First, I suspect that for people who consider marriage a religious institution consider it to be something fixed and permanent, the rules of which are determined somewhere other than in this world. I'm not sure, because I myself don't subscribe to any religious system, so I would be interested in hearing from people who hold that belief. But, having a strong interest in history, I recognize marriage as something that has likely changed over time and geography, and it seems that examining those changes can tell us a lot about what a culture values. Consequently, examining the history of marriage can give us a sense of how to position the institution of marriage in a way that reflects what we value (if we can ever come to a consensus!)
In the introduction to this book, Coontz points out that she began with the intention of showing how marriage has always been in flux and in crisis. While she acknowledges that this is, to some extent, the case, her own thinking on the subject changed several times over writing the book. What she did discover, to her surprise, was that the current state of the institution of marriage has no real historical precedent, which is to say: that marriage changes and appears to be "in crisis" is not new; what's new are the particular crises surrounding the institution in our current circumstances.
As you might gather from the title of the book, the thing that changed about marriage in modern times is the idea of marrying for love as opposed to financial or political gain. As Coontz writes, people most certainly fell in love in pre-modern cultures, but marriage was
...too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love. ... Because marriage was too important a contract to be left up to the two individuals involved, kin, neighbors and other outsiders, such as judges, priests, or government officials were usually involved in negotiating a match. Even when individuals orchestrated their own transitions in and out of marriage, the frequently did so for economic and political advantage rather than for love. (7)
I was thinking about dramatic literature here, though, and specifically Medea, in which this very idea-the dangers of marrying for love-comes up after Jason marries Glauce, the king's daughter. I'll post that debate here at some point, but essentially, Jason argues that although he has two children with Medea, his marriage is expedient and wise politically and economically. But Medea has clearly married Jason under the influence of Aphrodite - for love.
Interestingly, once people settled into this idea of marriage as a love match resulting in life-long intimacy (this was around the 1950s and 60s, the "Leave it to Beaver" era), it began to fall apart. When people accepted that love should be the basis of marriage, and that it should be a close relationship between equals, people started to get divorced more frequently. If those are the criteria for a good marriage, then staying in a loveless marriage that lacks intimacy seems destructive and wrong, so dissolving the marriage is a better choice than continuing it.
In examining why this same dissolution didn't happen in the late 18th Century or the 1920s or in any era when there was a particularly strong crisis for the institution of marriage, Coontz cautions against imagining that it was because in those eras people had stronger relationships. Contrary to what many people believe, there really is no "golden age" of marriage. One of the main root causes she determines is that, until the 1970s, people simply couldn't afford to get divorced.
I wonder, from all of this, what is happening to marriage right here and now. I, myself, know a number of people who are married and seem to have successful relationships. I wonder if it isn't because they all waited until much later in their lives to get married, and were sure they had reached a certain level of personal fulfillment before they decided to commit. From all of this evidence, though, I gather that the representation of marriage - how it's displayed in a culture, and therefore understood by the public - has a huge influence on what kind of respect marriage has. The value of the institution seems to be that it provides a model for how people's relationships should be, what we respect and want to reward and embrace, what we want to live up to. Given all of this, I could make a very strong argument that same sex marriage could save the institution of marriage in our culture.
But that's an entry for another time ...
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