On Marriage

by Devorah Baum

A shining exploration of why we marry from highly acclaimed author of Feeling Jewish Devorah Baum.

For better or worse. For richer or poorer. Till death us do part . . .

We've always done it, we're still doing it. Straight, queer, coupled or uncoupled, none of us live outside the cultural and psychological influence of marriage and all of us are written into its story. But why this highly contested and ancient practice has remained relevant to so many is by no means certain. Is it an act of love, a leap of faith, a holy bond, a contractual commitment, a bid for security, a framework for family, a hedge against being alone? Or could its traditional cover conceal something a bit more radical? Why do we do it at all?

Drawing on philosophy, film, fiction, comedy, psychoanalysis, music and poetry, Devorah Baum considers the marriage plot. What are we really talking about when we talk about marriage? And what are we really doing when we say, 'I do'?

Entertaining, illuminating, candid and consoling, On Marriage is a critique and a celebration of the many contradictions of matrimony - its sorrows as well as its joys - and an enquiry into its effects on us all.

'Devorah Baum is a visionary writer. Her intellectual depth, her emotional precision and her searing insight can only be gathered under an old fashioned wisdom. If more 'self-help' was written by people as smart and emotionally intuitive as Devorah than more people would actually feel 'helped'' Zadie Smith

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Relationships, Feminism

336 pages, Paperback

Published January 14, 2025

Reviews

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me declare an interest. The author of this remarkable book is an exceptionally dear person in my life: not just a mentor and friend but also a hero – I still very much want to be Devorah Baum when I grow up. So while I could never be unbiased I can only insist that this is a luminous work by a radiant intelligence. Marriage is a house of many rooms, an institution as various as the people who’ve constituted it. With an imagination as dialectical as it is subtle, as lively as it is compassionate, Baum guides us through the labyrinth of matrimony, untangling its contradictions while illuminating its radical possibilities.

[Vladislav Burda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devorah Baum has interesting story.
She is 50 and married to film director.
Her husband filmed their life in movie New Man. And she wrote about their life in the book “On Marriage”.
They are serial marriage exhibitionists. Because for them marriage exists only when it’s “approved” by the 3-rd side.
Devorah as professor of English literature tried to dig deeply in the subject. She uses multiple novels and movies as reference and context for discussion.
In the book you could find many interesting examples and definitions of marriage. My favorite is, that marriage is the continuation of conversation.
And this conversation she is not keeping inside her marriage, but sharing it with all of us.
“Marriage, in fact, may be the one of the only things most people do that they vow, on point of entry, not to get out of alive”.
“Marriage could be considered as direct competitor to philosophy, because it is also merely offending priority of thought ahead of action!”
You could find plenty of those definitions/aphorisms in the book.
The whole concept is to look at the marriage from different angles. From finding the match to divorce and remarriage.
Why marriage could be so entertaining and boring? Why men could be so immature? Why we have such big need for certainty?
Keep reading the book and discover a lot of new knowledge about marriage.
This book also helpful if you want to know what to watch with your partner.

[Alec · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't possibly give this one 3 stars, despite the fact that it felt like a bit of a slog to get through. I suppose that's because there's so much philosophy and critical analysis; it's all well and good, but I found it a bit hard to get through, a bit jumpy and often that Baum laid it on a tad thick at points. There were moments when I was thinking, "Exactly what is she trying to say here?" Probably that's on me for not reading carefully and following her train of thought.

That being said, there were passages that made me cry, made me laugh and honestly stop to think. These followed by others where I could barely tell you what the idea behind the words was. There's a massive bibliography at the end, one that clearly Baum delved into work by work to craft her own thoughts. There's dozens of literary works from Shakespeare to romcoms pondering and playing with the questions of marriage: Why do we get married? Was our childhood thought of marriage inevitable? Where does love fit in marriage? Where do kids? Is love compatible with philosophy? Honestly, some of these hit hard and grabbed my attention, while others made my eyes sleepy. I suppose what also bugged me was Baum's insistence that philosophy doesn't have any thoughts on marriage, as she proceeded to showcase different philosophical thought on marriage. It felt like a set up, "This is an untouched subject...by the way, here's a bunch of examples of when people have spoken about it before." Strong possibility I'm just hatin'. Granted, Baum does do a fantastic job of grabbing from the literary world (spoiler..she's an English professor) and the world of film (spoiler...her husband's a filmmaker) to probe marriage and all its beauty, weirdness, commitment and secrecy. Often, it felt a bit more like literary analysis than a critique or comment on marriage. Overall, a thought provoker but one that might've been too overtly philosophical for my taste.

