Marriage Is a Bad Habit

By Ruth Dickson

When Ruth Dickson released her 1967 book Married Men Make the Best Lovers, it went off like a bombshell. Defenders of the “sanctity” of marriage rose up to dismiss her frank, innovative, thoroughly researched book. But why? Why cling to the broken ritual of marriage? What comfort is there in a crumbling institution held together by meaningless tradition and out of touch patriarchy?

In this thoughtful follow-up, Dickson examines marriage itself. As she explains, “It’s no secret that the divorce rate is reaching astronomical proportions, yet nobody seems to do anything about the sole cause of divorce: marriage.”

Expertly weaving historical research, personal anecdotes, and scalpel-sharp philosophy, Marriage Is a Bad Habit makes the case that a life without marriage is a life of freedom—a woman’s freedom from male dominance and abuse, a man’s freedom from female resentment and martyrdom. In this new world it’s time for the sexes to find a new way of living together. Or, more specifically, a new way to live apart.

Sexier than Helen Gurley Brown, wittier than Xaviera Hollander, Ruth Dickson tells the truth, makes you laugh, gives you innovative ideas and thoughtful advice on how to navigate the tricky waters of true freedom of choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497607101

Ruth Dickson

Ruth Dickson was a bestselling lightning rod for controversy and a reliable source of entertainingly contrarian opinions about marriage, love, sex, adultery, and how much any of these subjects had in common when she burst onto the publishing scene in the late 1960s. Among Dickson’s titles are Married Men Make the Best Lovers, a survival manual for mistresses; Marriage Is a Bad Habit, an impassioned argument for unwedded bliss; and Now That You’ve Got Me Here, What Are We Going to Do?, which has been referred to as a “non-marriage manual.” She long ago lost count, but Dickson has lived in more than two hundred places on three continents but now calls Florida her (possibly temporary) home. Still going strong well into her eighties, Dickson recently published a new book, Life, Death, and Other Trivia: Outrageous Observations of a Wicked Old Broad, which includes many extracts from her blog. Just in case you were born yesterday, Dickson is here to tell you that Sex in the City did not start with Carrie Bradshaw. Ruth Dickson was a writing and popularity rival for Helen Gurley Brown in Brown’s heyday, right after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl. Current readers, given the perspective of time, will be best equipped to judge, which of the two was the better, smarter, and wittier writer.

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FOREWORD

Until quite recently, it was a generally accepted premise that all girls, upon maturity, would find a man, marry him, bear his children and live more or less happily ever after. Regardless of talent, ambition or sexual orientation, female children were expected to marry shortly after becoming nubile; college and/or employment were acceptable alternatives for a few years, but those options were primarily chosen as means to the end of locating a marriageable man.

Aside from the social rules, economics played a large part in the universal rush to the altar. It was virtually impossible for a woman to earn a decent income, limited as she was to a few acceptable positions: teaching, nursing, lower-level office work and the like. In 1969, women comprised only 9% of the total medical school enrollment in the U.S. and most of the Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton didn’t accept women at all until the seventies. I was the butt of many jokes and insults when I announced my intention to attend Cornell (the only co-ed Ivy in 1942) to study veterinary medicine, where I became the first female ever to attempt a DVM there. Unfortunately (or not, depending on the future health of the lions and tigers and bears I had wanted to treat) I became as caught up in the furor of man-trapping as everyone else, as, after a three-year drought, we were suddenly inundated with a flood of glamorous returning war heroes, courtesy of the G.I. Bill.

I won’t regale you with the story of my life after college, fascinating though it might be; suffice it to say I ended up in frantic lust with a hot ex-bombardier, married him and from there on up, it was downhill all the way. Seven years, two kids and two incidents of physical abuse later, I was out of there and never looked back.

