When marriage was a matter of exchange,
the gender of the units of exchange was a nonnegligible factor in the determination of who
should be exchanged with whom. A family simply could not afford to give its son to a fruitless
union with another family’s son. When marriage
comes to be seen as a line of work, by contrast,
and when individuals are seen as free to choose
their own vocation, then it correspondingly
transforms into a gender-neutral institution. It
is thus exactly the historical moment when marriage becomes a variety of work rather than of
Marriage is like prison, without all the sex.
—Chris Hardwick, 2011
exchange that the genders of its members cease
to matter. Marriage was always an economic
matter, but members of marriages were not always its employees, and this is what the awful
new talk of “partnership” is really about.
In the end, perhaps the only question that
really matters is whether the new marriage employees are happier than the old units of marital exchange. It is of course difficult to take the
measure of premodern happiness, but one thing
of which we may be fairly sure is that no one
of any social class nor, evidently, of any culture, ever placed any significant portion of their
hopes for happiness in life in the work of marriage, for marriage was not yet work. Certainly,
countless young people throughout the generations have hoped and prayed that fortune would
shine on them and they would be blessed with
a rich, strong husband, or with a buxom, fertile
wife. But this was a question of fortune, not of
work, and if one ended up with a lout or a hag
for a spouse, this seems to have been interpreted
mostly as a matter of fickle fortune, not the mark
of an underdeveloped work ethic.
Where then was happiness? In lovers, in
extended family, in nature, in god. Today, by
contrast, there is an expectation that a stable
partnership must be a sine qua non of happiness
in general, that if happiness is not flowing from
the work of marriage, a life cannot be said to
be happy at all. But such happiness is never less
precarious than a 401k, and in a world in which
marriage is a sort of work, and in which work is
conceived as something that we variously suc-
ceed or fail at depending on the strength of our
characters and the rectitude of our choices—in
such a world it is no wonder we find so many
people who believe they have, themselves, failed
to attain happiness.
gay love, gay sex, and gay relationships used to be countercultural, subversive,
and explicitly noncapitalistic. Although not always the rebellious and even criminal act that
it was for centuries, gay love has always stood
on the margins of the economic contract that is
heterosexual marriage. gay love and sex force us
to see another way of being, and history is ripe
with examples. There is paiderastia, a fundamentally unequal relationship, a nonpartnership, in
which a younger man played bottom to an older
man’s top, in the classic pair of contrasting roles
of erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved.
There is the Byzantine institution of
adelpho-poiesis, literally, “brother making,” which was
a sort of spiritual marriage between two men,
though which gives us very little evidence of the
thing our simultaneously prudish and prurient
age takes to be the singular marker of the erotic.
And outside of these and other complex institutions through which history leaves us traces,
there is always, of course, that broad buffet of
sexual activities that was long designated not
by a greek term but by a name deriving from
