On public performance and private thoughts | Sunday Observer
Marriage and passion

On public performance and private thoughts

17 October, 2021

More than 30 years ago, I seriously contemplated on writing a theoretical tract on the contemporary manifestations and utility of marriage as an institution. Towards that end, I even travelled to India in search of books I could not find in Lanka.

During that trip, I recall going to three bookshops in Delhi looking for Michel Foucault’s well-known series, The History of Sexuality. At the time, I thought his four volumes in this series should be the basis for my point of departure. I only found three volumes during my Delhi search. Though I began writing, that attempt remained an incomplete project. Today, much more has been written that goes well beyond Foucault. In any case, I am convinced experiences of life have a lot more to say that theoretical tracts like Foucault’s seminal effort developed in specific historical moments and in reference to very specific situations simply cannot.

This almost forgotten past intellectual life came to my mind recently because of an opportunity I got to think quite a bit about marriage and its public performance. This is mostly as the result of seeing the intricacies of a somewhat newer world of marriage in the public domain that was introduced to me by a young friend some months ago.

Sense of belonging

I saw many Facebook pages where self-declared husbands and wives maintain a single page supposedly symbolising their sense of belonging together, wishing each other happy birthday and long life in public, which they also could have done much more intimately in private. I also saw Facebook accounts where husbands would pose with their wives, and wives with their husbands for their profile pictures, replete with public articulations of love and intimacy -- often somewhat formally, and in my mind in pronouncedly colourless ways. Yet my friend showed me multiple private messages she had received from some of these publicly loving husbands making private sexual appeals, which seemed beyond minor flirtations. And this is merely a single example. I have seen many similar examples since then.

In yet another world, I came to know of many people who share their mobile phones with each other along with their passwords; decide who would be their ‘friends’ on Face Book and who they should follow on Twitter, all in apparent manifestations of ‘trust’ and ‘transparency.’ Moreover, this sense of trust was made into a public virtue by narrating it to everyone who cared to lend a sympathetic ear: “you know we are very close; we even share our phones!” But what came to my mind instead was a sense of ‘distrust’ and ‘easy surveillance’ whenever I heard of these cases.

How can there be love, passion or creativity in life and work when privacy and the option to have secrets have been so routinely axed? Aren’t these realistic attributes in life? What exactly is this highly idealised, publicly articulated but seemingly very odd world? Is this real or something hyperreal that is possible to be created in the post-structuralist sense so easily in the era of the Internet and the massive reproduction of imagery, ideas, multiple public selves and emoji-fed emotions? Do these collectively represent something that could be seen as real, but is far from it?

Public performances

While I truly do not have a handle on this and will take some time to make more sense out of these manifestations, I could not help but notice what I saw seemed to be more of a public performance lacking in substance than a private fact rooted in a tangible experience of affection and passion. And they also seemed to be public performances that were forcibly taken out of the domain of the private to make a populist claim about the individual sanctity of marriage, its longevity and apparent success. These practices reminded me of people taking their posh dogs for walks in the nearby parks for the ‘look’ and ‘affect.’ What looked good in public seemed to be of paramount importance. I was intrigued merely because in my book, all these were matters that ideally should have been in the private domain and should not have had anything to do with others.

What I found interesting is that these public performances of love and claims of intimacy coincided with the hegemonic and idealised value vested in the idea of marriage in our country. After all, it is supposed to be the final harbinger of societal happiness, the place of legitimate reproduction to ensure the continuity of society and one of the world’s smallest units of economic production. But beyond these obvious sociological parameters, very few debates in our country seem to consider the far more serious emotional and private considerations of marriage as well as sexuality and intimacy.

For instance, historically, marriage was culturally institutionalised in every society to control sexual access to people within a legally recognised unit, that of the family. But it could not then, and it cannot now, fully control people’s desires; emotions; attractions to others beyond marriage; passion that cannot be fulfilled by the limitations imposed by society with institutions like marriage, and so on.

But obviously, a discussion of these things in formal intellectual circles or in popular forums does not seem to happen as the very notion seem to be taboo. Also, the taken for granted, but utterly flawed and overly idealised wisdom and sanctity imposed on marriage seem to be a burden that cannot be easily cleared to come to terms with the more invisible but nevertheless important issues such as passion and emotion.

The only serious effort I know of, which tries to deal with some of these issues intellectually in the Sri Lankan context is Mihirini Sirisena’s 2018 book, The Making and Meaning of Relationships in Sri Lanka based on her research among university Students in Colombo. A broader exploration of love, desire and their expression in the South Asia region has been attempted in Francesca Orsini’s 2006 edited volume, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History.

Sign of societal stability

In a situation where there is no conversation about what marriage and family do in real terms, as opposed to what it is ideally supposed to do, many people seem to accept even a colourless and dry marriage as a sign of societal stability since its constituent units are intact at least superficially: the spouses, children and in many cases members of extended families.

No matter there might be little personal happiness and once fertile reservoirs of passion might have dried up over time. This brings to my mind the words of Friedrich Nietzsche when he noted, “it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

This is not that different from Ambrose Bierce’s words, “a bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can't let go.” One does not let go in this sense not because of inherent happiness or passion within the institution, but because of societal pressures and fear of public criticism.

Unlike these writers, I will not use the word ‘bad’ to describe these zones of silence about marriage, about what is present in real, but not articulated. But ‘bad’ might be the most apt word to describe the emotional content of many marriages all around us as we know from experience. But it is essential to recognise that marriage as an institution has perhaps already outlived much of its potential in human society when it comes to fulfilling crucial emotional needs including matters of desire, passion and even love.

Work of fiction

After all, the world has changed radically in every conceivable way, including lifestyles and outlooks on life while conventions of marriage and what it routinely institutionalises have not changed much. Seen like this, there is obviously a problem that needs to be discussed and addressed. It seems to me it is that necessary discussion that is further camouflaged and hidden as a result of the public performances of marriage and intimacy I referred to at the beginning.

A highly idealised and utterly romanticised idea of marriage and intimacy uploaded on social media is not a fact. Instead, it is an evolving work of fiction. It is a public fetish, but not necessarily a private fact. It is for mass consumption, but not necessarily a lived reality in its fullest sense.

Until people are willing to come out of this shell and address what marriage can and cannot do and the role of passion and desire in the realms of life far away from the shores of marriage, it would be difficult not to let society slip into a dry, colourless and seemingly pious, but emotionally dysfunctional Netherland. With these thoughts for reflection, let me end with the following lines:

“As the sun rose

We crossed the river

From the shore of feeling

To that of passion;

Long before the sun set

We were back where we began,

To embrace ordinariness

And life devoid of colour

To perform the myth

Of 'living happily

Ever after.'”

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