raft of liberalising legislation that essentially removes many of the legal um necessities around m marriage and strictures a and divorce becomes uh a no fault process, albeit fairly laborious. So

you do sort of have this flinging open of the doors of like, well, you technically can do whatever you want. Illegitimacy remained a category, interestingly, until the eighties. But um so so what I'm interested in now is why do we still seek out these kind of formal ratifications Um a is it just about, you know, sh displaying to

all that you love that you are making a commitment or or is there something else going on here now? Well let's ask our panel. Yeah wh why do we seek these formal ratifications? Josh, have you got any ideas on that?

If we if I just go back to Lawrence a second, he's got an interesting take on playing away. Um, most people see it as a kind of hydraulic release of sexual tension if you're not getting the sex at home. He seems to feel that actually there's something about the intensity of the two, of the couple, of their draw to one another, which is so claustrophobic, which is so erotically involving that actually it's easier and it lets off a it's a kind of safety valve to go somewhere else.

So I think that what people do is is I I think Zoe's right. It has a lot to do with regulating the force of sexuality within this very um uh fixed domestic structure. But It it often has unintended consequences, I think. And the presence of the other person in everyday life, not just in the bedroom, the the ways in which This person has to accompany you through so many different psychic and external manifestations of life. Um

I it I think it it's felt with such an intensity that it almost has the opposite effect of regulation. Think people escape it because of its intensity. Yeah. intention. I think there is an idea, notwithstanding the possibilities of divorce, that one goes into a marriage with the intention of permanent

Or as I like to joke to my husband, my first husband. Um I I mean, Kevin, what do you think? Is the i is the is the permanence an important element of the commitment to marriage or the intention to permanence? Or does that not matter? I think I would r reframe permanence as longevity um and repetition and a commitment to the everydayness. I think this idea of

The domestic and the ordinary, as other people have mentioned, is really important, but I don't necessarily see that as something that is intense actually. It's something that's And I was speaking about my own marriage maybe, you know, deeply tedious, very banal, um, incredibly repetitive. It's the opposite of falling in love and you know, playing away as it were. Uh and actually working out the person that you can go through those things with is a very i is a choice. It's an important choice.

It it's also a financial arrangement, Damage, as as demonstrated by the tax breaks afforded to married couples in the the latest budget. Does does that alter how we regard a marriage that it can be a financial arrangement? Oh of course, and it always was. I mean historically marriage through all history and Christian history was a contract between two men. the father of the bride and the father of the groom. The feelings of the couple were not that important. You're setting up a dynastic thing.

uh which is where my princess, Ethel Dreda, um, found a way through, because she found a way of trumping this traditional ideal by holiness and celibacy, which were considered by the church at that time to be better than marriage. Marriage was the second best. So she had the church authorities on her side, the Archbishop of York, really got up the nose of King Egfrist.

by supporting her, not the king. It was furious. But that was the church, because Christianity at that stage really regarded marriage as a bit embarrassing. Everyone did it more or less. But actually it wasn't the best state. Being a monk or a nun was a much better state. Um Rita, I'm gonna draw you in because your work on child brides

also thinks about the economics of marriage, doesn't it? Absolutely. I think economics stands at the very heart and centre of, you know, these arrangements because at the end of the day, even cutting across history and geography Marriage has been about consolidating resources, like Dermid just said. It's about passing on land, for instance, or really like bringing in, say, dowry or bride wealth, which are core institutions in, you know, bringing these units together in the first place.

And uh over a period of time, I mean, even the in the regions that I study, particularly in South Asia, If you come to think of it, today dowry and all of all of these bride wealth arrangements are also decided based on, say, migration.

You know, there's no longer for instance just money exchanged, but say a motorbike that is exchanged or there's a vehicle that is offered or you know, there are like other resources that are offered which is also going to make this journey from the marital home, from the natal home to the marital home a lot more smoother.

So it is there is a lot of power at play and also in relation to it, violence as well that is meted out if these offers and these, you know, demands are not met. Yeah. We we've been talking about

Mae'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r What's love got to do with it? In the words of someone famous? Um, love has more and more to do with it in an explicit way. I think love was always part of it actually, to some degree.

