Why Men Might Need Marriage
For most men, marriage is seen as a negative thing. The phrase, ‘the old ball-and-chain’, speaks to this sentiment. It is perceived as an infringement of freedom and the ‘graveyard of love’. One of my favourite writers, Lord Byron, who was himself briefly married, had much to say on the subject:
Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That Love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine —
A sad, sour, sober beverage — by time
Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavour
Down to a very homely household savour
For Byron, there was something about ‘domestic doings’ that formed ‘true love’s antithesis’. This was no doubt related to Byron’s love of freedom, which he exercised despite the conservative mores of his time (he also died trying to free Greece from Ottoman control).
Byron is nothing if not restless. His most famous poem, Don Juan, jumps from scene to scene, woman to woman, in an endless and objectless pursuit. It is, according to literary critic Harold Bloom, ‘unfinished and unfinishable’: ‘The last word in a discussion of Don Juan ought not to be ‘irony’ but ‘mobility’, one of Byron’s favourite terms’. According to Byron, mobility is ‘an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions’ — clearly, a recipe for disaster.
Camille Paglia, a disciple of Bloom, argues that ‘Byron created the glamourous sexy youth of brash, defiant energy, the new embodied in a charismatic sexual persona’. ‘Surveys show that two advertising words rivet our attention: “free” and “new.” We still live in the age of [Byronic] Romanticism. When novelty is worshipped, nothing can last’.
In his book on suicide, sociologist Émile Durkheim describes the underside of Byronic freedom, making the case against being a bachelor:
Though his enjoyment is restricted, it is assured and this certainty forms his mental foundation. The lot of the unmarried man is different. As he has the right to form attachment wherever inclination leads him, he aspires to everything and is satisfied with nothing. This morbid desire for the infinite which everywhere accompanies anomy may as readily assail this as any other part of our consciousness; it very often assumes a sexual form which was described by Musset. When one is no longer checked, one becomes unable to check one’s self. Beyond experienced pleasures one senses and desires others; if one happens almost to have exhausted the range of what is possible, one dreams of the impossible; one thirsts for the non-existent. How can the feelings not be exacerbated by such unending pursuit? For them to reach that state, one need not even have infinitely multiplied the experiences of love and lived the life of a Don Juan. The humdrum existence of the ordinary bachelor suffices. New hopes constantly awake, only to be deceived, leaving a trail of weariness and disillusionment behind them. How can desire, then, become fixed, being uncertain that it can retain what it attracts; for the anomy is twofold. Just as the person makes no definitive gift of himself, he has definitive title to nothing. The uncertainty of the future plus his own indeterminateness therefore condemn him to constant change. The result of it all is a state of disturbance, agitation and discontent which inevitably increases the possibilities of suicide
