The Language of Matrimony

A few weeks ago, for the first time ever I had to introduce CAG, my beloved, as my “husband” (we spent our first month as a married couple almost a thousand miles apart, that’s why it happened only recently). He later commented on the seeming ease with which I did it. I told him he was quite wrong. But not so much because I’m still not used to us being married, but because I don’t like the word. It seems to lack affection, romance, and fun of couplehood and implies, to me at least, nothing but responsibility and burden, not to mention the old-fashioned patriarchic domination. It got me thinking – is there a word that would satisfy me more?

I don’t seem to find one entirely to my liking, in either languages I speak (English and Russian that is, for those who might be wondering). Unsure whether this is my very subjective perception, I did some etymological research, which was a lot easier to do from the couch than pretty much any sociological study: my main data source were the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary online, and the Russian version of Wiktionary (the last, I concede, is not the most authoritative source, but the only one available to me without a trip to a library). Here are my findings.

Turns out, I wasn’t so wrong about “husband”: as far I can decipher MWCD’s abbreviations, in Old English it meant “master of a house” and in Old Norse – “householder.” What else but relations of property and power comes to mind?! (“Wife,” on the other hand, is “of obscure origin,” as OED puts it.) The politically correct and now hip “partner” would seem a lot better: it’s gender-neutral and almost unequivocally suggests parity of both participants. But it does not transcend, in my opinion, the connotation of marriage as a business-like union that two sides enter for utilitarian rather than romantic reasons.

For someone, who does not speak Russian, “spouse” would probably be ideal. It too evokes equality of the two sides and even hints at something metaphysical, not just purely material: it is related to “espouse,” one of which meanings is “to take up and support as a cause, become attached to.” I kinda like it: marriage as faith rather than a business venture. But the Russian ruins it all. “Spouse(s)” translates as suprug for him, supruga for her, and suprugi for them together, which quite literally mean “joined together by a harness (upriazh').” The two of them, like workhorses covered in sweat and grime, pulling a plow, forever yoked together, that’s the image that comes to my mind. Suprug is not a lover, soul mate, or even friend; he is bonded to, if not by, his spouse for backbreaking toil.

There are also muzh and zhena, which, respectively, come from “man” and “woman.” Not bad maybe, but the former rhymes with “gorged on pears” which connotes “kicked back, slacked off,” while the latter – with “Satan,” no analysis necessary here although the roles of domination seem to be reversed. Another wonderful marriage-related Russian word is brak, the institution of marriage itself. Apparently, it comes from Old Slavonic for “take” and, in this particular context, to “snatch, kidnap [the bride],” as apparently was a custom of ancient Slavs, according to Wiktionary. Better yet, a modern homonym of brak means “defect” and “waste.” Why would anyone even contemplate partaking in an institution with such a name?!

In any case, husband, spouse, partner, muzh, or suprug, are all either too bland for my taste or smack of old-fashioned conception of marriage as an economic union, rather than romantic relationship. Well, it is widely known that marriage based on love rather than economic considerations is an utterly modern phenomenon (see, for example, “Love and Property” in Randall Collins’s Sociological Insight). But does it mean that we have to carry on using the terms with outdated meanings? After all, as offspring of cultural and linguistic turns in humanities and social sciences we need to remember that language constitutes reality just as much as the other way around. Maybe the decline of the institution of marriage – high divorce rates, late nuptials, commitment-phobia, marital infidelity etc. – is to a certain extent a result of this discrepancy between expectations of affectionate companionship and the old notions of marriage as economic enterprise that still pervade the language we use to describe it?

I don’t have a universal solution to the problem, after all I am not a linguist, just a sociologist. For now, my beloved and I settled for “wifele” and “husbandchik” to stretch a bit the linguistic limitations within which we have to operate for now.

I also propose that if we all want our unions to be joyous (most of us do get hitched sooner or later) we call it *merriage*. Any other suggestions, folks?