Um again I I'm not a historian of early mm you know, m early modern and medieval Britain, but certainly the love match wasn't some sort of alien um concept, but but it was much more acceptable and and in fact expected to stress the kind of shared class background or the the pooling of economic resources now. Um from it's really interesting, in the kind of late twentieth century you get this shift to a twin concept, which one of which is the kind of romantic has to come first. The soulmate idea.

really important. And the second concept is compatibility, which is like a highly kind of psychological, quite a boring f term, I think, but it's used absolutely everywhere, all the time, from like the sixties onwards. Compatibility, compatibility, a couple has to be compatible. So you put immense pressure on a couple at that point. So love ha love almost has too much to do with it, and compatibility, which is like a

can be a symptom of love, but it's not i th they're not entirely the same thing. But you you end up seeing I mean, m my PhD supervisor, Claire Langamer, who's now the director of the um uh institute of historical research ha had such interesting work. on how when love is more and more part of it and more like officially recognized as one of the factors

the tolerance for infidelity and other sort of slips of so called trust within the marriage goes way down and you get a much more taut and pressurized um institution. So Love has a love has everything to do with it. I would say sometimes that's the very problem of it. Love has too much to do with it and compatibility I don't know. I don't even know what that means. Can I ask what compatibility means though? Because does that mean finding someone that shares

your worldview entirely and that you can go through in a entire you know, a a frictionless marriage? Or is it something that is more about finding the person whose worldview that you want to

bounce off and is willing to correct you. And I think that's one of the things that I love about the screwball comedies, um, of which Adam's Ribb is a really wonderful example, is that these aren't people that necessarily see I to I, far from it, but what they are willing to do is kind of take each other to task. And

sort of concept. Well the psycho as ever, psychology got interested in in all of this stuff and and did, you know, endless amounts of y charts and tables you could use to measure compatibility. And I think it it m wasn't necessarily about uh I think the shared values was part of it, but the taking to task could also be part of it. I think It was about what personality type you are partly. And we see that so much now. If anyone's ever been on any of the dating apps in the last few years.

It's bizarre actually. Gen Z who are also very into astrology, they like codifying things. Um, they always say what personality type they are. So compatibility's re entered it and it literally means um this this I forget the name of the scale, but they'll be like I'm a leader, director, ps you know, my or and then they have this terminology about love language. So that's how I think

the idea of compatibility is meant. So it may involve, you know, where opposites attract fits it. It's very malleable, but you know, I agree it It's less about we both are Christians, although that's coming into it. But and more about he's a leader dominant type and I'm a humorous laid-back type and we approach issues together this way and our love languages complement each other like this. And it you know, what does it actually mean? Are are Gen Z finding successfully? I think uh yeah.

I I hear obviously a lot about the apps and the algorithms and the technologies of compatibility. And I think one of the difficulties is that as this technology becomes more intricate and more sophisticated, they w they kind of foster the illusion that That that love can be organized and and cultivated by these different metrics. And what I find people running up against is that there's something

elusive that these metrics just don't cover. That when you fall for somebody or you're drawn to somebody, It usually has nothing to do with anything on this tick box list. it has something to do with the way that um an out of place dimple or or a parting of the head for some reason drives you absolutely crazy. And we tend to um to to sort of dismiss those quirks of the loved object.

as a kind of, you know, a a trivial add-on that has nothing to do with the real business either of love or marriage. But actually I think they're more weighty than we think. Vita you're nodding along, I'm intrigued. You know, I I was actually thinking about my grandparents' marriage for instance, you know, I mean they met for the first time perhaps at the wedding venue and um you know, I the conversations I've had with them has always been about marriage will happen and love will follow.

You know, it is something that is considered to be cultivated like you just said, in terms of really something that's co cultivated, whether it comes in the form of duty, whether it's in the form of, you know, respecting you know, because you're living in a multi generational household as well.

in that sense of duty towards parents or duty towards each other. So I think it's beautiful. It's something that this cultivated over a period of time. We're sort of getting at something of the mystery of marriage. May so maybe this is a Mae'n fawr iawn i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld i'w gweld

The church came to that quite late actually. People did not go to church to get married in the early church. And in the church in Europe, Western Church, uh it was the twelfth century. And that's because the church was a bit embarrassed by marriage. Uh but there had earlier been right at the beginning of Christianity, Paul, Paul of Tarsus, the man who wrote the earliest Christian documents we have.

threw in a hand grenade into traditional ideas of marriage by saying, actually, husband and wife are equals. And actually they own each other's bodies. So it's a very physical, sexual thing he's saying. And Christianity subsequently didn't really like that very much. It sounds very much like our modern idea. You know, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

