A Dirty Shame

Seven Reasons Why Marriage Can’t Solve Our Cultural Problems

Past is Prologue

Recently, I decided that I had to change careers.  This will be my six (?) career change in my life. About every seven to ten years, I have to make a career change.  The reasons for this vary but it almost always ends the same.  The career I had starts to fall apart, harried by technological change and my own personal idiosyncrasies.  First it was retail. To be fair, I’ve gone in and out of retail for years. I don’t mind it and it’s always been my fallback position. I can be amazing if I have to convince people to sign up for credit cards. But honestly, introverted, standing on my feet all day, my shin splints and never much of closer, a real sales job was never a career path I seriously entertained, even though at one point I worked for a Sun reseller and it would have been an easy jump.  

Next, I tried book publishing, but that was also short lived as I lived in New York and my wealthy father still does not understand how this industry works.  I’m not supposed to make any money. I’m supposed to be invited to all the glittering parties while living off a robust trust fund to pay my Manhattan rent. It was the same in fashion and journalism, although a little more money and twice the abuse.  Having to pay my own rent (*eyeroll*), I moved to a more lucrative form of publishing, for investment banks, a job which, had I never left, I would have lived a happy life.

The years I spent at investment banks where the best career years of my life.  Trained in New York at Merrill Lynch, and star of the publishing and graphics department during the dot.com boom in San Francisco, I could rock out 100-page pitch deck in less time it takes to lose all your money daytrading.  It was fast, it was dirty, and it was fantastic.  This was around 1998 -2000 in San Francisco, and the department went through publishers like Taco Bell through a 55-year-old. The running joke was if the department was Survivor, I would have been a millionaire several times over, but I never fancied myself a graphic designer or “artist”. I did production, that’s it, and my humility protected me from leaving in a huff.  At that time, you could have been a one-eyed, one-armed, drunken dw…little person and gotten a job. Someone gave me a second-generation Palm Pilot as a random gift in a bar.  Everyone had a Nortel phone. I still have all that Paul Frank stuff.   But the end of the dot.com era was a dark cloud on the horizon and that’s when I decided to do the dumbest thing I have ever done in my entire life: I got married.

To this day I ask myself how I managed to make such a colossal mistake. I was never the marrying type.  If you had asked me if I wanted to be married, I would have been, “uh, I guess.” Part of it was probably due that over my childhood I had - count ‘em - five stepparents. Marriage did not seem all that serious to me, and to be fair, to a fast moving, urban, overly sophisticated, and terribly mistrusting 25-year-old, it wasn’t.  Sure, I had steady boyfriends who were perfectly nice, but marriage…meh…seemed sus, as the kids say.  And so, when my high school sweetheart got in contact with me a few months after 9/11 wiped out an entire investment bank in one hour, when everyone was scared and angry and in shock, when all I wanted was the world to be just a little quieter, I got married and moved to a suburb close to Philadelphia.  I won’t go into the gory details of why it didn’t work out. Suffice it to say that’s another topic for another essay, but by the time it was done, I had changed coasts, countries, and careers three more times. In the irony to end all ironies, I wound up being a paralegal in family law. 

It was the perfect job for me. Years of watching my parents split and split again allowed me to understand things from the kid’s point of view, or at least, I felt like I could. Having the wheels come off my marriage in a sudden and somewhat violent way, stranding me in a foreign country where I knew practically no one, having no money, and no financial security at all, made me understand the vulnerability in a way that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been through it. And resolving to, whatever the cost, salvage something good from the whole experience made me fearless in the face of mounting obstacles. I always had a bit of grit, but this was going to really put it to the test.

Eventually, after many misadventures, it paid off. The feeling of clarity and perspective I have now is what I imagine what a person feels when they’ve climbed Mt. Everest. Which isn’t to say I’ve climbed every mountain or even that I will survive the trip back down.  But just like that annoying person who has returned from Europe and wants to show you ever snapshot they took of Prague, I do want to tell you about it. And I’m going to start with the thing I know most about: marriage. Or to be more precise, how it gets ruined.

Facts is facts, man

It's better for society that people get married. That’s a fact. For centuries, and almost every culture in the world has some form of pair bonding.  It may be permanent, or temporary or even polygamous, but it’s everywhere. There is something about marriage which stabilizes people and society. People who stay unmarried are generally regarded as less grown up.  They are denied benefits like dish sets, lavish parties and home loans (…Dad..*cough*) And there are the rituals and ceremonies and movies and books and businesses and lawsuits over cakes that all revolve around the idea of marriage. But despite all these supposed benefits, marriage is falling. Fewer and fewer people are getting married, and the negative effects are compounding. It’s fairly obvious that things like poverty, unhappiness, and crime are linked to the rise of single parents. Deaths of despair have skyrocketed among the unattached. More and more people are reporting they have no friends at all. Policymakers wring their hands that large entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are going to go bankrupt because there’s not enough children to pay for them, and old people have no one to care for them. Mass immigration seems to be the only answer.

