Jane Austen’s Practical Concerns About Marriage Are Still Relevant

I wasn’t the type of young person to seek out Jane Austen on my own. Period manners and marriage plots? Thanks, but pass; I’d seen Clueless and was pretty sure I got the gist. But with few discernible interests apart from books (and tastes that, I’m mortified to report, leaned more toward Bukowski than Brontë), combined with an even less developed sense of professional aptitude, my undergrad self ended up settling into a new identity as an English lit major. Austen, naturally, became a part of my new life. My 18th-century British lit professor, an affable young adjunct with a clump of Day-Glo orange hair, put Pride and Prejudice squarely on the syllabus during our semester on the Romantic era. This novel, he told us, signaled a major shift in social values, and was therefore important to understand. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Pride and Prejudice famously concerns the courtship of a family of sisters who need to marry into money to preserve the family’s social standing as members of the landed gentry. The new, period-specific catch is that the sisters should also, ideally, be fond of the well-off dudes they marry—and it’s this new requirement of affability, even maybe something akin to love, that leads to dramatic tension and lessons learned by all. But to me, it barely seemed worthy of being called a predicament.

When I encountered Austen’s Bennet sisters, I was 19, and newly into a relationship with someone who was prematurely wise, financially stable, and a clear marrying type—in other words, my exact opposite in at least three non-trivial areas. I felt utterly unequipped to parse the competing priorities of my romantic future, the balance of love and stability, companionship, and eroticism. It seemed much less intimidating to accept an eligible suitor on the simple grounds of mutual regard and material security—to say, “I like your bank account and can tolerate your person,” and move on. The clear directive to simply secure an economically advantageous match would have certainly taken the guesswork out of my own romantic future. I’d been brought up with the same expectations of a majority of my straight-leaning female friends: that it was not just possible but preferable to expect everything from one person, forever.

Austen’s era marked a relatively new way of thinking about the role of marriage, one organized on the individualistic notion of personal happiness rather than the participation in a tradition of social and family organization. The Romantic period made way, you could say, for romance. And in Austen’s novels, the folly implicit in the pursuit of romance drives the action. Not that Austen was herself a fool for love; as a writer and thinker she acutely recognized that the ideal relationship is a tough one to come by. (It feels mean but important to mention here that Austen died alone.)

Even considering how she put love on the agenda, the expectations of marriage Austen laid out in her works, by the standards of their 21st-century analogs, verge on the enviably quaint. Contemporary relationship narratives apply unending pressure to settle down without ever settling for. We are told, loud and clear and over and over, that Mr. Right will come along, and he’ll give us butterflies and the feeling of home, he’ll be our best friend and the man of our dreams. To compromise would guarantee a lifetime of regret and undermine our self-respect—the opposite of the girl power we’ve grown up with.

Austen’s heroines have been beloved through the ages because they still read as wise, rising above the bullshit that their more tragic foils inevitably succumb to. Elizabeth Bennet only accepts the hand of wealthy suitor Mr. Darcy once she recognizes his strength of character. Her younger sister Lydia, meanwhile, narrowly escapes social ruin by taking up with the moneyless cad Wickham, who then has to be bribed into marrying her. Austen’s heroines do not compromise; they just happen to gravitate toward their most ideal outcome, as though self-interest were commensurate with moral fortitude.

“Most of us, speaking frankly, are marrying for money. At least in part.”

Likewise, it’s only by holding ourselves to the implausible-on-paper standards of mate selection that we might arrive at the end game of a forever-match equipped to tick off any remaining “to-dos” from our self-actualization checklists. I grew up understanding that, for a smart and self-sufficient woman, a partner wasn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of life . . . except that it sort of, actually, was.

When considering coupledom as something that eventually leads to a lifelong commitment, we, understandably, weigh the pros and cons of a given relationship carefully. Do we aim for security or sustained chemistry, we might ask ourselves, or risk shooting for both at once (and then some)? Do we factor our attachment to our partner’s families or treat our significant other as an independent entity and our union as an island—or maybe a two-island archipelago in the variably navigable waters of life? (Do two islands even count as an archipelago? Are fixed landmasses an appropriate analogy for beings that move—maybe even apart—through time?) And, possibly, a scale-tipping question that pertained just as much to the Bennet sisters as it does to the average woman today: when men continue to hold significantly greater earning power than women, is it vulgar to consider economics?

A recent analysis by the American Association of University Women shows that women in the US bear approximately two-thirds of the nation’s student-debt burden, borrowing more and more than our male classmates, only to earn less after graduation. These figures are comparable in Canada, according to data from the Government of Canada’s Budget 2017 Gender Statement, and nearly identical in the UK as well. In truth, I simply would not have weathered the financial unpredictability of an early writing career if I hadn’t met and loved a good man with a great job, one who shouldered the bulk of our shared bills. While a sizable number of my creative-aspirant peers quietly bridged sporadic paychecks with parental subsidies, my boyfriend and I shared a cheap apartment where the distribution of expenses was income-proportional, and the only strings attached were our shared and indefinite future.

