A Word About Marriage
I'm inspired by our reactions below to the new poll with the depressing stat (four in ten agree marriage is "becoming" obsolete!). Here's a bet and a comment that I've been saving up for a while.
The bet: redo the poll twice. First do-over asks: "Marriage has become obsolete -- yes or no?" Second do-over: "Marriage will become obsolete -- yes or no?" I bet you see that 40% drop in both cases.
Now the comment: people act and speak strangely about traditional marriage (as we call it). I'm groping for the right analogy, here: do they act as if it is a mineral? Or a particular make and model of refrigerator? Something that can be exhausted, or that can exhaust itself? Something, I think they seem to believe, without any inner tensions, especially productive ones. But we would do well to recall that traditional marriage is actually an extraordinarily complex and subtle attempt at reconciling many different natural and cultural elements. Here are a few: a natural capacity for monogamy; a cultural appreciation for the aristocratic character of 'good matches' made over generations; a separate cultural appreciation for the democratic character of free, romantic matches; and a Christian (and post-Christian) appreciation for the power of a spiritual union to transcend, fulfill, discipline, educate, and redeem our natural capacities and our cultural particularities.
Ignore all this, and it's no wonder that traditional marriage seems increasingly flat, narrow, disposable, and meaningless to large numbers of people. It's akin to believing that books are becoming obsolete after generations spent thinking of them as doorstops.
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Aug '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
It's also a contract.
Jul '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Perhaps an organism that requires nourishment?
Nov '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
It's funny, I was just thinking I should write something about marriage on Ricochet. I'm something of an expert on the topic. I'm one of the few people kicking around that is the product of a successful marriage (my parents are nearing 50 years married, there's being the first marriage for both). And I've been married for nearly 20 years myself. I think there is a reason behind the 40%. People don't understand the purpose of marriage. In our society it seems the purpose of marriage is mutual happiness. Since one does not have to marry the person who makes them happy in order for that person to make them happy, then it follows that marriage as an institution is indeed obsolete. Of course, some folks (like my wife and I, or my parents) see the purpose of marriage somewhat differently.
Nov '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Marriage IS the analogy. And like most polls of this type, my take on the high percentage is that it's a reflection of people's fear of seemingly passing judgement on somone else's arrangement.
Jun '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
The belief that marriage is obsolete should set off alarms in our society like a smoke-detector on overload. The purpose of marriage is to provide a stable household for the propagation and proper raising of children. As goes the family, so goes the nation. The re-definition of "family" is a cultural trend that conservatives must fight with all the vigor we can muster.
All the other benefits of marriage are ancillary to the primary objective. Marriage offers spiritual, emotional and sexual gratification to the parties engaged, and there is nothing wrong in that. But until recently the idea of personal gratification was always secondary to the primary mission. The idea that marriage should be romantic didn't arrive in the western world until the late middle ages. Before that marriages were arranged. And it still is in many parts of the world.
If we remain on our present course, our culture will be marked by broken families and broken children who grow up to be broken adults. The road of self-gratification leads to perdition. If I might rework the words of WFB, it's time to stand athwart the gunnels of cultural disintegration and yell "STOP"!
May '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Ken, I'd be interested in knowing what you think the purpose of marriage is.
Sep '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Ditto!
May '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
I still think it was also a loaded survey that had a particular goal, combined with story writers looking for a headline.
Aug '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
In Ireland,homosexual acts were decriminalized ( and rightly so) on the basis that the State should not control what two consenting adults do in private.But now we are told that equality requires that gay couples have the same right as others to have their relationship recognized legally in a public ceremony- the underlying "logic" apparently being that public recognition of the relationship is the essence of marriage.So we have moved from an argument based on privacy to one linked to publicity, based on a concept of marriage which also turns both the meaning of the word and the purpose of the institution upside down and inside out.There is also much discussion of "love" - as if it were something that can be "diagnosed" and measured - being essential to marriage, when in reality it is an incentive to enter into the contract of marriage and an added bonus when it survives or grows ( it almost always changes in some way with the passage of time,)This romanticized concept of marriage is not just demonstrably wrong but the idea that marriage should end when the "love" is gone has caused appalling damage to children suffering the consequences of marriage breakdown.
Sep '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
With the social stigma attached to premarital sex disappearing almost entirely in the West, an important incentive to get married is gone.
May '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
What the poll doesn't measure is how many note the obsolescence of marriage with regret and how many note it matter-of-factly or even with pleasure.
