I am also interested in the marriage as an appliance idea. That strikes me as a very healthy way to look at it, because marriage has been, as I said earlier, very cage-y. And yet I remain extremely ambivalent about marriage and its social functions; I can "think" of my own marriage in this open and liberal and tool-oriented way, but it doesn't alter the status and role of marriage in the broader culture.
I think there's a critical cultural difference between the Britain, which has a reasonably viable state-sponsored form of welfare, by comparison to the U.S., which essentially does not. My basis for this statement is, I know people who live on the dole in Britain, I have worked closely for ten years with the social services there, and, on the other hand, I also know people who have been kicked off the dole in the U.S., and I have had, in the past, to get welfare in the U.S. for my children, so I know both systems to some degree.
And the conservative line in the U.S. has been, as welfare has been cut and cut and cut again is that welfare puts the State where the family should be. Welfare, to U.S. right wingers, makes people dependent (on the State, is the implication, but they don't qualify it that way. Which clouds the fact that without welfare, poor people are dependent on often dysfunctional birth families. Or birth families who have rejected them, say, for being gay or getting an abortion or mentioning that grandpa molested them or . . . Or at best on crappy jobs that they are staying in only for the insurance.) So here in the U.S., my tax dollars are supporting a policy that says: if people are poor, they should get married. The federal government is now spending money encouraging matrimony as a form of social welfare, because married people are wealthier, live longer, and provide better homes for children.
This is all true, but it's true in part because we in the U.S. have almost no options outside of jobs or family to provide support when jobs or relationships fail. As they do--unemployment, death, divorce, disability, child-molesting, and pyromania remain necessary facets of our humanity. The U.S. system mostly provides two answers: work-related benefits or family help. We have a small social-welfare system, but it is not sufficient to the demand, as our infant mortality, life-expectancy, and other key statistics bear out, particularly if you are not white and/or male in this country.
Now, since Deva is interested in how marriage functions to provide things that other institutions don't: My family is a complicated internationally linked family, and it probably couldn't have come into its current state of being if my spouse and I hadn't been legally espoused. For all kinds of reasons which are too complicated to go into--some legal but most more to do with social/cultural capital. I remain ambivalent about having that social/cultural capital, but it surely helped me to adopt two children who needed adopting.
Second, marriage has allowed me to stay connected to my family of origin in a way that I almost certainly wouldn't have done if I hadn't gotten married and stumbled into adopting children. There were people who hadn't talked to me in years who, particularly once children entered the picture, had something to say to me. That is definitely a mixed blessing, but I would still call it a blessing. But I wonder: to what degree does the surrounding social structure, with a very flawed safety net, also make me feel I need that wider familial support? I don't know.
And, so even if I view my marriage as a useful appliance, like a Philips screwdriver say, it's also true that the society I live in, in the Midwestern U.S., still views it as a mark of my maturity, and even my value as a person. And they give me perks for entering into it, some of which are tied to my continued existence--health insurance, child custody, etc.
And then those perks become threats: quit your marriage, and you quit your health insurance, in many cases. Quit your marriage and you may not get to see your child. ... That's where it still remains a cage that I am ambivalent about strengthening. |
