Marriage in the balance

Rev. Dr Paul Galea's analysis of young Maltese couples and their commitment to marriage has attracted a lot of media attention. But not nearly enough. The focus has tended to be on some statistics cited. His main argument, however, has hardly been reported, even though it is of considerable interest.

In reporting it, I am drawing on his written paper. Fr Galea's main concern is with "balance" and how to reconcile the various tensions that find a nerve centre in individual marriages: the tensions between marriage as a private relationship and a public good, between contract and a self-defining commitment, between the desires of adults and the needs of children. (He includes a balance between Church and state but more on that later.)

Fr Galea believes such a balance was established historically in Europe. Over the last few decades, however, that balance has been upset. Up to the recent past, a young man and woman had a language of intimacy that helped communicate to each other, not to say themselves, how they felt and where they stood.

It was a language that combined sexuality and public displays, which gave the relationship a structure of feeling and involvement, as the relationship progressed (ideally) from casual dating to engagement and marriage. Presumably, the involvement of parents and other kin in joint teas, dinners and other occasions of reciprocity and exchange served signpost the relationship further and also gave the parents a stake and a say in how the relationship developed.

The language, the pacing and that structured sequence have all gone. Sexual and social intimacy have been divorced so that the meaning and weight of one or the other is unclear for the very people involved.

For Fr Galea, young couples now find their intimate relationships to have no stable, or stabilising, meaning. Their parents, too, are without signposts. They are unsure whether and how to become involved; to the point of not knowing whether to collude with their child's sexual activity in the house, and, thereby, being able to keep a watchful eye, or else forbidding such activity at home but losing the reassurance of surveillance.

The outcome, says Fr Galea, proceeds on one of two broad tracks. A large proportion of young couples get married after a prolonged period - several years - of going steady.

But it appears that that period does not serve to develop their understanding of what marriage entails. They drift into it, Fr Galea suggests. Most marriages recognised as null by the Metropolitan Tribunal in the new millennium were vitiated by "lack of due discretion" and "psychic inability". Fr Galea hints that the drift occurs because of premarital sexual activity (among other factors) and not because it does not take place. Blurring the boundaries between marriage and non-marriage represses the wilful taking of a firm decision to get married or else get out of the relationship (an interesting flip of the notion that sexual abstinence represses one's feelings and puts one out of touch with them).

At any rate, such a drift represents one major track along which many couples are travelling. The other is less travelled but nonetheless represents a disturbingly large minority: it is the route taken by young unmarried mothers, whose uncertainty about the stability of their relationship with the child's father leads them to prefer not to declare his identity to the state.

There is a contrast made between the two kinds of cases. In one, the "respectable" route to marriage, couples appear to shrink from their freedom of independent adult decision. In the other, low educational attainment, poverty and the other complications stemming from single motherhood and marginal fatherhood are likely to reduce greatly the freedom to enter into legal marital commitments.

It is in this context that Fr Galea is calling for a restoration of "balance". Can it be achieved?

Not if the Maltese state persists in not collating some of the necessary available data. Fr Galea's statistics on mixed marriages and single mothers (including some details for three parishes) were considered sensational by the news bulletins.

The comparisons Fr Galea made were useful (though sometimes his statistics are marred by editorial slips). So how much more useful would it be if statistics were collected on mainstream marriages and separations, which included basic rates of breakdown, children affected, income groups involved? No balance can be restored if we do not know more precisely where it is needed.

In seeking balance, we need to be cautious about our assessment of the present and the past. Fr Galea's interpretation of both needs revision; his picture of the past, radically so, since it does not appear to be informed by some of the major works of historical anthropology published since 1983. The past would appear less balanced and the present less discontinuous with what came before.

Finally, we also need to have a better understanding of what a balance of the interests of Church and state would mean in this context. It is true that the Church needs to take the separate interests of the state into account (and perhaps this is all that Fr Galea means). But are there Church interests that the state needs to consider? I doubt it.

ranierfsadni@europe.com