Delphic Maxim 9: Intend to get married

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

9. Intend to get married

So I’ve hit a maxim that I find difficult to reconcile with the present day. Perhaps this is because thus far I’ve been finding ways to articulate these maxims in a way with which I can personally agree, but there’s something jarring — at least with an immediate read — to the idea that a person should ‘intend to get married’.

When Australia was having a public vote on whether marriage should be open to gay couples, my own view was that the law should treat people equally — that marriage should be a right extended by the state regardless of gender. This makes sense to me, and I believe that strongly. The arguments that didn’t wash with me as much were the more conservative ones, the ones that came from emotional places as though marriage were some natural state to which people strive. I don’t think I agree with that idea.

I worry as I write this that I am going to sound cold or curmudgeonly. That’s not how I want to come across! Every time I’ve been to a wedding, it’s been joyous and happy, filled with love, and that’s really beautiful.

My issue with this maxim is probably more historical and contextual. It’s bound up in ideas of property and ownership (far in the past, and I suppose this still happens in some places, dowries were exchanged for brides, and marriage was a means of acquiring property and titles). There have always been instances where marriage has been about love, and I imagine this is in part what drives this maxim, but my personal view can’t separate the history.

It’s conservative. I’m not. I don’t begrudge anybody else their own reading of it, but how can I possibly ‘intend’ to do something that I don’t see as necessary or valuable to my life? I value my independence too much. I’m radical in my desire to stand on my own. Which runs up against the feeling of loving someone, and being with someone — but surely marriage isn’t the only way to be in the world with a person?

The question I have to ask myself is why would this have been regarded virtuous? These sorts of things are of their time and social environment. Forgetting the idea of property and respect for the hearth (a maxim we will come to later, but one that I think is bound up in this), I think the act of translation here is about committing to the growth of yourself through your closeness to another. Or perhaps to marriage in a broader sense — being bound to an ideal, whatever that may be, rather than aimless and wandering in the world.

I’m taking this interpretation of marriage very wide to be comfortable with it!

John Keats wrote a letter to George and Georgina Keats in 1818, in which he explained why, though he is attracted to, maybe even in love with, Isabella Jones, he hopes never to marry. Let me quote at length:

“Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of Journey or a Walk; though the carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should not feel — or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is a Sublimity to welcome me home — The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness — an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as part of that beauty.”

So marriage is inessential, as long as love of a person in realised within that grander beauty and affection for life.

But maybe I’m wrong.