Marrying Your Friend
it's complicated for everyone...then, there's me...
When Harry Met Sally (1989) ended as 90% of its audience wanted it to: the arguing ‘friends’ professed their love for each other (after having sex, of course). I think street riots might have broken out had Rob Reiner used the original ending scene in which they went their separate ways. This film was a mirror to the collective consciousness of millions of educated Americans at the time – marry your best friend. Fall in love with your friend. Do your research. But don’t give up on “true” love.
Marrying your Friend. What does this mean?
In the second half of the twentieth century, “romance” was now no longer just a formal ‘courtship’ phase followed by inevitable patriarchal condescension or abuse. The nuance that this movie drilled into the heads of impressionable Gen Xers like me was that you now need to prepare for a long and wandering search for this ideal partner. Harry and Sally sure as hell wandered. In this new model, sex becomes more than recreation; it honors an intense friendship.
The steady increase in the average age of first marriage during the late twentieth century confirms that many Boomers and Gen Xers wandered. And the more educated you are, the longer you do.1
Figure 1 - Growth in Median Age of 1st Marriage after 19702
Only a world full of easily accessible retail birth control could make such a wandering possible without an explosion of unplanned births. Humans, for the most part, are remarkably fertile under 30. Remarkably.
Thus, you’ll notice that the fundamental shift in median marital age did not start until the mid-1970s when the oldest Boomers were about thirty years old. I do not think it’s a coincidence that Boomers began the marital delay trend as they were first to experience the consequences of the upsurge in modern, no-fault divorce as well (which kicked off in California in 1969).3
My Aspie confusion and Ph.D. distraction pushed me six years beyond the median marriage age for men in 2006 (the year I got hitched). Not surprising. I’m still amazed I ever got married. Getting into relationships was unbelievably awkward and terrifying for my brain, despite having a solid parental model at home. The motivation was strong. The playbook was, however, missing. I lacked any of the confidence of Mr. Harry Burns. Not until around 2004…I think my Platinum status on American Airlines finally gave me some mojo. My low testosterone levels may not have helped, either.
Then I met my own Sally, a rock climber/nurse/i-Shares team member who was impressed by my Ph.D. (not intimidated), my time in India (not horrified), AND my mountain biking skills (not mystified). That’s a lot of advantaged courtship material to work with, honestly, if we assume the peacock has to put on some type of show. It also helped to get an introduction from an equally neurodivergent buddy who knew I couldn’t deal with neurotypical, upper-middle-class hetero-females (and their low tolerance for social awkwardness and faux pas). For me, at the time, they needed too much romance, too much ‘etiquette,’ too much ‘conversation,’ and too much income. This assumes any given woman I met in Seattle back then even wanted to settle down (!). The perpetual bachelorette was a ‘lifestyle permutation’ I was not expecting when I came of age in rural New Hampshire in the 1980s. I had no clue this was a choice.
Despite the best-selling novels of Jane Austen, romantic love has only recently become a mass-market topic and a mass ideal among American adults. Among any adults. There are still millions of people who do not approach marriage or coupling this way in America. Not long ago, ‘romance’ was considered by most to be a luxury belief, an indulgence of the rich.
Figure 2 Use of the Phrase “Romantic Love” In Printed English Media.4
These Ngram charts continue to floor me in how well they time the appearance of modern cultural trends. What we printed before the internet occasionally revealed the mainstreaming of significant cultural values (before the internet era). As women gained control over the timing of marriage and childbirth (and earned a self-sufficient income), wandering for idealized romantic love became more feasible.
The real sign of romance’s cultural triumph as a mass American orientation to marriage and coupling is something most of us have overlooked—the sales of romance fiction. Romance novels are the #1 selling fictional book genre in the U.S. Over $12B in 2022 sales via 19,000,000 units. The number-one-selling romance novel ever is Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (~150 million copies sold to date). Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is #2 (at 120 million copies). There is romance fiction for all social classes and dispositions. There is no way a female reader can claim to be overlooked as a reader of romance fiction. Not a chance. If you think so, you just haven’t looked hard enough—or at all.
But we need to accept one cultural fact before I proceed. Heterosexual men, at least, do not read or desire anything called romance fiction. This is why you can not find anything in the genre written for a straight-male audience. Of course, one could easily argue that mainstream novels already present the male perspective on romance. Only 18% of romance novel readers are male.
But this doesn’t stop Romance Writers of America from making the case to men,
“…. more men should read romance novels because they can serve as instruction manuals for relationships. Romances show how much communication, compromise, and work is necessary for a healthy relationship. Books have the unique ability of letting us live experiences we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. And since romance is so woman-centric, it can give male readers a chance to see the world through a female perspective. This builds empathy in readers. It’s the closest male readers will come to experiencing prejudices that might not affect them, allowing some men to develop a sensitivity they may not otherwise.”5
OK.