Marriage is on the decline and certain media conservative personalities like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Tim Poole have asserted that things like the sexual revolution, gay marriage, and no-fault divorce, respectively, have been the cause. When the Dobbs decision was released, the Supreme Court’s repudiation of Roe v. Wade, gay marriage was suddenly back in the headlines. It wasn’t a totally unrealistic worry that the decision that legalized gay marriage would also be repealed. Like Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges was also an expansion of federal power to places no one was really sure it should be.  Matt Walsh, on the Joe Rogan Podcast, tried to explain how gay marriage was hurting straight marriage but he struggled to explain exactly why. It had to be, somehow.   

Even if young adults wanted to get married, there doesn’t seem to be any marriage material around, whatever that is. Recently, I was listening to the podcast, “A Special Place in Hell” and the hosts, I think it was Meghan, said something of the effect that the men she knew that wanted to get married all complained about how women didn’t want to keep the house and take care of them and who would want to be married to those guys??! But those guys are right, we don’t do that stuff.  We say it’s because we have to go to work, but is it really?  If my 23-year-old boyfriend had said to me “hey you stay home and take care of all this stuff and I will pay for it all,” would I have really believed him or even wanted to do that? And who would I hang out with, all the other women are at work now? It would be so lonely. Most of the men I dated could barely take care of themselves, and even then, not very well.  And it’s not just women that don’t want to do the work, Seth Rogan recently said that having kids, “[didn’t] sound fun.”  I mean, why would you get married? What’s in it for Andrew Tate? It can be reasonable to see why people just don’t want to get married anymore. But, okay, really did they ever?  Do you really think that our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers really wanted sex so bad that they would agree to live with each other for the rest of their lives? And that they never felt like maybe the magic was gone? Or never wanted to just kick their spouse in the nuts? Maybe some, but ALL of them?  I have my doubts.

Let’s put gay marriage, the sexual revolution, and no-fault divorce aside; here are seven other reasons why marriage may be declining, and five ways to fix it:

1.       Freedom.

If you were to draw a line and put on it all human relationships in order of coerciveness, as in someone or something can force you into being in some kind of relationship with someone else. Let’s say that ‘Slavery’ is at one end and ‘Friendship’ is at the other, you would find most other kinds of human relationships fall somewhere in the middle. We are all used to historical dramas like “Robin Hood”, “The Tudors”, and even Disney’s “Brave” that posit marriage as a less than consensual relationship.  For many years in the past, and in some cultures even today, marriage is not something that one enters by their own free will.  For ages, marriages have been arranged between the children by their parents, or matchmakers, clergy, or even the town elders.  What the children want has nothing to do with it, because they are stupid. Children left to their own devices would make terrible, awful, no-good choices, or worse, no choice at all.  While boys were heavily incentivised to marry a stranger, girls were given a mythology (If he’s a prince you will immediately fall in love with him) because honestly, they didn’t have much of a choice. The above-mentioned dramas look upon arranged marriages as being a horrific situation for the girl, and, maybe for some girls, it absolutely was. And that’s because for girls, at least for some, “marriage” translated into legalized rape.

But as time has passed the amount of “coerciveness” that society has been willing to tolerate has lessened. This coerciveness can be express, like in the case of a putting someone in prison, or implied, as in dirty looks from the line behind you if you are rude to the cashier.  But we don’t have debtor’s prisons (mostly), and polite society hasn’t banished anyone for farting in public for a very long time.  Time has changed many of these relationships, moving the scale so that it’s harder to force someone into a relationship with someone else without their consent.  This has been true about marriage as well.  Before the 1960s, a lot of weddings were “shotgun,” “knobstick,” or moeten in the Dutch.  It is estimated that, depending on where you were and what year, anywhere from a quarter to 90% of weddings were coerced.  In 1950, in the UK, it was reported that 40% of the brides were pregnant on their wedding day.  That’s a lot of babies. These marriages may not have been the happiest of marriages, but culture and society and maybe a little bit of Stockholm syndrome was enough to render them invisible.  This was just “the way” and anyone that bucked the system either got sent to the nuns or a farm.  It probably had a practical effect too; now you knew your mate wasn’t sterile in a time when there was precious little you could do about it if they were.