But uh it's been an idea um rumbling behind Christianity over the centuries. There is an idea in the background here that that marriage is in some way a natural state for people, a kind of default condition. What do we make of that idea? If do you want the history first? Oh yeah, go for it, Dummy. Marriage has been a second best to virginity. Hence Ethelre is a saint because she doesn't want sex.

uh and that's very alien to the church today. Uh which uh uh again in that twelfth century period decided that sex and procreation must characterize marriage. So actually Ethelred Ethelreeder was up the wrong tree. But they didn't stop us in being a saint. Um I think the natural state though, as opposed to the one that is considered the most virtuous, is feared to be one of sexual chaos and libertinism. And that must be why.

marriage is so important. That that would be my view on that. There's a chaos lurking. Yeah. A dark force of sexuality. I mean Josh, that sounds right up your psychoanalytical street. that behind marriage there is a dark chaotic force. There is a dark chaotic force, yeah. And and it can explode in in a kind of sexual incontinence or or

uh promiscuity, um in in all kinds of perversity. That that's one version of psychoanalysis, I suppose. But there is another one as well. Th there are unconscious impulses to unruliness or unbinding. But there are also unconscious impulses towards binding, towards coming together, towards fusion. And it's less about the chaotic, unruly beings that we really are beneath the the veneer of civilization, and more about that dialectic, that dynamic between binding and unbinding, between

um falling apart and coming together. Well this might get us very neatly to Stanley Cavell, who is our our philosopher for this week.

like to call upon a thinker who might help illuminate the topic of our discussion and and this week it's Stan Lee Cavell who who died in twenty eighteen. And and Catherine you've chosen philosopher. He uh you've chosen this philosopher. Ca Cavell

writes about marriage in his book Pursuits of Happiness and that's a book about this particular genre of film which you mentioned, the scribble comedy in America of of the the nineteen thirties. Tell us What is a screwball col comedy and and why is Cavell interested in them? Well, screwball comedies in general tend to uh feature very fast dialogue, characters who are um engaged in slapstick, in v sort of very witty word plays and double entendres.

Um, but the remarriage comedies in particular, which is a group of seven that Cavell is interested in, feature these couples that start the film Married. Or at least metaphorically married. fall apart and come back together again. And in a way, that's nothing new because as the film historian Janine Bassinger has written,

Marriage in itself is pretty boring as a subject and so marriage always has to be coming under threat in order for us to be kind of invested in it. It either has to be the happy ending or it has to be in peril. Um, but what's interesting about the couples in these films is that they are it's at this moment in history where divorce is a standing possibility, women can earn their own money. So it's not really the social or the religious because we're in the kind of modern age of secularism.

It's not financial because the women that inhabit them are either from wealthy backgrounds or they um are independently sort of career women as Amanda Bonner is And it's not to do with children because it's intriguingly none of these couples have children. So there is no reason for them to stay together. In f and in fact there's an implication that there are quite few affairs going on in these films and that's okay as long as that stays within the contract of

yw'r hyn sydd wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i And in what I find interesting them in about these films is that it's it's not that anything ratifies the marriage, it's that their choice to stay married ratifies the idea of marriage itself that

There's no reason for them to be together as a couple beyond the fact that they want to be together as a couple. Can you give me an example of one of the films and how Cavell thinks about it? A really terrific one would be a film like The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn. Um again we s we see this couple, they're married.

He has had a little dalliance while away. And she doesn't seem cross about the dalliance so much as the fact that he's being a little bit hypocritical because he's getting quite envious of a of a potential relationship that she might be having. They go to court, they get divorced. And they realize that they can't live without each other. And that's not a kind of i incredibly burning passion. It's that they miss each other's company, they miss each other's dialogue.

They're constantly kind of talking a language that nobody else around them can understand and that's where that kind of witty playfulness comes in. And Cavell says that the sound of Marriage is characteristically laughter. You know, do you d when you when you e when you enter into your marriage, do you find yourself in a tragedy, a romance or a comedy?

Um but also the sound of bickering and I really loved that. Low-level bickering sounds familiar to me. I just wanted to pick up on something um Josh said and I do think it's relevant about this.

It's question of what is natural and is it natural somehow for people to come together in the kind of romantic marital bond. And I think for me what I think is much more natural is the relationship between the parent and child, which obviously is facilitated by the marital arrangement and certainly historically has been, to prevent illegitimacy and, you know, carefully circumscribing

reproduction. But I think even on the sensual level, there's a sensuality to the parental kind of love and care um for the child and the urge to comfort and soothe and to be giving and not to lapse as romantic partners so often do or spiral into kind of jealousy, territorialness, infidelity, all that stuff. Well what what do you think, Catherine, to that the idea that the you know I mean'cause

There are no children in the comedies of remarriage that Cavelli is interested in, and yet the stakes are enormous for him, really high in these marriages. Yeah, I mean I

I don't want to derail the conversation, but I think a film like Mildred Pierce might give the lie to the idea that there is no jealousy or possessiveness in the parent child relationship. Um And what I would say in terms of these films is it's very important that these are relationships between equals and that's a very different dynamic that you know th and that historically hasn't always been the case. Where marriage then becomes a metaphor for something bigger is in friendship.

Mae'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol, mae'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol that every day I will get up

and continue with that commitment. So this is you know, the idea of marriage is a kind of form of repetition. Um, that may be the political state that we live in. I'm very intrigued by this idea that marriage is not only a metaphor but also a m microcosm of the way we might engage in a society. I'm I'm looking at you, Josh. What do we make of that idea? Is that that's a big claim? Um, yeah, y you do hear marriage sort of often used as a a model for living together.

the immediate association that comes to mind is uh Freud in Civilization and His Discontent. who argues that the the relationship of internal forces inside us is also can be reframed politically as between the claim of the individual and the claim claim of the group because we're both individuals and members of a group and those claims pull us apart internally. Take an Amex card with you on your morning coffee run and earn cash back. On a weekend trip, earn miles.

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Well I don't understand why people are generally so reluctant to embrace being individuals and to try out being contrarian about being part of groups. People are very keen to show that they belong to a group. Why are people still keen to do that? Why can't they be rest assured that they can exhibit

goodness in terms of their friendships. And why are people so reluctant still to think about other ways they can live with other people? Why does it always have to be marriage? Why not living with friends? Why not c founding little kibbutzim? Why are communes still kind of these far out r you know, things? Wha why is it always coming back to this?

you know, either man and man or woman and woman or man and w woman co sacralizing this you know, to me it there's a lack of inventiveness and there's a tenacity of the couple ideal that I have to say I find a little Surprising. What do you what do you think of that that riposte Damid that because the Protestant ideal of of marriage is is a social one, isn't it?

Oh yes it is. And it's very much about family. But th the the thing that none of us have mentioned so far, and we really ought to have done, is artificial contraception. From the beginning of the twentieth century, marriage and all relationships have been transformed by the possibility of avoiding procreation. What that has done, actually, is to put heterosexual uh sexual activity on the same level as homosexual activity.

Uh, you can make choices about whether it involves the possibility of procreation. That really has changed the nature of marriage. Uh and we need to remember that and how different that makes marriage today from any previous century.

whether Cavell's thinking, his thinking around marriage, still holds up in the twenty first century. Cause I think Zoe is saying, maybe it doesn't. I think one of the things that Cavell would say is that in our modern states we are all trapped in our s sort of individual isolated states. We know that we don't have the reassurances of the church, we have been disappointed by science. There's a sense in which I can never know.

whether anything that I'm saying to you, Zoe, is landing in the right way and that's very frightening and all we can do is attempt to try and overcome that by communicating. Now that doesn't have to rely on the pair. It can become a kind of wider network of relationships, certainly.

But I think the f the fear of isolation is a deeply embedded one. And anecdotally, I look at my daughter and and children in general and the pairing off that happens very early on, the need to be chosen and to try and be understood by someone else is deeply ingrained. I'm really interested in the fact that marriage does continue to hold on. I watched Selene Song's film Materialist the other day, which is a film all about choosing the right partner.

Whether it's to do with compatibility or for financial reasons or romantic love. Um, so that it really does kind of h have a grip still, I think, and there are lots of ways in which

Cavell's philosophy would speak to our contemporary age. I think speaking from a you know related but a different context would probably be in the context of history of labor itself and you know, understanding marriage through that lens. And historically marriage has been a central

for sort of central institution in organizing labor itself, whether we're talking about plantations in the Caribbean or the American South, or even this whole history of picture brides, you know, wherein you had Japanese and Okinawan women really moving through the Pa Pacific in order to, you know? It was actually because they were wives that that is w that is the reason that they could actually escape.

that kind of economic insecurity in Japan back in the early twentieth century and start a life afresh in in the in America. So in a way looking at marriage itself as a very key part and, you know, very central in organizing labour um and you know, really building that household. I think the shift from the individual to the household becomes very crucial.

in these histories from the developing world to the world that I belong to. Well maybe this is an opportunity to talk to you Rik Retika about about your research because our our conversation has been largely European and Christian. What it is a different picture when we think globally. Wh where is your research focused and And what are you discovering?

