The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (41 page)

But through all the vicissitudes and complications, you follow those real, original rules for finding happiness in love. You keep your distance until getting close is warranted by unmistakable signs that you’re the guy’s object of pursuit. You don’t offer him “unsolicited proofs of tenderness.” You weigh his character, and you determine his intentions. You pace the progress of your own falling-in-love as carefully as you can. And having determined 1) that he’s seriously interested in you, and 2) that he’s worth loving—not just for his fine figure and the beautiful grounds of his Derbyshire estate,
but for his character, too, that is, what he’s really like as a person—you decide that you love him. Or at least that you could, if he loves you. But you don’t blurt it out to him, and you don’t start scheming to rush him into a commitment. You wait for him to catch up to you—and you do that very uncomfortable waiting in the full knowledge that he may not. You don’t let yourself depend on his love until he gives you the unmistakable evidence that he’s stepped out of present-bound views into the kind of love that comes so naturally to you as a woman—love that makes him as eager as you are to offer you a permanent commitment, and secure one from you.

And when he finally tells you he loves you that way, you’re blissfully happy. Because what the hero offers the Jane Austen heroine isn’t just a big step toward happily ever after, or one part of what she’s longing for. It’s the whole ball of wax: love, sex, marriage, real mutual respect grounded in knowledge of each other’s characters, children, shared financial resources, a family of her own.
²⁴

But there’s also another way of pairing up for life in Jane Austen novels. You could call it marriage on the installment plan, or love by increments. Besides the heroines, we also see Lydia Bennet get married to Wickham; Mrs. Clay in the process of (it sure looks like) persuading Mr. Elliot to make her his wife; and Maria Bertram Rushworth trying but failing to get a permanent commitment from Henry Crawford. These women
don’t
follow the original rules.

Lydia and Maria have certainly showered “unsolicited proofs of tenderness” on their lovers. Jane Austen tells us in both cases that it was the strength of the woman’s love that drove the elopement; the men more or less willingly went along for the ride. Mrs. Clay, too, finds that her affections overpower her, so that she abandons scheming to marry Sir Walter and goes to live with Mr. Elliot instead.
²⁵
Jane Austen makes it clear that you
can
end up married this way, too, just as you can by following the rules.

It’s a bit of an iffy proposition, of course. Maria can’t hold Henry; the bitter end of their relationship is one of the ugliest things in all Jane Austen’s
novels: “She hoped to marry him, and they continued together till she was obliged to be convinced that such hope was vain, and till the disappointment and wretchedness arising from the conviction, rendered her temper so bad, and her feelings for him, so like hatred, as to make them for a while each other’s punishment, and then induce a voluntary separation.”

And Lydia is very lucky to—just barely—end up married rather than used and dumped. But Mrs. Clay does seem well on her way to snagging Mr. Elliot: “She has abilities, however, as well as affections; and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may finally carry the day; whether, after preventing her from being the wife of Sir Walter, he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William.”

My money’s on Mrs. Clay to succeed at marriage on the installment plan. Sometimes it does work.

The real difference between the two ways of dealing with men isn’t that the heroines’ rules guarantee you snag the guy. The difference is all about
on what terms
you get him. Remember, you can fail to end up with the man you want if you’re living by the original Jane Austen heroine rules, too. In fact, a crucial element of abiding by those rules is keeping it clear in your mind that there’s no guarantee you’ll get the guy in the end. Being willing to live with that uncertainty is necessary if you’re not going to try to rush things, either by “Rules”-style manipulation or by prematurely revealing your feelings for him. The difference between an Elizabeth Bennet and a Mrs. Clay isn’t just about: do you end up married, or not? It’s about the nature and quality of the relationship, about your dignity, and especially about your freedom to choose.

At first glance, Mrs. Clay’s waiting-to-be-made-an-honest-woman plight may seem completely outdated, now that society no longer punishes living together before marriage. But Mrs. Clay’s situation actually has a lot of resonance today. Are women in the twenty-first century still wheedling and caressing the men they’re living with into marriage? Well, sure. It’s happening all around us, all the time. In fact, you can make a strong case that Mrs. Clay’s relationship style has actually expanded to take over territory that used to be occupied by the Jane Austen heroine dynamic. Today the wheedling and caressing—and arguing and pressuring and ultimatum-ing, and the use of every other possible method of persuasion that might
get a guy to agree to the things we desperately want, but that he’s not inspired to offer us—don’t end with marriage any more. Now even
after
we’re married, we still have to start a whole
new
campaign to talk the man into being willing to have a baby. And a second child. And to share a life together, pooling financial resources and divvying up responsibilities like a real family.
²⁶

How come we don’t get to be like Elizabeth Bennet, saying Yes to a Mr. Darcy who’s eager to offer us everything we want? Or like the heroine of
Mansfield Park
, with an Edmund Bertram “as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire”? Compare Elizabeth and Darcy’s happiness to the “patched-up business” of Lydia’s marriage to Wickham, and you can see why Elizabeth tells Lydia that she does “not particularly like your way of getting husbands.” Why do we have to be like Mrs. Clay, already attached to a man, but with all the work still ahead of us to talk him into giving us the things we want from him? Why does it seem a bridge too far to hope that he might ever actually want those things himself?

The answer has to do with “attachment.”
²⁷
Mrs. Clay, Lydia, and Maria Bertram all end up definitively attached to men who haven’t committed to them yet because they’ve broken the rules meant to protect their freedom to choose. Given the realities of female psychology,
²⁸
the intimacy that all three women share with the men they love is bound to attach them with powerful bonds. They’re no longer in a position to evaluate and choose a guy; they’ve already chosen him, and have yet to persuade him to choose them.