But now it would be literally illegal to force your daughter or your son to marry someone.  And the marriage would be invalid, and you would probably go to jail. And the farms and nuns won’t take them in, as that would be “kidnapping” (*eyeroll*).  Just kidding… modern society doesn’t treat people like that anymore, and we all agree that it’s a good thing. And as time has gone on, without the coercive nature of society holding the couple together, no-fault divorce was created so people would just stop lying to the court about why they couldn’t be forced to stay together, which is a crime in itself. This isn’t universal, divorcing couples in New York still have to claim some kind of grounds like adultery or mental cruelty or something like that. So, they do. Did it happen?  Who knows.

I should note here that this is really a Western phenomenon. In other parts of the world, arranged marriages are still made every day.  Except now we call that “human trafficking” and we refer to the girls as “child brides.” But in those societies, no one has a child out of wedlock, not if they know what is good for them. And for a certain segment of men, this was part of the lure of marriage - unlimited sexual access - and so they agreed to it.  Which is why in some countries and jurisdictions, if you don’t want to go to jail for raping a girl, you can just marry her and rape her forever.

2.        Love

Let’s do an experiment: next time someone tells you they are getting married, ask them if they are in love.  The fact is almost all of those people will tell you they are “in love.” Not that the bride’s father is high up on the corporate ladder or owns 80 goats, not that they are offering a very large dowery or inheritance, not that this person was “the best they could do.”  No, they are always and forever “In love”..at least until they are not, which is a fickle thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, being married to a person you love is a great thing, but it’s not always the best reason to marry a person who may have significant problems.  Maybe you are in love with a criminal, or your boss, or someone else’s wife, or maybe they wake up in the morning and suddenly want you to start calling them “Sophia” and wearing your dresse..okay, okay, I’ll let it go.  In the old days, feelings of love were roundly ignored for other, more practical reasons. And more importantly this was okay.  Marrying “for money” was just called “marriage” and there certainly was no shame in it.  Girls were routinely encouraged to “marry up”- a class acknowledgement that would be verboten today. But as time has progressed, we have come up with names for people who engage in romantic relationships with people who would not be attractive, were it not for their money and status.  We call them “gold diggers” “social climbers” “greedy bitch” “gigolos” “star fuckers” and whatever is the going term for “whore.”  Practicality be damned, it must be mutual chastely love or you must be alone forever. (*another eyeroll*)  Never mind the saying “a woman who marries for money earns every penny.”  

But what if you don’t find love, or what if you can’t actually feel love? Or what if you are just atrociously unattractive but rich?  In a way, such relationships are very important to society because they fill a gap, a gap where the poorer party is cared for financially and the rich party can feel some semblance of love. Or at least have someone make sure they don’t fall down the stairs. I should note, I have never seen an unhappy picture of J. Howard Marshall.

This is why people struggle to figure out how gay marriage affected the institution of marriage.  Because it didn’t.  It was a result of this shift in the defining criteria for marriage. What used to be something that couples did to have babies or at least cover pregnancy up, or because she came from a good family or because he is an actual prince or because, well, they wanted to have sex, became about “love.”  Which is silly because you can still love someone without all that other stuff.   What gay people thought was “if this is about love, then we should be married” and there was no one who could coherently say why not, including Mr. Walsh.

Love can be a fragile thing. I’m sure couples in 1850 fell out of love all the time (if they were ever in it) and that is why it’s not a reason to get divorced.  When divorce needed some kind of fault, falling out of love was not one of them. You had to be abusive or not have sex but just not feeling the magic anymore wasn’t a reason to walk away from your marriage.  Behavior was the bar, not the feeling. Even the grounds of “alienation of affection,” aka seducing another’s spouse, was a tort claim, not grounds for divorce (although adultery was and still is grounds) and that’s been abolished almost everywhere. Just not being in love, meh…didn’t matter.

3.       The Pill

When it came out in 1960 it was hailed as a revolution and less than a decade later society had been irrevocably changed. The pill transformed women’s lives because now, no matter when or how, as long as women had it, they could not become pregnant “by accident”.  This control of women’s fertility, by women, was unprecedented and it removed the one thing that could dictate if a woman got married or not: children. 

