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yes.
    It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. But we’re keen, of course, always to ask where and how the proposal took place.
    It isn’t disrespectful to Rabih to suggest that he doesn’t really know why he has asked her to marry him, know in the sense of being in command of a rationally founded, coherent set of motives which could be shared with a skeptical or probing third party. What he has instead of a rationale is feelings, and plenty of them: the feeling of never wanting to let her go because of her broad, open forehead and the way her upper lip protrudes ever so slightly over her lower one; the feeling that he loves her because of her furtive, slightly surprised, quick-witted air which inspires him to call her his “Rat” and his “Mole” (and which also, because her looks are unconventional, makes him feel clever for finding her attractive); the feeling that he needs to marry her because of the diligent concentration on her face when she prepares a cod and spinach pie; because of her sweetness when she buttons up her duffel coat; and because of the cunning intelligence she displays when she unpacks the psyches of people they know.
    There is virtually no serious thought underpinning his certainty about marriage. He has never read any books on the institution; he has in the last decade never spent more than ten minutes with a child; he has never cynically interrogated a married couple let alone spoken in any depth with a divorced one and would be at a loss to explain why the majority of marriages fail, save from the general idiocy or lack of imagination of their participants.
    For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing grain business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages there flowed loneliness, rape, infidelity, beating, hardness of heart, and screams heard through the nurserydoors.
    The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative, and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it—the marriage of feeling—has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish desperately that it happen, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming instinct, and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age appears to have had enough of “reasons,” those catalysts of misery, those accountants’ demands. Indeed the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job; or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent “recklessness” is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable “reason.”
    He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives. Those voices which hint that marriage is no longer necessary, that it is far safer simply to cohabit, are right from a practical point of view, concedes Rabih; but they miss the emotional appeal of danger, of putting oneself and one’s beloved through an experience which could, with only a few twists of the plotline, result in mutual destruction. Rabih takes his very willingness to be ruined in love’s name as proof of his