So broadly speaking I look at you know, when we think of marriage, you know, as we've been discussing as well, I think And especially I focus on child marriage and early marriage, which is an institution which is historical. Uh but the way in which we sort of define early marriage, a child marriage, as being from a very legal lens or from a lens of development and you're looking at it in terms of a solution that is needed, you know, to solve this problem.

Uh but what I look at in terms of my work has basically been looking at the ways in which marriage has been a very important mechanism of survival in ecologically vulnerable regions, specifically in South Asia, which is one of the most fragile zones in the world. Um and I specifically look at the institution of marriage which is uh universal near universal almost compulsory, um and the ways in which it sort of adapts or uh you know you know, the ways in which families

change its functions and forms in terms of in their conquest and their quest for survival. Uh so I run a project called Climate Brides, which is an offshoot of my PhD itself, where I look at the ways in which marriage and child marriage takes on different forms

broadly questioning the forces and the structures that really push these untimely unions. H how prevalent is the issue of child marriage in these regions? It is like for instance, South Asia has the highest number of child brides in the world and nearly one in five girls are married before the age, the legal age. And that again is quite interesting because the emphasis on, you know, talking about child marriage has been very age based.

There's been a legal lens without really looking at the structural forces behind it. So it is a very important uh issue. And having said that, you know, the reason that the research becomes more interesting is that there's been a global, you know, discussion around reducing

um child marriages and it has actually reduced considerably. I mean, even in countries like India, which has the highest rate of child marriages in the world, it's come down to twenty, twenty three percent. But in certain regions it still continues to be very high in like Bangladesh for instance.

following cyclones, you see a huge rise in child marriages, similarly in Afghanistan and other places. And your research is indicating that that th this phenomenon of child marriages being significantly impacted by climate change. Yes. So I d do not I'm not building a causal relationship directly because that would be too simplistic a narrative.

But to try and see how marriage becomes a means of ensuring security, ensuring stability, ensuring a form of protection and, you know, questions of honour or ensuring economic sort of access to economic resources. in times of crisis and upheaval, which sort of links to conversations around marriage in terms of crisis in the context of war, in the context of yeah, refugee camps, etcetera. Catherine I do wonder if that's one of the reasons actually that we're seeing this resurgence of films.

Right now that are obsessed with marriage. Um, and they really are. Like there are so many films about love triangles coming out right now, and I'm sure that there is economic and historical evidence to link at a point in history where I think a large portion of the global West is feeling very insecure and embattled. I just want to add on the it's not quite film, but the um something I do refer to in my radio programme that is out this week about maritime.

Um, the the rash of uh reality shows about marriage, uh which I confess to watching especially Married at First Sight, but there's a complete I would say, you know, obsession actually that has grown massively, not, you know, in the last decade. And it's about all aspects of of planning weddings, like don't tell the bride, for instance, but also the fascination viewers have with can you know, can more of a l uh a married at first sight, literally, a setup.

Can that be a more effective way of finding, you know, happiness and, you know, can we bypass all the strains of modern relationships? But at the end of the day, is the fairy tale still waiting for people? Can the psychologists pull it off because these shows always rely on

psychologists matching people. And it's just really interesting how Love Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, you know, there's also Indian matchmaking, there's Jewish matchmaking on Netflix. Um these these are uh programs that kind of completely transfix Um and and I I think there I think you're absolutely right. There's a sort of desperate kind of m man or woman overboard sense of like Maybe we can salvage this cozy fantasy after all, maybe it'll save us.