Look, if you have a child, and you are your average parent, you know that you would move mountains for that kid.  You would walk on glass.  You would fight to the death. For the woman, this is even more pronounced because when she is pregnant, her body releases some really nasty boding hormones that bond her to that baby in a way that is unlike any other bond. To break it, is like removing a limb or an internal organ. Yeah, babies cry and they poop in diapers and they are obnoxious middle schoolers who don’t every want to be seen with you even if you are the person bringing cupcakes to school for their birthday… but you still love them more than life itself.  And if loving them, if ensuring their care and survival meant you had to marry someone who was, well.. just okay…it was okay. Have children long enough and maybe eventually she’ll come around to not completely hating his guts. He does take out the garbage and who doesn’t hate that, amiright?

But back to the pill.  Now, armed with no children, and no accidental children, women could go to work, live alone, have sex, get raped, and there was no real way to emotionally blackmail her into having mediocre sex with the same annoying dude for the rest of her life. If marriage was already on the rocks with freedom and love, the Pill murdered it in its sleep.

4.       Wage Stagnation

Until the civil war, slaves were not allowed to be married in most places because they were not considered persons, but property. When the slaves were finally freed however, American realized she had a real problem, now how to get them to marry? While a lot of black slaves chose to marry of their own free will, some were punished if they did not get married and “shacked up”. America had done a 180 on marriage and it was obvious why: having people married gives them economies of scale, as in, two can live as cheaply as one, and stabilizes the family in case one partner loses a job or falls ill or, more important, gets pregnant.

Up through the 60s, this commitment to marriage maintained and even into the 70s the Baby Boomers still got married, but the divorce rate rose. Now freed from marriages that maybe had been coerced and unhappy to begin with, people fled from marriage, and at one time the divorce rate was 50% (I think it’s now about 20% and falling).  Getting pregnant out of wedlock was still frowned upon, but if one got married, and then divorced, that was sort of understandable.  It also shifted the shame from the woman to the man, because men who didn’t pay child support were considered “deadbeat dads” as opposed to the “welfare queens” who had never married, even though either way the result was the same; the government had to pay.

But real wages have not risen since then. Wave after wave of technological advancements has driven rises in productivity that have not resulted in rising wages.  Globalization has outsourced the good jobs that make men attractive to women and hampered the ability to pay child support. Immigration has undercut the weakest of workers, the convicted and the disabled, rendering them financial albatrosses on any loving partners.  These are the people most in need of marriage, and least able to get it.

In the meantime, wealthy individuals, who may expect inheritances or have to keep up appearances marry often and well and rarely divorce. And even if they do have a baby out of wedlock or divorce, lawyers are hired, property is split, child and spousal support gets paid and doting grandparents shower their kids with houses and money, making them more likely to remarry, this time to someone better.

5.       Options

A long time ago…like…in the 90’s.. the only people you knew were the people that lived and worked close by to you. The availability of desirable partners was very limited, and if you met someone, it was because they went to the same church as you or the same school or worked in the same office or lived next door. And you made do with that because you didn’t know any different. Sometimes wild children (I mean, not ME, other children..) would flee their small towns to big cities and find a whole array of new and exciting options.  This scared the Olds and many a movie, from “Midnight Cowboy” to “Sid and Nancy” to “Kids” were thematic warnings that sometimes that doesn’t always work out for the best.  But after the year 2000 something magical happened, something that made everything about men and women different: the smart phone.

Now, it had already been building for years, with Match.com and Plentyoffish.com but it was the smart phone, and it’s Dickensian Fagin of Tinder that instantly transformed the world of options into something very different.  Suddenly, there were options EVERYWHERE. Women realized quickly that boys were like busses, every 15 seconds another one came along. Why should they make this one a sandwich? Men, fooled into thinking that women actually liked them for their looks, became the worst versions of themselves, and even more off-putting than before. 

Faced with too many bad options, a toxic stew of dating apps, social media, and communication availability has poisoned and paralyzed the dating community.  I knew the world had changed definitively, when watching She-Hulk, the titular character finds out she’s been ghosted by the man she slept with after checking for a text message everywhere she is.  In the old days, we at least had to come home to an empty answering machine. We are back to waiting by the phone like our grandmothers, but now we carry that knife-to-the-heart in our pockets everywhere we go.  One that even hurt the impervious She-Hulk.

In the meantime, the traditional way of meeting people, in schools and churches, in bars or at work, had receded or disappeared entirely, killed off by drunk driving laws, anti-smoking laws, discrimination laws and sexual battery lawsuits.  It is ironic that in an era where there are ever more ways to connect, fewer and fewer people are reporting having any friends at all. And friendship has become ever more fraught as the online persona of a person has replaced the in-person gut feeling that people used to rely on when they met a person IRL.  At least in the “love era” of the 1940 to the early noughts, friendship could precede marriage as a binding agent, my ex and I were from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but with fewer and fewer friends, the pool became ever more limited, and without friends to introduce other friends, real networks of affection and grace began to shrink. 

