Definitions of Love

Some thoughts on the vocabulary of marriage

In the introduction to my 2015 memoir Going Into the City, I venture the likelihood that, like me, the “aging male music obsessives” who dominate my fanbase are adepts of what I dubbed “the uxorious way of knowledge”—who recognize and appreciate the degree to which their musical responses, observations, tastes, and ideas owed the sensibilities and intellects of their wives, consorts, and girlfriends. I was proud of that phrase, which I thought long overdue, and was disappointed that although my notices tended pretty good, only one reviewer cited it: a woman, Dana Stevens of Slate. I should add that although “uxorious” is an unusual word it just popped into my head when I was writing. “Wife-loving,” sure—I’ve been flaunting my vocabulary since I aced the College Boards. And for that reason I never thought to look it up until a few weeks ago, when I was brooding casually about how “uxorious way of knowledge” had never won public notice from anyone except Dana Stevens. So I opened the Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary atop my desk to U, and this is what I found: “excessively fond of or submissive to a wife.” In other words: “uxor” equals “wife.” OK, give her some credit—just don’t overdo it.

There are other not quite identical definitions, sure. Random House Unabridged, 1987: “doting upon, foolishly fond of, or affectionately submissive toward one’s wife.” Oxford English Dictionary, 1971: “dotingly or submissively fond of a wife; devotedly attached to a wife.” Up-to-the-minute online Wiktionary, which has the advantage of not endangering your elbow when you pull it off a shelf: “very devoted and possibly submissive to one’s wife”; “excessive uxorial devotion.” Another online source suggests that “the female equivalent of uxorious” is “maritorious.” (Really? At least there is one, I guess.) For the record, I poked around hoping against hope that some obscure Latinate adjective utilizing the root “matri” or maybe “femina” might serve the wife-positive function I’d attributed to uxorious. For sure there ought to be one. But alas, there isn’t—at least, hint hint, not yet. Instead, I learned that the OED provides online charts mapping words’ estimated frequency per “million words in modern written English” by the decade, in “uxorious”’s case from 1750 (0.20) steadily down to 2010 (0.03). Adjacent info indicates that John Milton was its most prominent fan, as in “That uxorious King, whose heart . . . Beguil’d by fair Idolatresses, fell To Idols foul.” In other words, Eve was the one with the forbidden fruit. Never could get with Paradise Lost myself, and I’m proud to admit it.

Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell celebrate their 50th anniversary on December 21st.

So instead let me just say this. In June 1970 I fell in love more or less instantly with a woman I kept on my radar for over two years, until in 1972 she retired to an ashram where she soon realized that we were made for each other even though she’d never read a word I’d published. Indeed, except in the most general way she barely knew what rock criticism was. But quickly she made it a project to find out, and ever since she’s not only proven the boon companion of my life but has regularly fed me ideas about music via both spontaneous response and thought-through analysis as well as encouraging me to take a 10 grand pay cut to leave the good people of Newsday and become music editor of The Village Voice. Her tendency to dance for a few seconds when she’s taken by the groove emanating from the dining room speakers, for instance, has enriched my attraction to African pop for almost half a century now. So has the question “What’s that?” about countless other review candidates in many different styles, ‘cause it usually indicates that she hears something there that I haven’t altogether pinned down. Nor, of course, are these the only reasons I was right to fall for someone who has now been my wife for 50 years. They’re just the music-adjacent ones, which soon enough included some of the most impressive pieces of rock criticism anyone has published—find on her site, for instance, “Inside Was Us: Women and Punk,” “Skipping on Air: Cornershop,” “Irish Catholic: Fleadh Festival 1997,” and “We Condemn the Gang of Four (Just Kidding).” So while it’s statistically unlikely that every married man who reads my reviews all these decades later thinks either that there should be a better word for wife-loving/admiring than “uxorious” turns out to be, maybe we should just grab it by its Latinate throat and tell it we’re going to use it their way so stop whining.