Aside from a brief second marriage, I have been single for the greatest part of my 87 years and have not regretted one second of my unmarried state. Unbounded curiosity has led to a nomadic life, sending me from coast to coast and around the world, allowing me to observe the personal and social implications of the institution of marriage as practiced in a multitude of societies. And no matter where I looked, one thing was universally true: the institution of marriage is the one custom that has, without fail, kept women in a subservient, second-class position.

Even today, after thousands of years of progress, there are cultures that refuse to accept half the population as being fully human, although most first world countries have finally granted female suffrage and a grudging equality of education and access to most professions. However, the political arena, especially in the United States continues to be woefully short of female representation, as do other high profile careers. And in all cases women still earn less than men in comparative positions. These social factors are both the cause and effect of girls’ need to find men to husband them.

The new millennium, however, has brought some interesting changes. More children are born out of wedlock than ever before in our history, with little or no onus attached to the circumstances of their birth. Marriage itself is dropping like a hot rock: According to a recent Pew Report, ...in 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all twenty-somethings were married. In 2008, just 26% were. How many of today’s youth will eventually marry is an open question. For now, the survey finds that the young are much more inclined than their elders to view cohabitation without marriage...

With this in mind, it is easy to foresee the day when weddings will be as quaint as dial telephones, looked upon as relics of the days during which this book was first written. Although I never considered myself a prophet, it appears I was experiencing a prescient glance at the future when I suggested that marriage is indeed a bad social habit.

A parting thought: In a recent Mad Men episode, Betty Draper is talking with her only divorced acquaintance. Betty asks what it’s like to live without a husband, to which the friend replies, the hardest part is realizing you’re in charge.  At which I heard myself murmuring to the TV set, "No, no…the hardest part of marriage is realizing you’re not in charge!"

CHAPTER ONE

Who’s Hiding on the Premises?

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. —Shelley

Some forty-odd (some odder than others) years ago, I accomplished a small volume called Married Men Make the Best Lovers, which you are probably too young to have read. If so, ask your mother, or perhaps your grandmother to tell you the tale of the Outrageous Woman who became the scourge of the suburbs wherever disreputable books were sold.

Now, a book with a title like that is bound to raise some hackles, not to mention eyebrows and blood pressure, but I never expected it to result in the turmoil of which I rapidly became the vortex. Suddenly, I was being introduced as Controversial Ruth Dickson, as though Controversial were my first name, and the ensuing furor continued for years. However, not all the comments were negative, and some of the more penetrating remarks reinforced my contention that adultery is not the cause of poor marital relations, but rather the reverse. If there weren’t something wrong with our system of marriage, adulterous relationships would not be as prevalent as they are; and obviously, there lay the real root of the problem.

As the nation’s wives heaped scorn and curses upon my head, it became more and more apparent that they were operating not only from fear, but from a deep-seated anxiety about matrimony itself. Those who shouted the loudest were obviously those who were the least secure in their belief that marriage was a desirable state. They seemed to be saying, I’m in this mess, and I’m not going to withstand it alone. Therefore, everyone damn well better get in it with me, most especially you, Ms. Controversial! Because I said I felt women had something better to do with their lives than subjugate themselves to men, I was called evil. And because I stated flatly that I was far happier living alone than with a husband of my own, I was labeled sacrilegious. It seems like a pretty sad commentary on our society that the people who comprise it, especially the female contingent, are so frightened that they feel called upon to react so strongly to one woman’s opinions.

No matter. Marriage as we know it is going down the drain, and nobody is more aware of that fact than the wives who are so desperately trying to make it work. And for this reason, I thought it high time somebody shed the light of sense on what’s really happening to this fast-disintegrating system, and why. You aren’t going to like it, any more than you liked the Surgeon General’s report on smoking. Nobody likes to break a habit, no matter how damaging it might be, and I know perfectly well that nothing is going to change as a result of this book. But maybe it will make a few people think of what we’ve done to ourselves in the name of a religious superstition we insist on referring to as a sacred institution.

