Is marriage bliss or battlefield? What great thinkers said
A couple exchanges wedding rings.
What you need to know:
- Reflections from philosophers and leaders reveal marriage as complex, demanding tolerance, compromise, humour and resilience beyond romantic expectations.
- From Socrates to modern presidents, male perspectives frame marriage as both fulfilment and trial requiring patience, humility and endurance.
Many marriage proposals must have been made during last weekend’s Valentine’s Day, hopefully with success. The “lucky” men must now be looking forward to a life of bliss. Yet many reflections on marriage by men temper such expectations.
The Greek philosopher Socrates is quoted to have said: “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” This suggests that Socrates considered marriage an important step in life, for men. He was obviously addressing men as he does not say what a woman who got a bad husband would become. In which case, were women an important part of the human equation for him?
Linguistically, the statement has men as subjects of the action of marriage while women are the objects. This defines a patriarchal hierarchy reminiscent of the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve, the latter solely as a helper, an auxiliary. The words of Socrates also remind us of the biblical verse: “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favour from the Lord” (Proverbs 18:22). This leaves to our imagination why a wife is a good “thing”. But is a woman getting a husband also acquiring a good, worse or better “thing”?
Saying that a bad marriage would make men philosophers implies that adversity enables people to be reflective in such a way that they distil lifelong lessons. Socrates was arguably, tongue-in-the cheek, saying that even if one’s marriage turned out to be sour, it was not entirely useless. One wonders whether women who ended up with bad husbands would also become philosophers. Or perhaps that domain is limited to men. It is recorded that Socrates had a wife, Xanthippe, described as “sharp-tempered and argumentative”, a character that “helped him sharpen his ability to deal with difficult people in public life”.
Men’s philosophies about marriage are captured in popular jokes and witty comments. One is that marriage is a relationship in which one partner is always right and the other is the husband. This “philosophy” is that there are only “two” possible outcomes in an argument: either the wife wins or the husband loses. This thinking that women are innately obstinate is extended to another snippet that in marriage, the husband apologises to his wife when he is right. Jimmy Carter, the one-time President of the USA, exemplified by saying: “I’ve never won an argument with my wife; and the only time I thought I had, I found out the argument wasn’t over yet.”
The tension in marriage is captured in the words of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy who remarked that “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” This says that marriage brings together two different characters whose happiness is contingent on managing the divergences. This seems to negate the biblical notion that marriage makes the man and the woman one. As a humourist once put it, couples are still figuring out “which one” they become.
Again addressing men, Benjamin Franklin, the American artist, diplomat and statesman, writes inPoor Richard’s Almanack (1738): “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.” He was advising prospecting men to be rational and cautious when choosing brides. But why keep the eyes half shut after? Perhaps to avoid seeing other women, hence not get into temptation? Or, more plausibly, to ignore the wife’s imperfections? Franklin captures two dynamics—marriage as choice and practice in tolerance. This brings us back to the Tolstoian idea about incompatibility. Thus marriage is a game of tolerance, re-commitment and compromise.
One of the most sarcastic statements on marriage is by Irish writer Oscar Wilde.“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same,” he said. This depicts both legal and illegal marriages as undesirable. The view is that a wife is a handful, whichever way one looks at it.
There is, of course, the claim that a certain past American President kept his marriage happy through candle-lit dinners. He went on Tuesdays and the wife on Fridays. Echoing this scenario, famous British premier Winston Churchill once said, “My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.” The point is that couples need occasional distance from each other.
The enduring lesson from these thoughts is that marriage is work in progress, not a completed project. They tell the proposers one thing: beware. Or as Churchill would advise those who end up in the doldrums, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya University ([email protected]).