Perhaps what is even more important is that, now divorce carries a lot less stigma, it doesn’t take much to break the chain. And when it does, it’s often a rude awakening for spouses that all that pain they endured isn’t going to change one wit about where the money goes. Oh, maybe they carried on an affair, or beat up their spouse, but that in current divorce law makes very little difference when it comes to property division or spousal support. And if none of those reasons was going to affect who got what money, what did the reason matter?  In modern divorce law, the paperwork for the actual divorce is almost an afterthought.  Often, even if there are legit grounds for a divorce, rather than go through the hassle and expense of proving an affair or abuse, lawyers process a no-fault divorce often because that’s just a whole lot faster and cheaper.  

6.       Mobility

The other contribution to this mess that the internet has created is the ability to find a job anywhere.  In the bad old days, if you wanted to find job, say in NYC, you had to move there. And then you had a choice, was your old high school boyfriend going to go with you? Things had to be decided right there, right then, and once decided you were locked in because finding another place was hard. But now anyone can, at any time, find any job, halfway, or even all the way on the other side, of hell’s half acre.  This increased mobility is great for employers who might be looking for someone not in their general area, but not so great for employees who might be married to their highschool sweetheart and living in a town surrounded by supportive family that are holding this marriage together. Flung across the country, or even the world, many a marriage has foundered on the rocks of a new state or country where only one of the partners has found a place in society leaving the other partner stranded and alone.

It's hard to ignore the siren song of a new job that promises a lot more money. Your wage has been stagnated for years at the job you have, and housing is so expensive, and it’s just a great opportunity for someone coming from a town whose only income is from the chicken plant. And maybe the place has great schools and is safer and just a whole hell of a lot more interesting.  But the one thing it does not have is that extended family that’s going to talk you down after a fight or give you a funny look when you complain about your spouse. Let’s face it, they know you aren’t going to do better.

7.      Forensics & and the male gaze

Okay, weird, I know, but hear me out: remember all those serial killers in the 70s and 80s?  Yeah, what happened to those guys?  Notwithstanding you hear about some fabulous murder these days, most serial killers seemed to have disappeared or their body counts have significantly been reduced.  That’s because it’s seriously hard to get away with killing someone.  Just think what would have happened if William Hurt’s character in “Bodyheat” had been able to check Facebook? Maybe he would have seen a red flag or two. 

But just go back to our first reason, coercion. While it was true that women could be coerced into a marriage, they didn’t totally lose all the power they had, at least not until modern forensics came along.  You have to wonder if maybe the fear that your wife would poison you might have made you careful about annoying her too much. Giulia Tofana was a famous perfumiest whose real product was a scentless poison she would gift to abused wives.  After killing over 600 scoundrels, she became a victim of her own success and was executed, along with her staff and clientele. But certainly, that was a warning to errant husbands out there that was enough money to be made in their offing to give them pause the next time their wife claimed to have a headache.

Look, this is just a theory, but up until science caught up with us, and DNA became a thing, getting away with murder wasn’t so hard it couldn’t be done on the regular. Now that there’s considerable risk in knocking off your spouse, or even punching him in his stupid face, getting into a situation where you might want to do that is going to look a lot less attractive. And while it’s true that we have made marital rape a crime, it’s still a very hard crime to prove, unlike murder.  

But goodness forbid if a woman hits a man nowadays.  It used to be expected that a man got to aggressive or just acted like a dick, women could kick, beat and punch his lights out. And if he whined about it, well…he didn’t whine about it. And she told all her friends, “watch out for that asshole.” Everyone knew he had it coming.

I’m not suggesting we go back to that at all, but a few days ago a woman was arrested and charged with assault in the airport because she kicked her cheating, no good, lying husband. Her bad, there were too many witnesses, and she should have just #metoo’d him and any other male that knew about the affair. Then they would have lost their jobs, been reviled online, received death threats, and would have had to drop out of polite society for no less than a year.  That would have been fair.  That would have made them “square”.

Regardless of what you think about domestic violence or sexual assault, the delicate balance of power that had been maintained for ages in one way or another, even if it was through “divorce by combat,” has been upset, and unless we are going to expand self defence to include pre-meditated murder, it’s probably better to just stick to the cheapest “no-fault divorce” and that lady can save her money for her criminal charge.

Do we even need marriage?