Um, but at the same time what I find as a as a viewer both of Love Island and Married at First Sight so interesting is that the more pressure you put on couples, th th they're very enthusiastic and they wanna give it a try. They're miserable with their lives. they can't make it work. You know, they they just can't do it. And there's that sort of car crash experience. So, you know, outside of the rom com, there's the the pleasure that the viewer gets. Perhaps it's catharsis,

in watching um people just absolutely tearing each other's eyes out once they've kind of been through this reality T V show. You might be delighted or horrified to hear that Disney Plus is rebooting Blind Date. yn ymwneud â phobl iawn yn ymwneud â phobl iawn. Ac rhaid i fynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd

as a financial transaction.'Cause Rita Ker in your examples, what are the mechanics of the money and and how how does it work as a financial transaction? So there are it's again very contextual, but for giving an example, for instance, you know, w as part of my project at Climate Brides, you know, I do run a podcast as well called Climate Brides Podcast.

And we do interview different stakeholders in and from the region. Uh one episode was recorded from Afghanistan, you know, it was with a journalist who had reported from the internally displaced persons scams in Afghanistan. And uh there are existing practices of say bride price, which is a bridal payment uh which is offered by the groom's family to the bride's family uh at the time of marriage.

And uh very interestingly, I mean also quite uh shockingly, one has seen that there's been a sh change in the way in which, you know, these payments take place, especially in the context of drought and conflict. Uh wherein in a lot of these displa internally displaced persons' camps Um the bride price is actually livestock, a grain of ri you know, a sack full of rice, for instance, very basic essential resources just for the very sustenance or survival of that household.

So in a way here it's it's almost like the exchange takes place to ensure that the rest of the household can survive. Yeah. I mean well this is what you argue that that arranged marriage I mean arranged marriage is often regarded as simply a part of South Asian culture, but you're suggesting that it much more than that. This is a strategy for survival. Yeah. I mean I think that's also the kind of discourse that I want to change when you're talking about child marriage because

It's sort of looked at from a very like um, you know, legal lens. And during the course of my work when I was doing interviews on the ground in Western India, You know, I did a lot of intergenerational interviews and conversations with mothers were like, I know what this experience is and you know, I it's not like I hate my daughter. But there is this entire element of survival of the household and it's almost like a strategic decision that is being taken, that is taking place.

So I think there's this lens of vulnerability and like strategy that comes together in in these decisions. I'm trying to move our discussion from the kind of very alluring romance of the Screw Roll comedy to something a bit more

depressing perhaps, which is about the kind of economic strategies of marriage. I mean I mean Josh, what does this listening to Rit Retika listening to Retika, what does that tell us about the nature of marriage more generally, right now? Um at the other end of the economic spectrum from which Rudik is talking about, you have in a way um the history of the novel which is the history of marriage. Um, and it so often centers around meetings not only of uh individuals but of financial fortune.

and of financial compatibilities. Um, what kind of partner is suitable for this particular class traitum for this particular status? A man in possession of a a fortune. Exactly, yeah, exactly. And that in a way is is the sort of the exemplary s sentence of in in the history of the novel for for that reason. Um what's interesting is that money is meant to be what liberates

the potential partners from the burden of necessity. Um, it allows them to choose freely. And the great example in this context is Isabel Archer in James's portrait of a lady, um, who really sees the choice of a of a marital partner as a kind of refinement uh as an act of of intellectual refinement. Um she will not be corraled into marrying somebody because they're appropriate financially or because they're deemed a suitable match in some externalized way. It has to be um

if you like, the perspective of reasoning, it has to be somebody she really chooses freely. So ch she chooses um a a penniless easteet who she thinks is the soul of nobility and and and beauty of mind and he turns out to be a manipulative psychopath, really. Yeah. Um and at that point she says, I have to follow through the logic of my decision. She has all kinds of outs. I mean she can divorce. There's many other people who would love to have her hand.

But she she tells herself That having made a free choice. She has existentially to commit herself to it. It's very fateful. But it's a it's a kind of interesting mirror image to what Rutaka's talking about, I think. Well well is it? Because Rutika in your podcast you're interviewing lots of the young people involved in these economically motivated marriages.

How do they represent their decisions and or their whether they're their decisions or not? How do they represent the situations they're in and their their is th is there love in these situations too? Oh is there room for love in here?

I think there is room for love and I think love manifests itself in various ways in different ways, perhaps not in the definitions that we understand it, you know, otherwise. Uh but as part of my research is where I, you know, do these interviews and and one of the things that has always come up is I think sisterhood and friendship becomes very important aspect of even dealing with marriages outside of the confines of that marital unit itself.