Romance spread among the European elite, in part to soften the patriarchal ego blow that most elite marriages would quickly deliver to married women. And because the intricacies of flirtation suited aristocrats and others obsessed with nuanced consumption in general. Romance became a form of sophisticated etiquette in which men respected the need for a modicum of respect for the elite women they would marry. Don Draper didn’t get the memo. Growing up in a working-class brothel probably didn’t help.
Romance novels cue how important romantic love is in modern coupling and sexual escapades. But consumption of these novels also reveals how difficult this standard is for human beings. It’s easy to point to a Platonic ideal of romance. It’s easy to talk about it. Getting any two humans to keep it going is very difficult. Nothing in evolutionary biology necessitates bird-like bonding in human sexual pairs. Rape is just as ‘effective’ as consensual sex in perpetuating the species because survival is a group affair for humans. Strong, caretaking romantic bonds are NOT a human universal. In many pre-literate societies like early 20th-century Trobriand islands, fathers exchange yams to initiate and sustain sexual access with a woman, but, generally, they focus on supporting and raising their sister’s children, not their own. Why? Their sister’s children exist in the same lineage. Their biological children are in another lineage. Strict matrilineality created this structure, a vaccination against sexual romance as the sole pair-bonding technique (at least before Christian conversion). Instead, Trobriand women collect yams from their brothers and husbands/lovers and disperse this wealth as they see fit. The flow of yams, not flirtatious words, builds relations with a sexual partner (often as a gift after sex). Interesting how matrilineality empowers women (socially, economically, and sexually) without any documented idiom of romance or romantic friendship. Ahem.
Romance novels represent the failure of our high-minded European romantic ideal as much as its widespread grip on our imaginations. I think the failure is that romantic courtship is a poor ritual selection tool to obtain a long-lasting friendship. It is certainly not sufficient. Too many abusive men court their ‘victims’ successfully.
If all of the above doesn’t convince you that romance novels are a legitimately American cultural phenomenon that reveals much about our society, then maybe a story from my fieldwork memory will. In 1995, I had a graduate seminar on “Ritual Practices,” where I chose to do two months of fieldwork for my final paper. It was a way to challenge myself and warm up my interviewing skills. I chose a charismatic Christian church near Madison, WI. These are the churches where people play rock-n-roll Christian music, get possessed by the Holy Spirit, conduct live exorcisms, and perform spirit healings.
I knew I would have fun with this evangelical crowd when I showed up for the first service, and the pastor handed me a service pamphlet while gulping from a massive 22-ounce C-store coffee. The pamphlet's cover showed a picture of his mugshot from ten years earlier. Interesting.
On the second or third Sunday of my ten-week project, I met up with an older woman in the church after the service.
“James, this is not a church. It’s a hospital,” she said mysteriously and very charismatically. Word choice does matter in moments like this. She didn’t say “like a hospital,” She said it is a hospital. Full of wounded souls. Almost all of them were Baby Boomers who had crashed somehow on the rocky shores of the mid-90s. Drug addiction. Alcoholism. Traumatic divorce. Abuse.
When recruiting 8-10 participants for in-depth interviews, my healer friend helped me get a good array of ‘stories.’ One of these women was super quiet. I doubt I would have ever gotten her to agree to an interview without my intermediary’s help.
Let’s call her Pam.
Most of my interviews featured some kind of born-again conversion narrative, but not what the Amish would approve of. Definitely not.
Pam began hers with a unique opener,
“Now, promise me you won’t laugh, James,” she said.
“Absolutely not,” I replied, nervously preparing for a battle with my secular diaphragm.
Pam described her abusive marriage and how her former husband eventually abandoned her. Since her divorce, she had lived alone and had not entered into any relationships. This was a relationship gap of ten years or more. Pam was obese, in her late 40s at the time of the interview, and did not consider herself attractive.
“I’m addicted to romance novels, James,” she said matter-of-factly, “I will go to the bookstore and buy 10-15 of them. Then, I’ll read them all in one weekend and return to the store for more. I can’t stop reading them.” She began to weep in shame.
When she joined the church, she prayed for assistance. Then, she decided to throw out every romance novel she owned. This involved taking “dozens of trash bags” full of novels to the dump. Whoa. That’s a lot of fictional love. And, for Christian Pam, it was a lot of fornication narratives. At the time, I was oblivious that tens of millions of Americans still frowned on sex outside marriage. Oops.
As Pam told me her extreme story, I thought of my grandmother’s unromantic marriage and her constant stream of Danielle Steele novels. Is this what unloved, lonely women do? For most women like Pam, romance fiction is a harmless form of entertainment and female-oriented soft porn (for the record, my wife hates this analogy).
More objectively, reading romance fiction is polite resistance to the decidedly unromantic reality of some women’s marriages and lives. It’s reaching for something else, too - strong human bonds in an increasingly alienated society.