Speaking of scientific research, let’s look briefly at what our modern studies show about living together, since that’s the one big thing in common to all three stories: Maria Bertram’s, Lydia’s, and Mrs. Clay’s. Research tells us that couples who live together before getting married—at least if they’re not engaged before they move in together—are less happy when they do get married, and have a higher divorce rate. Which backs up Jane Austen’s insight that living together is a far from optimal arrangment. But why? “The cohabitation
effect” is one of those stubborn results, replicated in study after study despite the fact that nobody seems to have a definitive explanation for it. There’s all kinds of speculation about why this is. Maybe it’s self-selection: people who are bad marriage risks in the first place (children of divorced parents, for example
²⁹
) tend to cohabit more often than people who aren’t. There’s also the “experience of cohabitation” theory, according to which couples who live together are learning habits that will later undermine their marriages, starting with the basic lack of commitment that defines the living-together relationship. And one team of researchers suggests that “people may choose riskier, less compatible partners in the first place, because they think that cohabitation will be easier to break up than marriage.”
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All likely enough to be true.

But think about it Jane Austen’s way: don’t compare living together with being married; compare it with what you would be doing
before
getting married if you were a Jane Austen heroine. In other words, consider two alternate ways of “getting husbands”: living together versus following the real, original rules. Living together may be easier to break up than a marriage, but it’s a heck of a lot
harder
to walk away from than the kind of rational evaluation of a guy’s character and careful pacing of your attachment that Jane Austen heroines manage. Compared to the Jane Austen heroine method, the Mrs. Clay or modern relationship pattern is going to ensure that a lot of women double down on their initial mistakes.

So Jane Austen wouldn’t advise you to move in with your boyfriend? Not exactly late-breaking news. Why make so much of this rather obvious point? Not just because most couples today do live together before the wedding. More crucially, because the Mrs. Clay-type situation that too many twenty-first-century women find themselves in sheds light on a big, important difference between us and Jane Austen’s heroines—a difference that affects us and our relationships long before we’re making the decision to move in together or not. Exactly
why
and
how
living together constrains your freedom to choose a man matters to us all because today the very same dynamic is at work in relationships even much earlier on.

When women say they’d never marry a man without living with him first—that that’s the only way to really get to know a guy well enough to be able to decide whether he’s right for them
³¹
—they’re forgetting the power
of “attachment.” Sure, you know more about a guy once you’ve shared an apartment with him. But the knowledge you gain by setting up housekeeping with him is not free. As you get to know your man better, you also become more attached to him. For every bit of knowledge that you gain, you lose, in some measure, your objectivity, your ability to evaluate him, and your freedom of judgment. And who doubts that attachment is generally a more powerful game changer for women than for men? That’s even assuming that your feelings and his were equally tentative at the beginning—that moving in together in the first place wasn’t, instead, the exact same compromise as the one between 1) Mrs. Clay’s desire to marry Mr. Elliot and 2) Mr. Elliot’s desire to move the relationship along without making a permanent commitment.

If the point of getting to know guys better is for women to
choose for ourselves
, and to choose
well
, then any mating scheme that progressively strips us of our power to evaluate men is seriously defective. Unfortunately, modern dating in general—not just our 60 to 70 percent cohabitation-before-we-marry rate
³²
—tends to maneuver us into a position where we’ve got more data to evaluate the man by, but we’re no longer able to see him as clearly as we did at first. At the end of that piece for the
New York Times
, Marguerite Fields knew a lot more about her recent hook-up, including some information that might have been a definite turn-off if she’d been told it about a man she
didn’t
know: “During the night he kicked and snored, grabbing greedily at me with his well-moisturized hands like a child snatching at free candy.” But she acquired that knowledge only at the cost of having her view of him softened by attachment. When he blows her off, she has to struggle to remind herself she had originally thought him “arrogant.”

A friend once told me, after an apparently promising romance fizzled, that she had realized people who are more objective—your family, your friends—can see the guy you’re dating more clearly than you can. This is an important point in light of the project Jane Austen was engaged in: helping women do a wise job of picking a man, once they were free to pick for themselves instead of submitting to the choice of their parents and guardians. True, your friends and family don’t get as close to the man you’re
interested in as you do, so there are things they don’t know about him. But they’re also not intoxicated by the emotions that make it hard for you to see him straight. And an awful lot of the really big things your happiness will depend on are going to be more obvious to them than to you—and clearer to you
before
than
after
you get attached.

Notice that all those arcane rules Jane Austen’s happy heroines abide by are set up with the same end in view. They all allow women to spend time with men and get to know them, but in a way that preserves their independence until they’ve got a definitive commitment from the man. Regency Era social arrangements were all arrangements for maximizing women’s interactions with men to the precise extent that is possible while still minimizing the possibility that women will commit themselves to any relationship of a tentative nature. They were about fending off attachment, maintaining women’s freedom to pick a man by preserving the scope for her observation and judgment.

Jane Austen could poke fun at decorum when it was pushed to an extreme, with the woman making a great parade of her modesty.
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And
Persuasion
shows Jane Austen thought that protecting women from anything tentative in their relationships could be taken
too
far—at least when the source of uncertainty was only external circumstances (Captain Wentworth’s lack of fortune), not any hesitation to commit on the man’s part.
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And of course after Jane Austen’s day, the Victorians took the whole thing to an absurd and stifling extreme, so that concern about “compromising” your all-important reputation eclipsed the really significant issue that Jane Austen saw: compromising your heart and your judgment. Jane Austen would never have followed the Victorians down that dead end. But she was 100 percent on board with the basic idea that women benefited from the rules that warned them against committing themselves before a man commits to them.