the oblivious newlyweds in traditional marriages
were themselves the units of exchange, today, by
contrast, in the bourgeois nuclear family, couples
fulfill the role not of society’s basic units of exchange, but rather of economic production.
of course, households have always been loci
of such production, but the modern era brought
with it an increasing awareness of the economic
character of spheres of life that earlier had been
not work, but rather simply what one does. Thus,
first, the market itself came into existence, or was
discovered (depending on how you see things),
and over time came to engulf virtually all domains of human activity. Today, we understand
not just factory work or ditch digging to be labor
in the proper sense, but also eldercare, babysit-ting, clothes washing, and child rearing. This
is in one sense certainly right: there is no justifiable categorical difference between the sort
of labor once glorified by Marx—dirty, manly,
soot-soaked labor—and the kind that goes on in
the home. But if everything is now conceptualized as labor, this generality of it makes extremely hard the task of imagining ourselves into a
world where nothing was so conceptualized. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not think of fishing or berry picking as “a good line of work” or a
bad line. It was just what one did. So while it is
worth abandoning the false dichotomy between
Marx’s preferred varieties of work and what goes
on in the domestic setting, one might still regret
that anything at all in human life should have
come to be seen as work: as something that is
taken away from us, and for which we deserve to
be compensated.
It will not be controversial to point out
that until the past two hundred years or so,
there simply was no presumption that mar-
riage should be motivated or sustained by love.
In fact, many premodern authors took it to be a
sort of category mistake to love one’s wife in the
same way, with the same passion, that one might
love a lover. St. Jerome attempted to correct the
category mistake in his Adversus Jovinianum of
393 as follows: “Men should appear before their
wives not as lovers but as husbands.” one prob-
lem with passionate love toward a spouse is that
this is simply impossible to sustain, yet marriage
is, or long was, a lifetime commitment by defini-
tion. Thus many skeptics well into the modern
era continued to highlight the categorical im-
possibility of the sort of conjugal love the mod-
ern world had come to hold up as an ideal. As
george Bernard Shaw would claim in his 1908
comedy Getting Married, this new conception of
marriage based in passionate love requires two
people to promise to remain in an “excited, ab-
normal, and exhausting condition continuously
until death do them part.”
What is more difficult to understand, and
what seems to invite only controversial theses, is
the question of why the conception of marriage
as love, on the one hand, and as work on the oth-
er, emerged together in the modern era. Some
have argued that it was precisely the expectation
that marriage should be sustained by love that
brought the institution to a crisis, and brought us
to a situation more absurd than Shaw could have
imagined, where couples are expected to work in
order to preserve themselves in the exhausting
and abnormal condition in which they started
out. Stephanie Coontz argues in her popular
2005 book, Marriage, a History, that “although
many Europeans and Americans found tremen-
dous joy in building their relationships around
these values, the adoption of these unprecedent-
ed goals for marriage had unanticipated and rev-
olutionary consequences that have since come to
threaten the stability of the entire institution.”
Love, on this account, gives way to work, as the
feeling of love, but not the expectation of it, de-
clines over the course of a couple’s life. Today,
metaphors of work abound in the way we speak
of marriage. We are even led to believe by thera-
pists and their parrots that marriage itself just is
work, and that when it goes sour it is because we
are not working hard enough.