Perhaps we had best first define what we’re talking about when we use the word marriage. Let’s see what Mr. Webster has to say about it: Marriage: the state of, or relation between, a man and woman who have become husband and wife, or the ceremony marking this union. Well, that doesn’t tell us much, so let’s see what he means by husband, okay? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Husband: married man; the manager, as of a household; to manage economically; conserve. Does that begin to tell you something? Let’s try wife, shall we? Wife: from the Anglo-Saxon ‘wif,’ meaning ‘the hidden or veiled person’; a woman in relation to her husband.  Still true in certain mid-Eastern countries, but hardly the norm in the Western world.

Yet, viewed objectively, that’s pretty much what marriage is still supposed to be, despite all our strides forward into what we hopefully call civilization. A husband is expected to gather wherewithal and see that it is expended wisely and conservatively, while his wife is supposed to stay hidden from the world (meaning other men) and do whatever it is she’s presumed to be doing behind those closed doors. We assume she’s bearing and raising children, and helping the husband to husband his resources. And that’s it. Except for one thing: it doesn’t work like that anymore. Nowadays, the hidden person is just as likely to be out husbanding as is the male, just as much exposed to the world at large as he is, and thereby just as knowledgeable and educated as he. Maybe more so. And if she’s not, and remains at home, it is she who is doing the managing and conserving, duties once assigned to the man. So what do we have? A system which is working on principles that are no longer valid.

Even Webster hasn’t been able to give more than the original definitions of the words marriage, husband, or wife, and would doubtless throw up his hands in despair if he were called upon to give adequate, workable meaning to these words today. They have become as ephemeral as truth, beauty, and honor, with each individual defining them in the light of his own background and experience. In other words, totally meaningless, since they mean all things to all people.

Marriage was, at one time, a sound economic move, with predetermined and worthy ends. It was a working partnership, at best; a means to an acquisitive end, at worst. If, a thousand or so years ago, someone had asked the question What is marriage for? a reasonable answer could have been given. And it would have been a man who answered, because marriage was designed by and for men, with nobody ever bothering to ask the woman what she thought of the whole thing. Men needed wives for many things, not the least of which was to provide them with offspring to whom to leave their land. For it wasn’t until man settled down and stopped his nomadic existence that marriage was conceived.

Of course the human animal bred, but it didn’t much matter which female a male mated with, or vice versa, in a society which took its sustenance from the land on which it found itself, then moved on when it had depleted those resources. In those circumstances, all the children belonged to everyone, as did all the women. The women did tend the children, but only because they were biologically equipped to do so, nursing bottles being a rather recent innovation; but the children belonged to the tribe as a whole, not to any individual pairs of parents. And I bet there wasn’t an Oedipus complex in sight, much less any of our other modern conveniences. But more on that later.

Anyhow, after a while man realized that he could make the land do things for him, rather than just taking what he could find, and thus began the whole sorry system. As soon as man began to identify himself with a piece of real estate, he needed (1) someone to help him take care of it, and (2) someone to leave it to, in order to create his own immortality. The offspring also answered a need for more manpower to defend his property from intruders and invaders, but because these extensions of himself needed to be his, he hit on the one solution to insure that they would be. He outlawed adultery. Not for himself, mind you, but for his wife, or wives, depending on the area and the time in history. It had nothing to do with morals, purity, or any other latter-day invention. It was simply a way to make sure some other dude’s kids wouldn’t inherit his land.

And it all worked pretty well, if you want to ignore the state the poor female found herself in. She, for centuries, was a mere piece of property, belonging first to her father, later to her husband, with no rights of her own, no self-determination, no voice in her own destiny. And the funny part is, she helped man perpetrate this crime against her, aiding and abetting every anti-feminine device he could imagine. It’s difficult to pinpoint any one reason for this attitude, outside of congenital masochism, but it isn’t too hard to see how it could happen. After all, man held all the wealth, made all the laws, and did all the brainwashing. And with the female’s enslavement to her own biology, plus all the myths man invented about her, she never really had a