[Karolína Klinková]

„O manželstve ľudia často hovoria ako o sexe: ako keby vedeli, čo hovoria. Nikto ale v skutočnosti netuší, o čom to sakra hovorí, keď hovorí o sexe, keď hovorí o láske - a ani keď hovorí o manželstve,“ povedala mi v rozhovore akademička a autorka knižky On Marriage Devorah Baum.

Je to zaujímavá knižka - Baum nevystupuje ani „za“, ani „proti“ manželstvu; pomenováva jeho krásu aj problematické aspekty. Pracuje s filozofickými textami, s náboženským, feministickým aj politickým myslením a aj s mnohými literárnymi dielami, v ktorých pozoruje, ako sa vyvíjali príbehy, ktoré si o manželstve rozprávame.

Neviem, či pri nej prídete na to, čo si vlastne o manželstve myslíte. Ale myslím, že si možno začnete klásť veľmi zaujímavé otázky, ktoré ste si predtým nekládli.

Môj rozhovor s autorkou nájdete:
- česky tu - https://denikn.cz/1643273/a-zili-stas...
- slovensky tu - https://dennikn.sk/4627589/najstastne...

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up because I thought she did have some good points. I spent a substantial part of the book wondering what her point was, which in the very last couple paragraphs she acknowledged was valid because she too didn't know what she thought about marriage. So the whole book felt like an erudite exploration of...what other people thought about marriage? Which made it kind of a slog for me personally. My primary complaint, though, was that the overall tone of the book felt...negative about marriage. Which, granted, there are plenty of things that you can be negative about regarding marriage as an institution, or even any specific marriage. But the author isn't anti-marriage. In some places she is deeply grateful to her spouse. So why so much negativity? What it comes down to, in my opinion, is that she spends most of her time reviewing thinkers and artists who are negative about marriage, rather than those who are positive about it. Her discussion about religion and marriage totally ignored some religious perspectives about marriage (including my own), which I don't feel are exactly fringe. So it was meandering, negative, and oddly insular (in my opinion). But it was also funny (sometimes), very widely read (the vast majority of books and movies she discussed have never so much as been on my radar as existing), thoughtful, thought-provoking, deeply personal at times, and had some good points. On the whole, I would not recommend to most people. But if this kind of topic or obscure literature is interesting to you, go for it.

