SOME SELECTIONS FROM THE ABOLITION OF MARRIAGE to whet your appetite. Stuff in brackets is from me. I’m quoting the more theoretical bits here, but the book is chock-full of examples, anecdotes, stats (and she’s careful with them, too, unlike most policy-popularizers), and moving personal stories, breathing life into the philosophical discussions. You can see, I hope, why Lingua Franca described Gallagher’s prose as “bodice-ripping”–that’s a compliment.

“[C]ohabitation thwarts as often as it satisfies the impulse to marry. Cohabitation comes wrapped in the language of commitment, but at its core it is about anxiety, commitment with fingers crossed. In this sense, like the hedonist ethic, cohabitation seeks to reduce sex, to make it more about the self and less about the union with the other–to keep the self more contained and therefore safer. Cohabitation is what lovers do when at least one of them does not dare to marry, to love without a net.”

“Regardless of the quality of the poetry it may inspire, romantic love, when it is primarily defined by the current emotional state of the lover, is always ultimately about the self, the lover, and the rights he earns by the intensity of his feelings. The lover does not care for the beloved so much as he draws inspiration from her; one might almost say he consumes the beloved, although always to the highest purpose, or at least the highest purpose that the self, trapped in itself, can know.”

“The therapeutic ideal, by reducing love and marriage to means of personal growth, makes both temporary by definition. It is a rational, utilitarian, practical ethic, deeply American and consumerist. It encourages us to view marriage as a disposable spiritual consumption item and to view our spouses as particularly valuable vehicles for personal growth, to be traded in when they have served their purpose.” [cf. “flexidoxy” in Bobos in Paradise, re “spiritual consumption items”; or, for more insight, Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.]

“For the sake of our mental health and personal spiritual growth [these theorists claim], we ought to accept a world in which no one will make or keep a promise to anyone but himself.”

“Oedipus. Medea. Lear. Erotic conflicts within families are the oldest staple of tragedy. What is new is our American insistence on denying the tragedy, which we can do only by denying the conflict.”

“One reason we are reluctant to think deeply about family and marriage is that the family does not fit into the intellectual categories with which we feel most comfortable and whose metaphors come most easily to the tongue–especially the market metaphors that so permeate the American culture. Lacking the language to articulate the family relation, we try, futilely, to fit the family into the language of economics or management, blinding ourselves to who we are and how we actually live. …The market is the arena of the stranger.” [I’m no expert on this, but it seems to me that the biggest remaining problem with the Constitution and the constitutional thought that developed in response to it, a problem that continues to warp politics today, is that the Founders were still early enough in the Enlightenment to take the family more or less for granted. We’ve been conditioned to think about politics in contractarian, rationalist terms that do a lame job of describing, comprehending, and supporting family relations and the loves that ground society.]

“Lust takes but does not surrender.”

“[In marriage] we can come as close as human beings are capable of doing ‘justice’ to one human being: to know and to love him. To attempt to love just one other person the way God loves everyone. That is the seal, the aim, the substance of the marriage contract. Marriage is the incarnation of eros, the body of love. It is the psalms and the Song of Songs and it is the Crucifixion, or at least it is our aspiration to all of these things.”