Marriage and Dependence

And is it not the bitterer to think

That, disengage our hands and thou wilt sink

Although thy love was love in every deed?

Last night I had one more little thought about Judge Reinhardt's explanation for his decision not to recuse himself (opinion here).  On four occasions in the decision, Judge Reinhardt states forcefully that his wife is an "independent woman" or an "independent person" or that she has "independent views." 

Since it seemed to me that the judge was attempting not only to describe the actual nature of his marriage but also to explain what a reasonable or ordinary contemporary (and therefore, not "outmoded") observer would think about the relationship of a married couple, something he had to do for purposes of the recusal standard, I began to wonder about the emphasis on the idea of the independence of spouses.

It is certainly true that in many ways spouses are independent.  They will have different occupations and careers, different interests, different tastes, different friends, different views, and so on.  Much of their lives will be independent.  Sometimes one hears that to be married is to "sacrifice" one's independence -- no more hogging the closet, no more going out drinking with your buddies whenever you want to, or lying on the couch all day just because you feel like it. 

But I've always thought that dependence is a reason to want to be married, an important boon of marriage, not a sacrifice.  In at least some happy marriages, to be dependent is to be supported, to be cared for, to enjoy the goods of intimate trust and loyalty.  I enjoy greatly my dependency on my wife, because in addition to making possible the attainment of certain goods to which I otherwise wouldn't have access, it is an intrinsic solace and a comfort to rely deeply on another person. 

To be sure, as feminists have pointed out to great effect, dependence (and especially marital dependence) can go horribly wrong -- it can be abused by one or both of the parties, as it was by the husband in Browning's lovely poem ("Any Wife To Any Husband").  In criminal law, one sees that marital dependence can breed all sorts of horrors -- wives who cannot leave their abusive husbands, mothers who cannot report abusive fathers. 

But for all that, dependence seems to me something which couples who are contemplating marriage might relish and look forward to with excitement.  Dependence is the natural state of many thriving marriages.  It is so powerful a bond that it somehow persists even when a marriage is in disrepair -- as Browning says, dependence becomes "bitter" after betrayal, just as it was sweet before the fall.