Quotes: "the story of Eros...reveals that it is no less difficult nor any less heroic to live with love than it is with death."
"It's a curious kind of song in which passion isn't spent exactly, but love has turned into labor." In my opinion, that is largely what love is.
"Love, in other words, once it gets tied up with marriage, can be co-opted in such a way as to capitalize on interests that may be very different to those of the lover." I think this can be true...but to a point. And I don't think it necessarily has to be true, which is kind of what the larger part of this section is claiming. I think it also ignores the power of love itself to be beneficial outside of other interests.
"When marriage is in crisis, the world itself is in crisis, because no one any longer can be held to their word." Although this isn't necessarily what the book is arguing (again, never could tell for sure what the book was arguing), I thought this was a valuable point.
"a modern era where unreasonable emphasis has been placed on the shoulders of lovers to expect from each other what an entire community once used to provide." Yup.
"Creating things with another person can be wonderful, but it's just as often hard. The collaborative can be the divisive...We fought a lot during that period. The things we were going through together we experienced as if we were going through them alone."
"Which isn't of course to deny that there are familes who know how to engage brilliantly as a single unit all together, and in such a spirit that everyone gets to be playful and everyone childlike -- although I do often wonder if someone within that constellation is perhaps concealing the sort of adult anxiety that makes this playfulness possilbe; which someone, I tend to assume, is likely to be the one in the maternal role who enables the play but who frequently finds it hard to feel playful herself. Actually, I'm telling on myself now." This reminds me of a conversation I overheard in a meeting of women a few months ago. And resonates.
"Marriage is about accepting change in each other."
(Quoting her mother) "For a mother can only really be useful as a mother, he counselled, to the degree that she doesn't imagine her only emotion is love and her only method self-sacrifice." Yup.
"I guessed who I must really resemble with my constant complaints about my never-ending to-do list: the middle-class family on the make; the family who can cause even those they love most to feel squeezed into a schedule, like just another item they have 'to do.'"
Quoting Simone de Beauvoir, "Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife." Don't necessarily fully agree with the larger concept of the whole quote, but I definitely feel the emotion in this one. I think finding purpose and meaning in those labors is a necessity, but not an easy one.
"I think it's perhaps that we feel these suffering parts of each other and ourselves are the future that awaits us; as if it's these very parts that we're truly married to, committed to, devoted to; as if caring for each other's bodies as they move through time is what our marriage ultimately is, or means."
"They can't really be apart from each other because they are a part of each other."
"Marriage, not necessarily as a legal contract, but as the metaphor for a certain structure of meaning and relating, still has a lot to tell us about how we might come to know love."
"I'm married to someone who, for better or for worse (and we've definitely sampled both), I don't wish to let go. I'm married to someone I feel I can't live without. Could that even be what this book is up to in the end?" I kind of wish she'd led with this instead of ending with it, as in some ways I think it's one of her most powerful and personal statements about marriage.

[Skyler DeYoung · Rating 4 out of 5]

•” The gift of marriage, that is, as that which, rather than speaking for us, might instead become a means of our learning to speak – by responding to the logic of another person in their irreducible strangeness and their strange irreducibility. For if anyone bears the logic of that other person, it’s one’s spouse.”

•”For however much a standup resembles a despot, one could equally observe that a sense of humour resembles a sense of justice. It's this we can sense, for instance, in the pleasure of repartee whose drive for equilibrium comes from the balancing and rebalancing of the scales — a pleasure never better depicted than in the back and forth of witty dialogue between the lovers in Shakespeare's plays or Hollywood's golden age of romantic comedies. For what those couples learn from each other, and what we learn from those couples, as they seek to tame each other into obedience, is that mastery isn't what they're looking for, after all. They're enjoying their quarrelling too much. Or they're enjoying the pleasure of a relationship that, though it might look like a battle for mastery, is really thrilling to the dynamics of equality. Without that equality, each sparring partner comes to realize, their own words would never really feel responded to. Nor could they expect to enjoy the sort of mirthfulness that comes from being open to surprise. as in the sort of mirthfulness which, rather than seeking from the other the assurance that one is right, finds in the other a failsafe way of being proven continuously and enjoyably wrong.
Indeed, it's this very inevitability - that your opposite and equal number will always find a way to prove you wrong - that not only renders the present something scintillating, but carries itself over into the promise of the future as well. So if marriage, viewed accordingly, does provide a certain vision of social justice, that's not because justice is perceived as a virtue, whether in politics or morality. It's because justice is experienced as a pleasure. And not just any pleasure: pleasure at its purest.”

•”For marriage […] is nothing if not a practical way of finding out what love is.”

•”Marriage, that is, takes what’s bestial when it roams at large in the world and then sanctifies the same under its own covers.”

•”The happily married are the ones who have accepted their own ignorance and learned to play as they did during their infancy; […] the ones who’ve simultaneously killed and reinforced the institution by making it suit themselves.”

•”If paradise is what gets lost when woman wants more, then there must all along have been a problem in paradise.”

•”For what the marrying couple are essentially asking of their witnesses is to help them naturalize their romance by making of their love’s origins in fantasy something that can also work in reality. It’s in this sense that the wedding aims to turn the fallen angel back into one of the heavenly host, by treating somebody who might be inclined to destroy my bliss as somebody who I will instead invite to help me sustain it.”

