In my View [7]

If, as seems likely, the state of marriage is falling steadily into more and more disrepute in this country, then no one – not even the most determined celibate or rebellious homosexual – can accept the process with equanimity. Some variety of marriage is a key structure in every society. If you pull out those essential bricks the wall won’t stand on its own. Therefore to work on the question mentally and morally – I mean this question of the rehabilitation of marriage – is in some degree everybody’s job, and not just that of the parson and psychiatrist and marriage counsellor.

Not long ago I had a play put on stage that took apart the structure of a bad marriage in Remuera; nobody’s marriage and everybody’s. And some of the audience naturally felt that something as private as marriage shouldn’t have its anatomy exposed. This would indeed be true if marriage were only a private relationship. But I think it is in the nature of marriage to be both private and public.

We have all of us at some time either observed or experienced liaisons. Perhaps I have a soft spot at least for the premarital liaison because a good half of the best poetry in the world is nearly or remotely connected with such happenings. But when I meet two young people living together in a flat, with some tenderness, some honesty and some fidelity, and both of them express the view that they could not bear to be publicly married because of the hideously deadening aspects of that public relationship – as they have seen it in practice among their parents and other elders – I acknowledge the validity of their fear, but still tremble for the future of the society I inhabit. page 35 They want their relationship to be a romantic poem. I would like to see it become a firm objective structure, free within its bonds, indeed made socially free by those bonds, like the magnificent heroic couplets of John Dryden. But I know that they are probably right in their opinion that the social pattern itself will turn any marriage they make into dead, slack journalistic prose.

Recently I had an illuminating conversation with a divorcee. This woman of goodwill had had a hard battle bringing up her children without a father; but her assumption of responsibility had undoubtedly strengthened her character and given her many insights that she might well have lacked if she had remained married. She was capable of looking at our society partly from the outside. I had the impression, however, that she had originally seen marriage as a private relationship, and saw it now as the romantic poem that she had failed to write. This view may have contributed to the original crisis.

I doubt if we can afford to let marriage be simply the playground of private hope and fantasy. I doubt if any given partner can afford to say, ‘My husband (or wife) has proved dull, unkind and hurtful; therefore I have the right to ditch him (or her) and try to forge out a life on my own or with another partner.’ In the doubtful climate of a liaison this would be a reasonable decision. But marriage is communal as well as private. One should perhaps labour at turning the dull prose into heroic couplets. But this in turn would require a vastly more objective view of marriage in society at large. Those societies which have tolerated extra-marital liaisons (toleration is not necessarily a condoning) or which did not regard separation as the termination of the public side of marriage may have been wiser than our own. Their children at least had an unclouded knowledge of who their parents were.

1969 (574)