My ambivalence over this state of financial affairs has continued to linger beyond the borders of that relationship. To be clear: we were in love. Yet, it’s also true that during the years that I racked up the chops and bylines I hoped would eventually secure my financial independence, I felt like a kept woman. I wanted a relationship that was altruistic and fair, but I also wanted the experience of self-sufficiency. I hated feeling beholden. And I continue to reap what I hated.

We weren’t technically married, but in Canada, where we lived, our common-law partnership was legally regarded as though we were. I didn’t make the choice to be there simply because he made more money than I did, even if I benefited from it; on the contrary, I believe this dynamic contributed to the relationship’s demise. Studies have found that financial harmony within a long-term partnership is essential for that partnership’s success. And being partnered at all is considered essential for financial harmony, period. Even so, I’m not above speculating who has or hasn’t “married for money” with the judgmental undertones that imply I would only tie the knot for some other reason. But most of us, speaking frankly, are marrying for money. At least in part. The contract of marriage was founded as an economic alliance and it remains as much today: shared roof, shared bills, shared wealth or lack thereof. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t need to involve the state to make it real, nor lawyers to make it stop.

What has been par for the course throughout the history of courtship, and under scrutiny by Austen, remains true today. Somehow, still, it’s a (white) man’s world. Men of means in particular hold disproportionate power in the heterosexual quest for companionship, a cliché echoed on celebrity tabloid magazine covers and in romantic comedy plot lines, recurrent in a subclass of New York Times wedding announcement that may or may not make mention of a much younger bride’s “wisdom beyond her years.” My best friend and I sometimes joke about the distant-future day when our devoted male partners will decide to direct their gravity-yielding anatomy toward tenderer—yet improbably still willing—pastures. Neither of us believes this would actually happen to us, but there’s a fatalism to our breezy texts.

“These days it seems unromantic, at best, to suggest that romance and pragmatism are diametrically opposed ideals, even if people’s mating habits often tell a different story.”

Possibly for better than worse, ours is an era of technologically enhanced sexual transparency. Everyone’s on Tinder and OkCupid, Bumble and/or any other number of apps for managing the burden of finding love (be it for life or the afternoon). There are even nakedly transactional dating sites for married couples seeking an affair, and for facilitating “sugar baby” configurations between (usually) young women and wealthy older men, though same-sex and sugar momma pairings are also brokered by such sites. The latter cohort are seeking an “arrangement”—one of the aforementioned sites is literally called SeekingArrangement—that blurs the boundaries between sex work and plain old-fashioned dating, typically involving an exchange of material provisions for companionship and sex.

The trademarked slogan of SeekingArrangement is “Mutually Beneficial Arrangements,” only barely euphemistic. The site’s implied market exchange of young female sex and older male wealth replicates a cultural paradigm so familiar to the average North American adult that there’s barely a need to elaborate on what exactly an “arrangement” entails. (As it happens, the site operates across 139 countries worldwide.)

To either cover its tracks or assuage the moral hangups of its pricklier clientele, the website’s language uses the words “relationship” and “arrangement” interchangeably. It’s a clever bit of branding, given that while most people are able to suss out what’s beneath the wink-and-nod, anyone who’s ever been in a relationship will agree that all partnerships require some degree of compromise. The basis of every partnership is matching one’s preferred give-and-takes with those of someone else. SeekingArrangement reasons that its site gives couples a leg (or something) up on coupledom by letting each party be upfront about at least a few major expectations off the bat. Aren’t we all, in some way, seeking an arrangement?

There have been moments when I’ve found myself sheepishly jealous of what SeekingArrangement calls “the Sugar Lifestyle,” a transactional approach to partnership that doesn’t pretend to ignore the economic imbalance between parties, nor the dating-market commodity of youth. Not that it’s in my constitution to feign approval at the type of man who believes he has “earned” lots of money, but maybe life would have been easier in the medium term if I’d held my nose and plunged headfirst into the sugar bowl as a 24-year-old. Even then, I was acutely aware of the specific time-sensitive desirability I held, as a woman just over the threshold of my twenties, and I also appreciated that I still held the cards to play that deck if I felt like it—an insurance policy whose finite nature no woman recognizes more than one who is only barely an adult.

But these days it seems unromantic, at best, to suggest that romance and pragmatism are diametrically opposed ideals, even if people’s mating habits often tell a different story. Nearly one in five Americans will fess up to having cheated on their partners, despite a widely held understanding of infidelity as an ultimate act of betrayal. While I agree with pretty much everyone that partnering for romantic compatibility is ideal, I’ve also spent many agonizing hours interrogating the odds of my own ability to sustain romantic connectivity with the same human being over the course of a lifetime. It feels good to be devoted to a person you love and who loves you back, yes. But people grow, either in parallel, together, or apart, and emotional compasses don’t hold fast to magnetic north.

Social values are the product of conditioning, informed by our own living conditions and what we’ve learned from those who came before us. And, where it comes to following your heart, “those who came before us” is a relatively short list. Love hasn’t always been conceptually tied up in the context of a singular forever-marriage. In fact, it wasn’t until the 18th century that anyone really did the marrying-for-love thing at all. A majority of people, across the history of humanity, had agreed that the risk was simply too high.

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From Hard to Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up. Used with permission of Coach House Books. Copyright © 2018 by Kelli Maria Korducki.