•”Love, historically, has been highly seductive for women, agrees sociologist Eva Illouz, ‘precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.’ Love, in other words, once it gets tied up with marriage, can be co-opted in such a way as to capitalize on interests that may be very different to those of the lover. As such, the liberalization of marriage to accommodate individual passions and preferences, as well as the more recent adaptation of the institution to other cultural shifts - e.g. the legalization of interracial and gay marriage - doesn’t mean the inequalities enshrined within marriage’s traditional arrangements have themselves been rearranged. For Chambers it rather suggests the opposite: that marriage will elasticate itself as necessary to protect the interests of its key beneficiaries.”

•”What a coupled relation seems to threaten, in the eyes of those running shy of it, is to render them dangerously demystified, transparent, known – once the fall into conventionality, or worse, contentedness. The artist who feels they cannot afford to be so satisfied will accordingly avoid any framework – such as marriage or such as psychoanalysis - that could certify them by telling them who exactly it is they are. A clever dodge if what impels creativity is a wish to escape reality, or if creativity is the half- desperate act of someone so deprived of herself that she invented one – or postponed the necessity of having to be a person at all.
[…]
The adventurousness of narrative might have no condition of possibility without the regulatory force of marriage as its organizing principle and idea. The intimate relationship between the family and the writer, or the familiar and the novel, is thus a close even if ambivalent one. There would be no reproductive history of the family, after all, if the child didn’t rupture its unity to break away and create its own variations on theme. So, the child whose role may well be, according to convention, to confirm the couple’s identity by naturalizing their relation and proving its profitability according to the accumulative logic of capital (multiplication), also represents, within the same social order it reproduces, a chaotic and creative presence – a plus-one subtracts from the unity of the whole by adding its own difference and making a case for oddness rather than evenness.”

•”Josh sees me at my least made-up, my least attractive, and yet he’s the one who needs to feel attracted to me. And we’re both quite slovenly people. So one thing couples often do is have ‘date nights’ they go out into the world together. And in that outing the eye of the world acts as a third character in their relationship: a character that’s intrinsic to the sexuality of their relationship. So yes, the element of exhibitionism can probably add a kind of interest.”

•”What hails you is what implicates you, like it or not. The email that lands in your inbox, for example. Or the ad that pops up on your screen. Or the question ‘Are you married?’, or, as it might be posed to a young girl, ‘Who will you marry when you grow up?’ Or when you’re called upon as a member of a certain race, or class, or sex, or religion, or ethnicity. It doesn’t matter if you feel recognized, or misrecognized by what, or who is hailing you – it’s the very recognition that you’ve been hailed that puts you within their relation. Once you’ve been called upon, something has been contracted between you and the other, rendering you as responsible for what your mistake and for as for what you take yourself for.”

•”Whatever its claims to liberty, comedy has always been the illiberal method of figures seeking to demonstrate who exactly has the power, the pleasure and the freedom to screw with you, and who doesn’t.
[…]
With the slipperiness of words as they function in comedy also means, after all, is that, regardless of how sincerely, we may intend our words, if we really are sincere, it isn’t whether we mean our words, but what we can learn to do with them, that matters. And that, I would hazard, is what the comedian knows, and it’s what the spouse knows best of all.”

•”Marriage is where monotheism gets transformed into monogamy, where faith becomes fidelity, where oaths become vows, where the afterlife becomes the happy ever after.
[…]
While many a married couple can happily tell you how they have coffee each morning or pancakes on the weekend religiously for instance, they’re usually much harder, pushed to think of what things they do together progressively.”

•”Reflecting on how maternity, in order to generate society, must be in some sense radically other to that society, she noted that if the social world is aligned to the name of the father, and bound by the authority of his word, then the maternal experience must be of a type that not only labours to reproduce that world, but simultaneously threatens to undo its construction. Childbirth, after all, suggests a truth about the human condition that patriarchal codes and taxonomies can never entirely master, or entirely appropriate: namely that it's from the mother that another being - wordless and infant - comes forth. Hence why, says Kristeva, maternity gives priority to a mobile, freely associative, pre-Oedipal language that makes of the maternal body 'a place of permanent scission' that will never cease to interrupt and lay waste to the 'symbolic law organizing social relations'.”