Because most of the people that I've worked with in, you know, in terms of interviews has always been communities who are migrating. And that brings in this element of, you know, because patri vary locality, I mean, like really living with m leaving your ne mother's house and going to your maternal you know, marital family is a very important part. So that shift at the age of like sixteen, seventeen is a big shift. And then starting afresh.

Um, I think here love, as I was mentioning earlier as well, takes on different forms in the context of duty, you know, making sure you're d taking care of your in laws, uh, you know, making sure there's general stability and, you know.

Yeah, there's structure to that household. I think that's where it sort of takes form. And this is the kind of conversations that come up as well, you know, and uh Just to give you a quick example, I think um, you know, I was working as part of my PhD, I was working with sugarcane h sugarcane harvesters in Western India.

And uh you know, it's very interesting because over the years earlier we had male gang members who used to go and migrate and cut cane and that's what we've seen globally. But ever since there's been a rise in drought on the one hand, and you know, there's water scarcity in these villages

Even the sugarcane you know harvesters and the sugarcane farm owners have changed labor arrangements and made marriage a crucial part to form a labor unit. So it's also the industry which has evolved and sort of said that okay, marriage is anyway compulsory and anyway universal, so why not create a unit?

So that it also ensures stability of labour in the cane fields. And what I find interesting here, you know, just to quickly add, is the fact that when you're making this movement, when you're moving away It's sort of it's quite interesting because you have these quick fix marriages that are fixed in the span of like say thirty six hours. So you meet, get married and move to the cane fields in less than two days, you know. And these are marriages with the with the prospect of permanence.

Um so yeah, that's exactly where in which I think it's it's what I'm trying to say is it's a lot more complicated in the way in which love manifests itself. It's something that happens. Yeah. I want to hear more about these marriages, but if I go on social media

It's not these wives that I'm seeing, it's trad wives, Zoe. And I want to ask you about triadives because something peculiar is happening online right now, particularly in the Western version of social media, where this very traditional heteronormative vision of marriage is

you know, raising its head. It's hypervisible. I tell us what the trad wife is. Well I'm glad you've you've brought that up. Well the trad wife is this ludicrous invention by a generation that obviously has zero grasp of history. um and shamelessly promotes the exact kind of um setup that drove Betty Ferdinand to write The Feminine Mystique about women in suburban America who are smart

killing themselves and taking overdosing on meds because they were so depressed by their lives. So, you know, to me this is a case of a mass amnesia of a generation who doesn't know history, doesn't remember anything about what women have had to just deal with in order to and have only recently broken free of. Um so the trad wife um

puts a kind of attractive, glamorous gloss on her um worship of her uh husband and how he h her priorities are always about making sure he has his dinner and she cooks everything from scratch and she's the full time mom, etcetera, et cetera. Of course she's m the the irony is that she's

also obviously a good businesswoman because she if she has millions of followers she's monetizing the heck out of this whole thing. And it's this thing that has emerged. Post Me Too perhaps, it's something also swirling around the trans debate. um a group of people, you know, a huge body of people, also Trump, ma empowerment of MAGA associated women, um the the the sort of

the morphing of the of the sort of conservative, who's a kind of reasonable figure, who just may have different views from from you or I, into this kind of extreme figure. Um does seem to be this sort of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, this idea that

you know, th they'd have, you know, disagree with with all the the trans right stuff, so therefore biology is everything. It's not just something, it's everything. And so that means women return to this essential self, which by the way is completely disproved in science. as an es as an as a female essential. But um so so the Tradwife is is a really d I think, kind of bizarre offshoot of of um all sorts of cultural forces at play.

And I think it is adding a sort of glamour to the sides of marriage that women should still stay very cautious about. And I think that, you know, w much more quietly hiding under the rise of the trad wife. are s resear studies, research figures showing that women who completely dis give up work to serve um a a male partner and their children um do often end up feeling like they've wasted their potential and their um and their and they are completely dependent on this.

husband and when the marriage goes south, if it does or if it becomes abusive, they literally can't escape. So yeah, m marriage is i this is a strange new fortune for marriage and it's being rehabilitated in ways that I think it probably shouldn't be. I wonder if there's a legal strategy there though as well, because if you are a woman that hasn't worked and the marriage goes south, then legally you are entitled to half of that person's earnings because you have contributed to their

fortune by being the person that runs the house. Whereas if you're working part time that's not the case.

But actually Zoe, what I wanted to ask you was about um polygamy in all of this because we've talked about kind of the Christian trad wife. multiple marriages which also seem to kind of be part of this conversation. I was wondering if it's that something you've given any thought to. Well I I've been very aware that there's a a again, part of this reality T V obsession, the real lives of Mormon wives and Mormonism is definitely having a kind of pop cultural moment.

I do think that that um from you know, it's it's very specific to parts of America it feels to me, that aspect of it. But related to polygamy, I suppose, is the is the increasing acceptabless of polyamory. So there's all sorts of more flexible models people can adopt within legal marriages. I I think in Utah maybe polygamy is I don't know what the l laws are.

But I think, you know, th the fascination with Mormons is is more like the sort of Victorian freak show potentially. Not that I'm not saying Mormons are freaks, but I think that's the the vibe in terms of people's fascination. But there are yeah, but there there are these also you know

In answer to the trad wife there's also the yeah, the the the married couple who has multiple the the wife who has multiple boyfriends or there's a thruple or there's all sorts of things like that, which obviously aren't Mm. a sign of a kind of flexibility, open marriages, for instance. We haven't mentioned the Lily Allen in the room at the moment. But um, you know, i are are these a sign of the flexibility of the institution of marriage or do they challenge the coherence of marriages?

Marriage not working if these are the new modern arrangements that people are reaching towards. I'd take us back to contraception. Uh because that has l uh changed the floor. on which we all stand and uh that gives us choice rather than procreation being the the model between a heterosexual couple. Uh so uh that's going to be part of the story and w you mustn't ignore that.

Josh Ritika, you wanted to come in? I think along in I I would probably define it not as flexibility but more as adaptability. I mean, because you know, marriage becomes a very strategic decision here. And talking about polyamory, I mean it's uh it's a system that Pretty much exists in a lot of regions, even in South Asia for instance. Like in northern India it's also come as an outcome of skewed sex ratios, wherein there aren't enough women to be married.

uh married with. So which is one of the reasons you have two brothers marrying one wife, for instance. And it also is a reason in terms of consolidating agrarian land, for instance, making sure, you know, everything sort of stays within the confines of the household in a way.

So again here I think it's the adaptability and the structural stability that marriage can offer that makes it quite a strategic um and striking institution. And I think at the opposite side of that is the enduring desire to be married, even though

one doesn't have to be mar be in an open marriage, you could just be in a partnership. And yet marriage kind of endures in that situation, which I find really fascinating and I wonder if it's partly to do with a kind of what David Shimways described as the social imaginary of marriage, which the idea of kind of the life partner that we've has been so It's it's like the cultural script thing. But one of the sociologists that I you know r one of the I read some sociologist

Um one sociological view I came across in thinking about why people still get married is that it's the view of the couple that they still want to sacralize, which is a really interesting word, the quote hard work of the couple. And sacrilize obviously relates to this

idea of there's a sacredness there, so it's not just about social, there's also something potentially n I don't know if it's spiritual, but something beyond the realms of the ordinary and the everyday that transcends all that and goes into this more m potentially you know T yeah, transcendent realm basically. Damage, what do you make of that? Uh yes, sacralization, that's a very interesting thing, isn't it? Um and the church gradually took on uh marriage uh when it had been a civil contract.

Uh, and uh that s is uh clearly a big hangover in societies which um have a very strong Christian memory and that's about a third of the world. So y sacralization, yes. Uh and how does that relate to love, sexual love? These are s now open questions. Hm. I mean just a couple of things about these alternative arrangements, polyamory, open relationships. I think one of the things they do is really trouble any notion of naturalness.

Um I think n naturalness is not of you know, c kind of going on the hunt for it to ask what it is that is kind of native to the human being is not very useful because it it in the nature of the human being to to to be born into conditions uh which lead us to ask questions about the kinds of lives we want to live and and not to resolve them. Um every

Living arrangement. Every way of living with one or more other person is a kind of discomfort. And I think that one of the things that different models of relationship do and different kind of combinations is they find different ways to alleviate one discomfort or another. But it becomes a bit like a Heath Robinson device where, you know, the minute that you uh address one element of the conundrum, something else rises up.

to uh to to sort of unbalance the whole again. Well that's what free thinking episodes are for, to tackle the next issue. Rydyn ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd David McCulloch and Catherine Wheely. Thank you also to producer Luke Mulhall and studio manager Sue Mayo. Next week, Matthew Sweet asks who shapes history?