About a year ago, there was this animation going around that sought to describe “the marriage market”. Its basic point was that until the modern age, women would do the gatekeeping when it came to sex, but this had been undermined by other women who were more sexually available, and THIS was the reason that fewer and fewer people were getting married.  The message, although not explicitly stated, was that women needed to zip up and support their sisters by denying men sex so they would get married to them.  However, it never goes into the possibility of divorce, which has made up to a third of single parents, single. Nor does it acknowledge the role of family, society, technology, or church in enforcing and maintaining marriage as an institution.  Ultimately, it’s the old saw that loose women are ruining the world for chaste ones. Aside from its obvious misogyny, it’s such a non-starter that it does not even need to be part of the conversation. It’s just bashing women for things they can’t control and never will again.

There seems to be no world where people return to the religion of yore, or at least not in the form this animation was suggesting.  I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here; religions are perennial, when old ones die, they are replaced by new ones, which are just as irrational as the old ones (Full disclosure: Atheist here), but they do provide important structures and supports to the faithful. That practical use can’t be just roundly dismissed, especially since it’s responsible for things like a lot of hospitals, old age homes, schools for underprivileged kids, charities for the poor, and consolation for the lost and grieving. But even if large swaths of the population were to return to new religion which lined up with the old ones, like say Lutheran or joining the Church of Latter-Day Saints, one has to ask if that new religion would still carry the old sexual taboos.  It might not.

Here’s the thing about women: they don’t support each other.  Study after study has proven that when a man enters the picture it’s every girl for herself. And the dearer the resources, say in a world where wages have been stagnant for over 40 years, the more even short-term relationships are desirable for their potential to turn into long-term ones, or even child and spousal support. It is perhaps a hilarious irony that if a woman wants to maximize the amount of child support she collects, it’s in her best interest to have children with several of the richest men she can find, as opposed to the same one, because the court will give the father of multiple children a discount for each child.

And that’s why marriage exists in the first place, because of children. (Or if you are the Witcher, a “child surprise.”) The whole point of the State being involved in marriage in the first place was to ensure the responsible raising of children no matter how they were conceived.  The State relied on culture to fill the gap by coercing (sometimes quite nastily) couples to marry, and that was way cheaper for the State, who didn’t and couldn’t track down every provider father. Those days are over, and with DNA, completely unnecessary. Everything else was some weird religious practice the state didn’t care about. At least not in the USA, international results may vary. God and Love was just the sales pitch.

Now here is the problem: we can’t turn back the clock.  We certainly aren’t going ban the Pill or throw our smart phones into the sea. We aren’t going to just wink and nod at Lorena Bobbitt, because OBVIOUSLY. And despite all the bleating of Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson, Seth Rogan and Charlie Houpert are probably not going to prioritize marriage. So maybe it’s time to ask: do we need marriage? Maybe we can replace it with something else.  Here’s a few ideas:

1.       Revisiting spousal support limits/restrictions on enforcement:

States often set limits on the amount of money that spouses can collect and the time they can collect it. Often enforcement doesn’t happen if there’s no children involved.  And these rules can vary widely state to state. There’s very little the federal government can do about it, because the Constitution doesn’t give the feds any control over marriage specifically.  Gay marriage required some tricky legal maneuvering to even get it under the jurisdiction of federal law, and the recognition of another state’s marriage license is another way the State relied on the comity of custom. But just because someone doesn’t have a child doesn’t mean that people won’t make decisions and sacrifices that leave them more vulnerable to financial ruin at the end of a relationship.  With sky high housing costs, being forced out of your rental and having to move could be devastating. It was one thing when things were cheap and people could go out and just buy housing with their job money, but the great housing-Hoover known as the Baby Boom generation has ruined that and now people need actual support. 

You can’t have it both ways. If people are going to risk their hearts, money, children, time and even physical integrity to create relationships, you have to make sure they don’t hit a wall if it doesn’t work out.  This is the reason that Americans, mostly women, cling to abortion so tightly, because it’s the last exit on the highway. If you hate abortion, you better be willing to come up with a really good reason why women shouldn’t be so afraid of losing it.

2.       Palimony:

Long thought of as the undeserved money given to grubbing ex-girlfriends, palimony would improve the lots of many women who never married the fathers of their babies and therefore are unable to collect spousal support. Treating pregnancy, or any kind of dependency as a type of constructive trust would reinstall some of the guardrails that coercive marriages provided in the old days. Women could apply for it, or have it imposed for them when they sought government money like welfare, food stamps, subsidized childcare, or health insurance.  Wanna go on Obamacare? Sure, but first you have to report the names of anyone who might owe you palimony.  Similar programs already exist for child support, but because of our legal obsession with “consensual marital bargains” (*eyeroll* again) those programs don’t extend to the spousal support of the never married.  They should.

