Our research at the Institute for Family Studies routinely reveals that the women in America who are forging the most meaningful and happy lives are married mothers. In fact, married mothers are nearly twice as likely to be “very happy” with their lives as their single, childless peers.And while marriage rates increasingly fall along ideological lines, female happiness doesn’t: the newest data show that married liberal women with children are now a staggering 30 percentage points more likely to say they are “very happy” or “pretty happy” than liberal women who are single and childless. What’s even more striking is the trend among prime-aged women 25 to 55: happiness among single, childless liberal women has plummeted since “the Great Awokening” of the last decade while it remains high for their peers who have managed to marry and have a family. The tragic irony is that the very group of women who are most likely to think marriage and family are an obstacle to happiness—women on the left—are less happy than their peers on the right, in part, because they are less likely to be married with children.
They don't really consider the perspective of the young men, whom they chiefly describe in terms of the female complaints against them. They do add some context about how the same forces making young men less marriageable are also making young women so in other ways, which is an attempt at balance, but they don't entertain any of the expected perspectives about how marriage is a bad deal for men.
I realize that the advocates for that position are often bitter, angry, or otherwise unlikeable figures. However, there's an important aspect of the problem that they have identified, one that is persuasive to a lot of young men. The institution of marriage has inherited very high guardrails to protect the interests of the mothers and children that it is expected to produce. In an era in which women initiate most of the divorces, however, these guardrails have not been rebalanced to protect the interests of the men who join the institution. A man wagers his lifetime capacity to earn a decent living disproportionately, while the odds of him getting to retain access to the children the marriage produces is also greatly unbalanced. There's something like a 50/50 shot that he'll end up without his children while subjected to punishing alimony and child support payments to a woman who decided to cheat on him and leave him.
The zero-sum-game aspect of any rebalancing on that score means that making marriage more attractive to young men would make it less attractive to young women. That's a hard problem not tackled by the article.
Another serious problem is their treatment of the question in terms of the parents' happiness. Marriage's basic value as an institution is that it sets up an environment in which child rearing is more stable: marriage is not really about the good of the parents but about the good of the children, in other words. That it makes the women happier is well-studied and adequately demonstrated, but also beside the point. The point is that men and women who have sex are likely to produce children, and those children need to be supported, educated, and fitted out to join society over the course of decades. An enduring institution that achieves that most difficult of tasks is necessary for humanity's continuance.
Thus, this sort of commentary is entirely missing the point:
The nature and content of digital offerings are degrading men’s marriageability and women’s, especially liberal women’s, interest in putting a ring on it. Neither sex is developing the capacity to embrace self-sacrifice or long-suffering commitment, precisely the virtues which marriage requires. They’re also what makes marriage so life-giving, character building and personally gratifying. Psychologists have long documented this paradox: deep, lasting happiness is much more strongly tied to meaning than it is to pleasure.
No doubt, if you are selling marriage in terms of happiness, "self-sacrifice" and "long-suffering" as requirements are going to make the whole project seem like insanity. It may in fact actually produce happiness as well, but it doesn't seem likely to; and all of us who have been married a long time will attest that self-sacrifice and long-suffering are in fact highly accurate descriptions (both for ourselves and our spouses!).
Very likely the real problem is that the institution is failing because it no longer fits the civilization we've evolved into. I don't know how you sustain marriage in a civilization that treats the children as trivial non-considerations, and the 'happiness of the adults' as the only thing that matters.
Who gives a damn if the parents are happy? It turns out they will be, more likely than if they remain unmarried; but that's not the point at all. It's just a good thing that falls out of it, as the old virtue of chivalry -- the quality that allows a man to tame a horse and ride it to war -- happens to produce gentlemen who can treat women better than other men normally do. That's good, but the point wasn't the gentle treatment of women: the point was the cavalry.
By that token, if you don't have horses anymore you won't get much chivalry; and if you don't care about the children predominantly, marriage is going to fail. Slowly, as chivalry did, but surely, all the same.
I have recently said quite often that relationships are about an opportunity to give, not receive. We get to nurture, we understand more about duty and the joy of being in the place fitted for you. Meaning has more value than happiness. I hope that I at least partly knew that as a young man, but as well as I remember, I may have only had a toy version. The thought occurred to me more than once that this was a dodge, a rationalization that people used to convince themselves. Whistling past the graveyard, as they used to say.
ReplyDeleteI think we learn it only by doing it.