Excerpted from Marriage: The Dream That Refuses To Die (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 225 pages, $25.00. This title will be published in May 2008 by ISI Books, where it will be featured as the Book of the Month.

Until recently, even the harshest critics of marriage never denied that, for better or worse, its nature and purpose have been to unite a man and a woman. Much of the rising tide of criticism leveled at marriage focuses precisely on the tensions of attempting to bridge sexual difference. Men bully, abuse, trivialize, and hopelessly misunderstand women. Women ensnare, emasculate, nag, and cheat on men. The litany goes on, and many of the complaints Archie and Edith Bunker launched at one another in All in the Family sound disconcertingly similar to those of early modern European folk culture or even Aristophanes’ comedies. Among the gods of the ancient Greeks, Hera nagged Zeus, and Zeus philandered, strewing children in his wake.

These first three chapters will offer a series of vignettes intended to illuminate the changing social function of marriage and the current campaign to destroy marriage as a unique and uniquely valuable social bond and the essential cornerstone of cohesive society. Having originated more as a relation between families, tribes, or clans than as a relation between individuals, marriage has gradually been transformed into an exclusively personal relation—a matter of an individual’s “right” to specific benefits and privileges and, perhaps above all, community recognition and approval. Thus, the institution that anchored and transmitted legitimate authority has emerged as the frontline target of a comprehensive attack on any notion of legitimate authority, natural or divine. The flurry of opinions on the crisis of marriage and the family obscures the magnitude of this transformation, but we can ill afford to ignore its implications.

In modern times, complaints about marriage have accelerated. Ironically, this growing dissatisfaction has corresponded with the most sustained attempt to link marriage to romantic love. Love and marriage may, as the song would have it, “go together like a horse and carriage,” but by no means necessarily. First let us consider premodern forms of marriage, including the features that have provoked feminists in particular to dismiss all forms of marriage as blatantly patriarchal and oppressive of women.

Genesis tells us that God created woman and man for each other—“male and female he created them”—and enjoined them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:27–28). And woman He especially created as the true companion for man, who welcomed her as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The author of Genesis reflects, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:23–24). Disobedience to God cost Adam and Eve banishment from Eden. God told Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life,” and He warned Eve that “in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16–17). But even that original sin did not destroy their complementary natures as man and woman, and their expulsion inaugurated the fallen human history of marriage.

The Old Testament often offers a less than appealing picture of marriage, which helps to explain the outrage of some feminist critics. Beginning with Abraham, the patriarchs fathered children with concubines, took second and third wives, and frequently treated their wives as little more than servants. Even Jacob, with his many admirable qualities and his deep love for Rachel, during the years when Rachel seemed barren, fathered children by her sister Leah, whom he had previously repudiated to marry Rachel. Marriage frequently seemed intended solely to produce sons and to preserve the patrimony of the tribes of Israel. Thus, the daughters of Zelophead are told that they may marry whom they please, provided that they marry only “within the family of the tribe of their father,” so that the “the inheritance of the people of Israel shall not be transferred from one tribe to another” (Numbers 36:6–7). In a similar spirit, if a man dies without having a son, his brother must marry the widow, and the first son she bears him “shall succeed to the name of the brother who is dead, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.” And the house of the man who refuses this obligation to build up his brother’s house will be called “[t]he house of him that had his sandal pulled off” (Deuteronomy 25:5).