Even such august publications like the Wall Street Journal hasn’t figured this out yet, questioning as it did this morning with the title to this article “Moving In Together Doesn’t Match the Financial Benefits of Marriage, but Why? Married couples are four times as wealthy as unmarried couples who live together.”  The journal goes on to conclude that part of what happens is that married couples are more likely to pool resources than unmarried ones.  You know who also pools resources?  People coerced into marriage by their disapproving parents. Pooling resources requires a level of trust, a level of trust that shacking up couples don’t have, or they would just get married. Palimony would take that decision out of their hands and bring it back to where it historically was, that behavior, not feelings, not words or documents, but how the couple is acting that testifies to the relationship, ergo, one of marriage.

3.       Conceding that immigration hawks, anti-globalization advocates, and housing activists all have a point.

All of these things have contributed to the destruction of the “hometown” and the communities that people rely on to find partners and stay married. A long time ago, one of the bullish of bull dyke lesbians I have ever known said to me, “A marriage isn’t just a celebration of two people, it’s a celebration for the whole community.” Perhaps because it was denied to her, she understood marriage better than I ever could.  I know everyone is probably pretty sick of the whole “it takes a village” thing, especially because more and more it seems that the village idiot somehow got himself elected mayor, but we really do need to look across the political aisle and realize that this problem isn’t going to be solved by poking holes in the other side’s complaints, or disingenuously insulting and ignoring the people that these things are hurting. They aren’t trying to prove a point, or win an argument, or “own” anyone, they just want to raise their kids around their families the way they know how. There’s nothing wrong with that.

And the fact that immigrants do good things for the country is irrelevant.  I am an immigrant of a sort. Sure, if the country I immigrated to actually used my skills I would probably outclass everyone around me.  It doesn’t, so I’m here on Substack trying to make a go of it. But I didn’t move here because I wanted to work for foreigners.  I moved here to raise kids. Because even though I’m not nearly as successful as I was in my home country, there are supports here that my home country did not have that mitigate the risk.  The risk of divorce, the risk of abandonment, the risk of unemployment.

I essentially have no control of any of those things. At the end of the day, if the person I love wants to go out for a pack of smokes and never come back, there’s very little I can do about that. I’ve seen enough divorces to know that.  It sure would be a lot easier if I also didn’t have to worry about my job replacing me with someone cheaper and less demanding, or my landlord kicking me out. Sure, maybe that makes all the goods at the dollar store cheaper, but how much cheap crap do I really need? What I need is a roof over my head and a job to pay for it.  

In 2016, the Office of Child Support and Enforcement estimated that 662,000 people who owed child support, mostly men, were incarcerated. Most of them can’t and won’t ever be able to pay it.  Nationwide, 50,000 people are jailed just because they didn’t pay child support.   This doesn’t include all the support owed by people who haven’t gotten themselves locked up. It was estimated that total child support in arrears is now $113 billion dollars.  Before 2020 it was $117 billion.  So why am I putting this under here and not above where it talks about child support?  Sure, it’s probably good to look at laws in Georgia where the incarceration itself is considered “involuntary unemployed” and therefore justification for the reduction of arrears.  But none of that really solves the problem, does it?  Children and their custodial parents are still just left poorer off.  And say you had a job that wasn’t complicated but required a lot of physical labour, like a chicken processing plant?  Who would you hire?  An immigrant who has no issues, (and maybe no rights) or an ex-con? And what if that immigrant was much more skilled?  Would you go, “nah, Imma gonna train this dude right here because he’s got three kids.”  (Okay, so in Canada that answer is “yes”, but the USA is a little less sentimental.)  Even if immigration eventually is a break even or profitable result for the US as a whole, the ability to pay that child support like our poor ex-con and his baby mama(s) has been permanently damaged. It’s not fair.  

We need both sides of the political aisle to finally tire of fighting a war no one wants. The other thing I learned by moving countries is America’s ultra competitive and short-sighted focus on productivity at all costs *is* having a cost, and this is it. If we want to maintain some social fabric, we are going to have to admit that the influx of cheap labour, the outflow of jobs, and the prohibitively expense of housing is having an effect on the locals.  It just is, and the sooner there is an admission of this fact, the sooner we can work on real solutions instead of just blaming poor people for being poor.

