THE ROMANTIC MORALITY
Take the case of John who is a good Catholic. He married a year out of college and he and his wife have been together three years. Their first child has been born.
Now take Isaac who has said he doesn’t believe in soulmates, who met a girl at a party and after speaking to her a little began having sex with her. He claimed that there was nothing serious about it and there was nothing wrong with this, but as time went on he decided they were a couple. She was what was there and so he decided that love was something that you did not find right away. Love was something that might eventually be arrived at if one worked hard enough.
Take your great grandfather, and let’s call him Hamilton, because that’s a good old fashioned name. Let’s make him, in fact, your great grandfather’s great grandfather. And let’s say he’s a well heeled individual, in good standing with the wealthy Episcopal Church in town. And Hamilton marries… let’s call her Abigail. Of course she was Abigail. She is younger than him and educated in piano. She is not much for companionship but she is a good wife and both families see the marriage as fitting. Love will come in time.
Now, if I say that Isaac’s way of self defeating serial monogamy is wrong and immoral, and I do—if I see meeting someone you don’t know and don’t love and going through the drama of a sex based relationship is, in fact, a bad thing, then many people will agree. At night, when she stays over and she is asleep next to him Isaac lies awake, looking at the ceiling and wishing this were the real thing. That it was real love.
But what if I were to say that John and Hamilton do the same thing? Isaac is thoroughly modern, an atheist who dabbles in drugs and has no time for tradition. But what if I said that the thoughts that go through his head are the same that go through John and Hamilton’s. John, in fact, like Isaac, is a closet homosexual. Like Isaac he does not consider himself gay, but rather as having “urges” that he doesn’t like. And he hopes that despite his desire he will love this woman, and in fact has married her to end that old desire, to reshape himself. He will love her as best he can because loving a man is not allowed, workable or even imaginable. And what now if I said that Isaac, who grew up in a Pentecostal family believes more or less the same thing?
Now, what if I said that Hamilton, the great-grandfather or your great-grandfather doesn’t even know what a homosexual or a heterosexual is? Sex isn’t a word in his vocabulary. He just knows good, Victorian Christian duty and in this desire is forbidden. Desire doesn’t make sense? Then what I am saying is the thing that makes my hackles rise at Isaac’s promiscuity and his continuing settling for less—which can be seen and may actually be “slutty”—is the thing that makes me cringe at John’s good Christian marriage. It is not my Christian morality, for there are many Christians and many moralities, but rather it is my romantic morality that moves against these three marriages.
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