Marriage is a life raft?

A buzzy new book about a couple stuck at sea is the perfect metaphor for how we think about marriage—in terms of survival and endurance, but also rescue and safety.

Photo: Ciro Magliano

I’ve been sitting with this metaphor of marriage as a life raft in the middle of the ocean.

I just finished Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea, a true story about Maurice and Maralyn, a couple that fled domesticity in 1972, selling their house, buying a boat, and setting sail, only to end up stranded in a life raft in the middle of the Pacific for several months.

The book is filled with the startling details of survival: sucking the juice out of fish eyeballs, sawing into the tough skin of a squirming turtle’s neck, suffocating seabirds in t-shirts, shitting into a can. All the while, the couple coexists in a raft so small that only one of them can lie down at a time.

The book makes it clear that Maurice is pretty ineffectual and has a bad attitude, while Maralyn is a savvy survivalist with a relentlessly positive outlook, and without whom they would have been doomed. (Spoiler alert: they survive.) She does a lot of mothering during their ordeal, especially after Maurice falls ill—as Elmhirst puts it, she “had become the adult, in a way, and he the child.”

But the book doesn’t dive all that deep into the emotional dynamics of their relationship and spends much more time on the nitty-gritty details of life at sea. And yet it’s been marketed heavily, and very savvily, I think, as a marriage story, as opposed to a survival tale—or, really, as if they’re the same thing. On many levels, the basic premise of the book is a perfect dramatic metaphor for how marriage is often experienced and thought about.

There’s the aspect of being stuck together with no escape, which speaks to the coercions of marital norms—from compulsory monogamy to divorce stigma. It also taps into the ways that intimacy and domesticity can feel suffocating and ego-threatening. We just recently got another dramatic metaphor on this front with the upcoming body-horror film Together, in which a couple ends up supernaturally fused together. (I mean, the cultural signs are not even subtle.)

That couple in a raft in the middle of the ocean also feels like an overly obvious symbol that the subconscious would drum up in a dream to represent the isolated nuclear family home (and maybe especially in this post-Covid era). The sea is everything outside the home—those things necessary for survival, like money and food, as well dreaded existential threats (a pandemic, a lost job, a hot stranger).

Obviously, the book’s title is both literal—their marriage is at sea—and suggests that their relationship is lost and confused. I dunno, I definitely watch too much reality-TV but it makes me think of shows like Temptation Island and The Ultimatum, where struggling relationships are supposedly redeemed when they survive the existential threat of (again!) hot strangers.

I’m reminded, too, of another upcoming summer release: Splitsville, a romantic comedy where, in a last ditch effort to save their marriage, a couple explores an open relationship during a weekend away with friends, and things get “comedically” violent and bloody.

Survival is baked right into how we talk about marriage. In a recent podcast episode,

Amanda Montei

and I talked about how the so-called “father of marriage counseling” famously started a 1950s column in Lady’s Home Journal titled, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” The marketing for A Marriage at Sea definitely takes this up: “Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests,” reads the book jacket description.

And let’s not forget that common phrase: “a marriage on the rocks.” A boat metaphor! A ship running aground!

The image of the couple in the raft also taps into this more positive idea of marriage as a source of safety and security, in domains ranging from the emotional to the financial. Of course, the history of marriage is filled with laws, policies, and norms designed to make women need that raft.

In my twenties, I knew a lot of straight women who, in addition to the wonderful stuff of love, also experienced getting married as akin to rescue from the wild oceans of patriarchal dating. Now, in my forties, I know a lot more straight women who feel stuck on their raft, or else who have jumped out of it.

Last year saw the “divorce memoir” boom, but this summer marriage is showing up in books and TV as a survival story—it’s comedically violent polyamory, supernatural bodily fusion, and being stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean.