Marriage promises a shared refuge but leaves both spouses alone

Evidence

Marriage is often a crisis for man as well: the proof is that many masculine psychoses develop during the engagement period or the early period of conjugal life. Less attached to his family than his sisters are, the young man belongs to some group: a special school, a university, a guild, a team, something that protects him from loneliness; he leaves it behind to begin his real existence as an adult; he is apprehensive of his future solitude, and it is often to exorcise it that he gets married. But he is fooled by the illusion maintained by the whole community that depicts the couple as a “conjugal society.” Except in the brief fire of a passionate affair, two individuals cannot form a world that protects each of them against the world: this is what they both feel the day after the wedding. The wife, soon familiar, subjugated, does not obstruct her husband’s freedom: she is a burden, not an alibi; she does not free him from the weight of his responsibilities, but on the contrary she exacerbates them. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1277

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘conjugal society’ myth versus isolation echoes Sartre’s bad faith and the earlier chapters on myth of woman; also connects to the married couple as a doomed project in mid-century existentialist thought. — connects to: The poor serf marriage grounded equality through shared nothingness and mutual labor bonds. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 210; Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance; Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this critique of the couple as refuge compare with feminist critiques that both spouses’ freedom is compromised asymmetrically?

Broader Connections

• Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance #expands (0.85)
• Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage #expands (0.82) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806
• Marriage transforms partners from erotically charged Others into the Same #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1193
• Shared isolation rather than perfect understanding is the basis of real intimacy #expands (0.78) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 753
• Intimacy is shadowed by the knowledge that shared commonalities are not truly exclusive #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9639
• Marriage denies woman the particularity of desire that man retains as citizen #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1135
• Marriage makes woman contingent while man mediates her to the universe #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1196
• Marriage annexes women to the husband’s universe #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1109
• The proximity of the couple makes disentangling their mutual influence nearly impossible #expands (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 43
• Patriarchal marriage serves collective interests, not individual love or happiness #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1132