He was drunk at the time. Coming to his senses he swears off the grog for 20 years. It was England in the mid-nineteenth century. Thus opens Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.
Such things were not confined to fiction, according to a myth-debunking presentation at the National Family Summit this week.
While the brazen vote-enticing speeches given by Paul Keating and John Hewson snatched the front pages and lead television items, far more prescient and cerebral things were stated by other speakers. Ita Buttrose, the organiser of the conference, warned that political parties would ignore the family at their peril. A pity she could not warn the media that they would ignore her non-political speakers at their peril.
The wife-selling matter was revealed by Dr Warwick Hartin, the National Director of Marriage Guidance Australia. He says the call for a return to the halcyon days of the 1950s where everyone married for life and raised children is misplaced. The 1950s were an aberration resulting from World War II. Today’s state of a higher proportion of single, divorced, de-facto, and unmarried parents is in fact the more normal pattern of human relations.
Singlehood is at the same rate as the turn of the century; de-facto relationships more common three centuries ago than now.
He made the slightly chilling observation that today’s “”high” divorce rate was only doing what death did a couple of centuries ago: it shortened marriages, albeit indiscriminately. The good went with the bad. Presumably, divorce is more discriminating.
Every society needed a way to dispose of bad marriages, Dr Hartin said, throwing in the point about wife-selling at public auction. The sold wives, he said, gave consent willingly, no doubt happy to shed a wretched husband for a man at least willing to pay to demonstrate her worth to him.
Dr Hartin set out to explain the increase in divorce in the past 25 years: longevity, absence of children for a greater part of the marriage, women in the workforce, a presumption of an entitlement to happiness causing wide scope for disappointment and a nasty, competitive, uncaring economic world. These add up to greater demands on the emotional side of marriage.
“”The psychological fit between the two people is of crucial importance,” he said.
He opined that partners are drawn together by an attraction of opposites driven by childhood family experience. Each tries to make up for deficiencies of the past: a volatile, expressive woman seeks the taciturn man; the man from an over-involved family seeks a woman from a disengaged family in pursuit of the personal space denied him in childhood, and so on. If a partner failed to provide the balance, trouble began.
“”Inter-locking needs are the driving force that draws two people together and sustain or, if mismanaged, divide their relationship,” he said.
The cause of divorce “”is not money, not extra-marital affairs, not interfering in-laws,” he said. “”Good relationships can deal with all of these things. Common to all unsuccessful marriages is mismanagement of the emotional side of the relationship.”
Dr Hartin’s exposition was of much greater profundity than Hewson’s or Keating’s and therefore much less newsworthy. Of equal newsworthlessness was the opinion of Dr Don Edgar, the director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. He defended the family in a way unthought-of by the usual political pro-family noise-makers who wrongly opine that the family is in ruins and morality is going to the dogs and if only divorce were banned and all mums forced to stay with the kids, all would be well.
No, says Dr Edgar. The family is not in ruins. Families of all kinds “”are hanging in there, caring for their own, looking after the aged, the sick, the disabled, sharing their threatened and declining incomes, getting things pretty right, while the rest of society is pretty much a disaster.
“”Our economic systems haven’t got it right _ they’ve promoted greed, non-productive investment and tax write-offs and the highest unemployment since the Great Depression”.
The standard workplace “”is not family-friendly”. The education system was not much better, concentrating on jobs and giving children scant exposure to other intelligences, to human relationships.
“”And our political systems are dominated by the heartlessness of economic rationalism,” he said.
“”Yet in the midst of such institutional chaos, the family remains the linchpin-pin of meaning and satisfaction in most people’s lives.”
By family, Dr Edgar did not mean just the nuclear family. “”It takes many forms and is changing all the time,” he said. “”It evolves and adapts to new circumstances but the cost of family caring and sharing continues on. The family is not breaking up, or breaking down. Rather, like the chrysalis, it is breaking out of its recent tight cocoon and revealing new colours, shapes and forms.”
He scoffed at the idea that “”proper family values” could alone make a better society. It was not families that caused the deficit, the recession, unemployment or violence on TV, he said. Families and individuals had never coped with it all or their own.
Work structures would have to change, perhaps through enterprise bargaining, as the role of “”the wife” diminished and true democracy entered the household, he said. Policy had to recognise new family realities; it could not change them.
The conference was laced with other cerebral contributions. Isabel Tarrago told of the cultural impossibility of capitalism for Aborigines. Accumulation of wealth is a bad, esteem-sapping thing for Aborigines. It is frowned upon. Sharing is automatic and repaid 100-fold in their vastly extended families.
Dr Simon Clarke told of how parents must accept that in these different economic times their adolescent children cannot set up alone. They would stay in the nest. And make love in it. It was difficult for parents to acknowledge their children’s sexuality, but they must. If not, clandestine, sporadic sex in which contraception is less likely will go on anyway.
Dr Elsa Bernardi pointed to the terrors of torture-victim refugees and the difficulties of migrant families dealing with demented oldies who don’t speak English.
These quick sketches cannot do these contributions justice, but they should get greater attention elsewhere. Ms Buttrose hopes her summit will goad governments into greater action, saying political parties will ignore families at their peril.
Michael Henchard, incidentally, after renouncing drink for 20 years, rose to become Mayor of Casterbridge: the rise before the fall. His downfall to poverty, drunkenness and death in that grim century highlight all things people at the National Family Summit are seeking to avoid: a laissez-faire economy giving no help to families.