4.       Stop blaming the slutty girls, gays, and divorcees that don’t want to pay the lawyers every penny they have.

The thing is they never were the sexual gatekeepers.  They never had any power; it was the power behind them that made the difference.  I had to explain this once saying, “women like Coach purses because whoever paid for that purse is signalling that this woman is not to be fucked or fucked with.” The gatekeepers were the mothers and fathers and matchmakers and ministers and pillars of the community that said, “If you knock up that girl, I am going to meet you at your door with a shotgun.” And the likelihood of that happening was the measure of the meaning of the word “no” to men.

We expect a level of chastity that our girls never had to endure before - almost half of all marriages before 1945 were a result of some kind of “bundling” and everyone just quietly forgot how to count. We ask kids to hold off for longer than ever before in history because we ask them to put off marriage later and later, when they are “ready” - as if that is ever the case. We frighten them with horror stories about how terrible life will be as single mothers, and we leave out the fact that an abortion can leave a scar on the heart that never heals.  They don’t have kids and then find out too late that now they can’t.

It doesn’t have to be this way: the father could be involved; the couple could live with their in the giant mega houses that Baby Boomers parents have now been holding forever. The Boomer generation could (finally *eyeroll*) retire and GenX, Y and Z decide to be more flexible with work, accommodating daycare and practical needs and wages could finally rise.  We could incentivise people to get married and support them when they do. We could tell young pregnant women that “yes, you are enough” and then make sure they are.  And we could dispense with this weird need for ceremonies and rituals and mythology.  Go ahead, fall in love, have a wedding, get pregnant, never get divorce, die together, I wish you the best of luck.  Now let’s deal with everyone else who is not so lucky.

5.       Man taxes:

So, I know this is a pie in the sky idea and totally unconstitutional but it’s still my favourite solution so I’m throwing it in for all the slut shamers. A tax only paid by one gender would at least bring home the idea that men need to curb other men.  For every 20-something, Amy Schumer wannabe, there’s plenty of men (I’m looking at you, Andrew Tate) who could say to their buddies, eying up the candy, “Hey you know for 1,000 women on the pill, two will still get pregnant anyway ... I mean, if they are actually taking it.” Of course, only single men would have to pay it, married men would be exempt, but taxes levied on every single man from the time they start working until the day they die would go a long way to caring for every welfare queen they might have left in their wake. Don’t want to pay the tax, wife someone up and fast. I realize this is a one-way street, which is why it’s unconstitutional, but men can’t get pregnant. (Okay, okay, cisgendered men can’t get pregnant.  If you want to get mad at anyone, get mad at whatever God or natural occurrence made us sexually dimorphous.) As far as gay men go? Well, what would you prefer? Paying a little tax or a repeal of Obergefell?  I thought not.

Leave the Libertines Alone

In the meantime, we need to stop wondering why men won’t get married and some women go, “I want an abortion” and stop blaming gays and no-fault divorce and slutty girls, and whatever is our least favorite political movement.  We do it to ourselves, and it’s horrible.  

And just to let Seth know, okay, maybe it doesn’t sound fun, and to be fair, parents don’t make it sound fun.  We complain about our kids ALL THE TIME. Kids throw up, there is a lot less sleep, tantrums that don’t stop until they are, like 25, they are breathtakingly expensive, they can be so mean, especially as middle schoolers, and having a kid was literally the most frightening thing I have ever done, and I once got out of the subway alone on Houston Street in NYC at 2 am in the morning on a Monday in the EARLY NINETIES.

BUT

what we don’t talk about is how much fun it is to chill on the couch on a Sunday and just play Minecraft together all day.  How hilarious it is when you give them ice cream for the first time. How fascinating their observations about life can be because, honestly, you never thought of it that way. How nice it is to have another person at least half like you. How enticing the promise of the future is.  How exponentially richer your life is. How reassuring it is that when you are old and ugly there could be someone to love and care for you – if you don’t fuck it up too badly. And how amazing it is to love something so much; because until you do, you don’t think it’s even possible. And you complain about them because all you parents know that you will never let them go, FML.

We can’t, like out of that scene in Peaky Blinders, forcibly usher our sons and daughters to the alter, sight unseen, and hope it all works out. And if it doesn’t? Well, that’s life. The older I get the more important I realize these things, marriage, children, are, but you would have been hard pressed to convince me at nineteen or even at 23.  That’s why our ancestors didn’t bother, they just said, “You’ll understand when you’re older, now get your hair out of your face, stand up straight, here’s how to make a casserole.”  We can’t do that anymore, so we have to adapt. What we can do is see the problem for what it is, which is no one’s fault, just the passage of time and the change of the seasons and try to compensate for the otherwise magical world we live in now and make a few adjustments. Everyone would be better off. Do it for the children and leave the libertines alone.