Free The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen Page B

purpose. Maybe. But the general idea of promising oneself to lifelong companionship with another person has proven to be less frail than conservatives have proclaimed year after year. Marriage in the West has outlived some seemingly vital parts of the order it upheld, e.g., the loss of the laws and cultural norms around “illegitimate” children. It survived women working outside the home. By all appearances it will survive gay marriage. Certainly the gay marriage movement underscores the continued power of the institution, given that the movement is driven by the desire of an excluded group to take part in it. What is clear, however, is that marriage isn’t what it used to be. Something has changed at its core. And as love is increasingly thought of as its center and its condition, the rites, roles, and laws of marriage have been transforming as well.
    An instructive example is the wedding. At many weddings, vows are spoken that date to the eleventh century. After the love revolution, however, what those words are doing is not the same. It used to be that two individuals walked into the church one day and walked out of it with a new relationship, new responsibilities, new rules, effected in the public vow. Whatever its other ethical dimensions, the wedding was on the model of a contract, and could be prosecuted like one.
    When love becomes the basis of marriage, however, the vows take on a different kind of significance. They become the declaration, the lived representation, of the ardor that the two people feel for each other. This change has been accelerating in the last fifty years, when many premarital couples start to live together and basically have mini-marriages. The words commemorate and crown the bond; they do not bind. This commemoration is not nothing. The “I do” marks and makes memorial a mutual devotion that already has a life of its own but that otherwise sprawls in a messy and often unspoken way across a lifelong loving companionship. But a representation is a radically different sort of thing for a ceremony to be, and a very different experience.
    I believe that the honeymoon has had a similar recent history. In the twentieth century the honeymoon was for intimacy and initiation. In the last couple of generations, it lost this more direct function. Now intimacy and initiation take place in the first months of, as we put it in our maximally understated and sweetly simple way, “being with” someone.
    What happens when the honeymoon loses its function? Does it just become a vacation with a special name? That’s basically how I approached it (not really thinking one thing or another about it). I thought it was a good excuse to go somewhere warm in December. We were, as everyone else we know is, exhausted. I vaguely figured that if twenty-first-century honeymooners don’t fall into each other’s arms anymore, well, then they collapse on the bed side by side. It sounded nice. But my experience was that that’s not quite the honeymoon’s mood either. Instead the honeymoon has gone the way of weddings and a lot of other traditional things: what was once performative becomes commemorative.
    This memory-making—that this is to be a representative good time, that the cameras are rolling, as it were—can make you do all sorts of idiotic things on your honeymoon. I was seriously considering making some sort of stand against a whole Hawaiian family, one on six (what would this even have looked like?), because they had stolen my boogie-boarding spot. I stood in the shallows, with a foamy wave sucking at my calves, scheming how to seize the day.
    The worst of it, though, is the nasty pathology of presence. The honeymooner wants, above all, to be present. But he wants to be that way so that he can have been that way on his honeymoon. The result, in my experience anyway, is the opposite of that intended: each moment slips through his fingers; everything is always already over.
    In its own way, the wedding too