A reliable
test of character and circumstance is how you spend Sunday morning. What
do you do? Are you able to choose what you do? Or does necessity—for
example, the need to earn money—drive you?
I am
lucky. Unless I have a family emergency or my job has gone crazy, I am a
free woman. Do I dance? Do I sing? Do I burn incense at the altar of
false gods? No, I read the wedding and ceremony announcements in the
Style Section of The New York Times. They are fun, and a
profound social and cultural history.
Obviously,
they show the newly respectable demographies of love. The couples
represent a range of nations, races, ethnicities, and sexualities.
Individually, men and women, be they in a two-sex or same-sex union,
personify the social mobility of the United States. The parents of
Ivy League law school graduates may have been truck drivers, or nurses'
aides, or mechanics in a city transit system. Behind the smiles of the
head shots must be story after story of ambition, energy,
intelligence, determination, and the anxiety that mobility generates. The
jobs these lovers hold—no matter what their class of origin—reflect
the contemporary economy. Women are doctors, lawyers, company chiefs.
Both men and women earn their money from the new
technologies—-developing software, designing web sites, selling
Internet services.
For those
of us who habitually study narrative, each of these announcement extends
the marriage plot that is a staple of song and story. Two people meet,
but one of them is involved in another romance, and so they part, only to
meet years later accidentally or to have one person send an e-mail out to
the other as a whim. And then this Cupid's shot in the dark hits, and the
couple, reunited, are now announcing their marriage in the paper of
record. Or, a young man and a woman, though educated in the United
States, are raised in traditional families that believe in arranged
marriages. One of them refuses to be go along with tradition, but then
freely meets a soul mate from the same culture. Neither can believe their
good fortune.
The most
sophisticated renderings of the marriage plot balance romance and
realism. So amidst the hope and happiness that these versions of the
marriage plot radiate are dry statements of the number of previous
marriages each partner has had, couplings that death or, more often
divorce, have severed.
Read these
announcements. I really do.
This is my
last guest blog. People cling to the cliche that journalism is the
first draft of history. Perhaps a blog is the first draft of an
essay, but it is also an experiment in a conversation, here with
strangers who have had the courtesy to listen to you. My thanks for the
chance to be here.