If the former category is substantially larger than the latter, there's still hope. We have work to do, but we might still be OK because the ideal endures.
Sep '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Marriage is becoming obsolete just like deficit spending can go on without end. While societies can deviate from the norm, they can't do it forever.
Edited on Nov 21, 2010 at 8:14amSep '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
The fiscal train wreck that has just begun will blow away, either through monetized debt inflation or through Draconian austerity measures, many of the programs that supported single mothers. Premarital sex is about to become much, much more expensive for women. One of the silver linings in financial panics is that the afflicted society can't continue to lie to itself about the basic truths of human relationships.
Edited on Nov 21, 2010 at 8:19amJul '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
A couple fop things strike me.
First, the popular culture has pretty much eliminated marriage as a subject - except as sitcom fodder. Kids don't know that it matters because nobody says it does.
Second, When we say that redefining marriage (as in the same sex debate) will weaken the instituion, this is exactly what we mean. By broadening the definition to meaningless dimensions, people rightly perceive that the term has become unimportant.
Last, this strikes me as something like the polls that show while people have an awful opinion of Congressmen in general, they are mostly satisfied with their own. I suspect even those married people who say that marriage isn't all that important don't think that about their own.
Jul '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
It is incumbent on those of us who cherish and support marriage to significantly out reproduce those that do not, and to imbue the same regard for marriage in our children. Because the education of fatherless louts is akin to teaching pigs to sing.
Jul '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Patrick Shanahan: A couple fop things strike me.
...
Last, this strikes me as something like the polls that show while people have an awful opinion of Congressmen in general, they are mostly satisfied with their own. I suspect even those married people who say that marriage isn't all that important don't think that about their own. · Nov 21 at 11:47am
My Congressman is a lout and a buffoon who hates scouting, votes with Pelosi more often then Pelosi, and creeped by in the election by 900 votes despite my best efforts. If only I had voted 1000 more times. My marriage is much, much happier.
Then again, I consider lying to pollsters to be pretty much the national sport, if not an outright duty of citizenship.
Edited on Nov 21, 2010 at 1:01pmNov '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Pseudodionysius
Ditto! · Nov 20 at 9:01pm
The purpose of marriage, as Paules said earlier, is to propagate our culture. Sex propagates the species, and marriage (among other things) propagates the culture. A strong traditional family is foundational for society. As Paules so aptly put it: as the family goes, so goes the country. I once heard someone say "I don't be one of those women who stays in the marriage 'for the sake of the children' only to divorce when they are grown." I say "What better reason to stay together than for the children?" If marriage is about making each other emotionally and physically happy, then it sure is easy (and it makes sense) to split up when one or both of us is physically or emotionally unhappy. But if marriage is about more than just your happiness or my happiness, then we have a reason to work through our issues.
May '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
I still think that the question and analysis had an agenda, until I can see the survey internals and the questionnaire.
The actual divorce rate is not 50%, and most people still want to get married and have a love for a lifetime. Go read the stories about immigrant families broken and destroyed by alcohol in the garment districts of NY 100 years ago with mother supporting several children.
A large share of our problems are simply elected- by liberals due to their destructive policies. Ordinary people still desire actual family life as first preference.
Aug '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
I think feminism deserves a heaping serving of blame.
1) Women groomed since birth for homemaking and motherhood will instinctively value marriage more than women groomed for careers.
2) If the high-earning jobs are culturally largely off-limits to women, then women will need men, and therefore marriage, more than if they earn the same as men.
3) If women are taught that chastity is a virtue, then men will need marriage more than if women believe chastity is a form of oppression.
4) If a culture finds meaning and takes pleasure in gender difference, then people will naturally adopt gender roles that emphasize their differences, making people feel less whole outside of marriage.
And so on.
May '10
Re: A Word About Marriage
Paul DeRocco: I think feminism deserves a heaping serving of blame.
1) Women groomed since birth for homemaking and motherhood will instinctively value marriage more than women groomed for careers.
2) If the high-earning jobs are culturally largely off-limits to women, then women will need men, and therefore marriage, more than if they earn the same as men.
3) If women are taught that chastity is a virtue, then men will need marriage more than if women believe chastity is a form of oppression.
4) If a culture finds meaning and takes pleasure in gender difference, then people will naturally adopt gender roles that emphasize their differences, making people feel less whole outside of marriage.
And so on. · Nov 21 at 7:58pm
Finally some mention of the root problem.