LOVE AND MARRIAGE: David M. Wagner

"Historically eros, for example, was considered more a threat and a rival to marriage than a justification for it or an intrinsic part of it. Has that changed?"

Yes, to some extent: beginning in the Renaissance, the West has tried to bring Eros and Marriage into closer alignment. ROMEO AND JULIET finds them in perfect alignment, though out of alignment with the state. Most of Moliere's plays are about the triumph of an Eros-supported engagement over an engagement with social (usually paternal) sanction only. Almost all of Jane Austen's novels are about efforts to use the virtue of prudence to bring about a closer alignment of Eros and Marriage. (Austen characters who spurn Eros utterly in pursuit of Marriage are sometimes called to account for it -- Charlotte in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE -- and the reader may decide whether they do so successfully.)

But alignment is one thing, identity is another. Eros is not marriage. At best (and we hope this is often) it provides the fuel for a marriage to achieve escape-velocity from the atmosphere of whims, lust, and roving eyes. But once up there, Marriage is in its own orbit, promoting vital social goods, and flourishing on many wholesome emotions besides Eros. That's what's missing from the gay marriage vision: the rhetoric of "commitment" is there, but it's left very vague. I find no gay equivalent of the traditional marital ideal of "growing old together."

Nothing really new here: C.S. Lewis wrote about this in the love-and-sex chapters of MERE CHRISTIANITY, and he made the vital distinction between Eros and Storge (love of the comforting and familiar) in THE FOUR LOVES.

posted by Eve at 8:01 PM VOTE

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