•”It’s as if our parenting, particularly in its less impressive moments, has shown up in order to sit like a judge upon our marriage. And at least because a good-enough marriage made up of not-good-enough parents probably isn’t a good-enough marriage after all.”

•”Marriage is about accepting change in each other.”

•”Marriage could also be the chance of something else: a situation inside which adults will return to the unformed haze of their own childhoods, yes, but only because, given that they are now adults, they might yet learn to do things differently this time.•

•”Loneliness is only ever intensified, after all, in the company of the person who has failed to thwart it.”

•”Although the notion that I don't have to go on like this remains something that divorce, whether name-checked or not, continually conjures. I may be married, but I'm still free. He may be married, but he's still free. It's this that makes divorce, as a structure of possibility subsisting tacitly inside a marriage, alternately liberating and terrorizing.”

[Steve Warsaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging treatise on marriage told through the lens of television, movies, literature, and philosophy. By using this lens Baum exposes and enlightens us about the institution of marriage through history. It's a challenging read and I found myself having to focus more intently. It's not exactly academic writing but a close hybrid. So, know that going to work on this one.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was much to like here, but it was a bit syrupy at times - fun to consume, difficult to wade through. This is a historical/philosophical look at the institution of marriage (who wants to live in an institution, amiright?) with a fair sprinkling of personal anecdotage which was just as often fluffy as it was illuminating.

I think I would have enjoyed this more as a Friday night dinner conversation than a work of non-fiction. The author and I have so many reference points in common that I enjoyed the work even as I found it a little labored at times. One chapter in particular which went from a deep look at the motivations of Tevye's daughters into a nuanced take on Fleabag had me cheering from the sidelines. I felt seen.

I never thought this much about marriage back when I got married. 32 years later, I'm not sure how helpful it would be for us to think this much about our marriage. Still, maybe I'll see if my wife wants to read it.

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m convinced Devorah Baum wrote On Marriage for me. Baum analyzes many of my favorite texts (including Normal People, Fleabag, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Ordinary People, and Fiddler On The Roof) to highlight the many complexities of marriage. In examining the language, affect, and representations surrounding marriage, Baum explores the ways in which we (have and continue to) understand marriage as an enduring structure for our romantic, social, and political lives.

[Bryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book MONTHS ago, so it is obviously wasn't extraordinarily compelling--but each chapter in many ways functioned as a standalone essay. It is essentially literary criticism focused on depictions and meaning of marriage across a variety of media from a variety of time periods. So, if literary criticism isn't your thing, this is a 1.0 star. If literary criticism is your thing AND you like Miranda July and/or Sarah Manguso, this will be a 5.0 star. It's an interesting study with detailed readings and connections.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some interesting ideas advanced in these essays, but I found that a lot of the arguments didn’t seem to hold water (especially in the earlier sections of the book). The persuasiveness of these arguments was NOT helped by the lack of copy editing — half of the text were just clauses, not sentences. This really hampered the author’s abilities to get the ideas across.

Ultimately some of the most interesting parts of this book were just the quotes from other authors’ works.

[HY Liu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thought it would be philosophical. It's more like a literary review that examines the marriages of fictional characters. You need to have read the same books or watched the same TV shows to really get the author's points. Also too many unnecessary references to her own married life--I don't need or want to know this, thank you.

[Mare BV · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pleasurable book about difficult murky subject with many important insights, I’ve also enjoyed this sailing through a lot of different literary examples

[Rebecca Stilson]

Interesting. But cannot do another philosophy book right now. Currently reading the wife of bath.

[nilab]

*DNF damn i really tried to make this work but this is boring as fuck!!!!!

[Dorothy Greco · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not work for me. Way too much philosophizing and sharing her brilliant thoughts that seem mostly irrelevant to anyone hoping to learn something about what it means to be married.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed this book
weird lack of queer marriage / non-heteronormative marriage musings