Not all straight men are equipped to fulfill some women's fantasies of romantic love. That’s for sure. Most can not sustain it deep into a marriage, either. They can still be good partners and friends. And isn’t that what matters most? Not the flirtatious beginning of the friendship? Not the ability to ‘woo’ or ‘court’ or talk a person into a relationship? Not the preface, but rather the main chapters?
I worry that the elevation of romance has quietly enabled a sort of sociopathic fooling of many women by men who intend to behave like Don Draper once the ‘honeymoon’ is over. The Jordan Belforts of the world. This hijacking of romance by bad-faith actors only prolongs the wandering many of us experience in our 20s and 30s.
If the point of modern romance is to marry your best friend, this will happen organically without a game or a sexy performance. Some light social filtering helps a lot. Friendship is not about the dopamine rush of romance (or exercise). It’s about oxytocin, the chemical of human bonding. Real friendship takes much longer to form than reading a titillating, dopamine-releasing romance novel.
Romance is not the end, it’s an initiation into an intense friendship bond. When mature couples say they’ve “fallen out of love,” I suspect it’s because we no longer have the friendship bond anymore. I don’t know what it means when a high school kid says the same thing. No clue.
This is an early draft of material appearing in my forthcoming book - Our Worst Strength
Post-grad degree holders like me, as of 2020, generally took 1.5-2 years longer to get into their 1st marriage. School gets in the way. Source: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/julian-median-age-first-marriage-2021-fp-22-15.html#:~:text=Women%20with%20less%20than%20a,at%20first%20marriage%20(31.6).
United States Census, Table MS-2 estimated the median age at first marriage by Sex 1890 to present.
All 50 states permit no-fault divorce for irreconcilable differences today. But some conservatives are organizing in Texas and other states to over-turn these statutes.
Google. Ngram Service. ”romantic love.”
https://bookriot.com/why-more-men-should-read-romance/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20survey%20conducted,as%20instruction%20manuals%20for%20relationships.
Ironically, I read this just after celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary. Pete and I were friends first, and we began to hang out together because we worked together at a homeless shelter and the place was like a 24-hour circus. Also, we both wanted to go camping and nobody in our circles wanted to go with us. So we did. Our honeymoon was spent canoeing in the glorious Algonquin Provincial Park, many miles of wilderness north of Toronto. We kinda skipped the romance thing. Somehow, it works. Damned if I can explain it except to say that some things are not meant to be analyzed.
I think there's something to be said about society's (understandable) rise in interest in women and their wants. But, emerging as it has from, well, a male-and-male-mode dominated world, spearheaded by feminism (of multiple stripes)... it makes it difficult to effectively push back or rebut.
If the history of much of the West (at least) can be said to be focused on men and male behavioral norms, then we're arguably in the "age of women" where we're not only balancing the scales between the sexes, but actively tipping them in the opposite direction. It makes it difficult to point out what men are now lacking without coming across as a misogynist by your opposition. More and more, *any* masculine behavior is labeled "toxic" - including things like men being stoic in the face of adversity. Our "better halves" are become convinced that the problem is not just that society was male-centric, but that male behavior, in general and in totality, is a problem in itself.
So, now, more than ever, we men are basically invited to conform to women's expectations or else be pariahs. Admittedly, this is a flip from "the before times" when you could argue women were expected to conform to male expectations or suffer the same fate. It seems to me, we're not "allowed" to note any downsides of this flip, or complain at all, lest we be "problematic." If the issue with the "male mode" being (more) dominant in the past is that it alienates roughly half of humanity - then why is flipping to a female mode the answer? The answer is finding an equilibrium that satisfies both sexes. Far easier said than done, and less fun than shouting about the patriarchy or toxic masculinity for some.
All this to say is that when women measure men by women's standards, we will inevitably come up short as a group - such as expecting men to be romantic throughout a long-term relationship. I'm more than open to the idea that *certain* behaviors qualify under "toxic masculinity" (sexual harassment, rape, outbursts of anger) but let's not lose sight of the fact that we could and should conceptualize of a "toxic femininity," including such "bad" behaviors as female-on-female bullying. Women can lean too far into their own ids as well. The trick is coming face-to-face with your nature and our nurture, and deciding what we (as men or as women) ought to be in order to peacefully and satisfactorily achieve balance. Tipping the scales exclusively towards women will only plant the seeds of an eventual (and perhaps ugly or harsh) pushback. This method of "social justice" that seeks to operate by simply inverting the "oppressor and oppressed" roles is just a recipe for discontent and continuous back-and-forth revolutions, with "power" swinging back and forth between whatever binary you've identified. The oppressed get relief until they get the power and now they oppress the former oppressors; then its the former oppressors turn to claw for relief until they are back on the throne. And on and on. This method never grapples with what equilibrium looks like. Some have said this is a feature, not a bug of liberalism (either classical or otherwise). I'm not sure what the answer is.