Why Is the Pundit Class Suddenly So Marriage-Obsessed? by J. Weiss
Ew, they actually included marriage-worshipping, singles-shaming Brad Wilcox (of National Marriage Project) for this.
I’m a life long conservative, I don’t agree with liberals on many topics, and I sure don’t agree with the far left on much of anything, but I found myself agreeing with one or two of the left of center types in this piece more than I did the conservative, excessively pro marriage types, like Wilcox.
I tend to view the topic of marriage from a realist perspective, not so much a “left” (liberal or progressive) or “right” (conservative) vantage. I think too many conservatives pin unrealistic hopes and expectations on marriage (as well as parenthood and the nuclear family).
I think conservatives want marriage (and parenthood and the nuclear family) to do things it’s incapable of doing. I think many conservatives make much more out of marriage than God Himself does!
Some of these conservatives continue to make the mistaken assumptions that women aren’t marrying because they’re “career obsessed” and are choosing career over marriage (not so), or that they hate marriage (not true).
These types of conservatives continually overlook the fact that many conservative women, such as myself, had hoped and expected to marry, but we get past the age of 35 and we never met the right person.
(The “equally yoked” rule unnecessarily keeps a lot of Christian single women single far longer than they’d like. Many churches and denominations have far more single women than single men, and the gender imbalance plays a role, too.)
I do like where Bruenig mentions that there’s a difference between high quality and low quality marriages because this point is often neglected by pro-marriage conservatives.
Too often, a lot of hyper- pro- marriage conservatives hold this faulty assumption that all marriages are equally wonderful, loving, and healthy. The reality is, a lot of people end up marrying selfish, abusive, irresponsible, or neglectful spouses.
Not everyone who marries gets married to a person who is loving, kind, reliable, and responsible. Marriage is not always a happy-clappy fairy tale filled with Rainbows, Glitter, and Unicorns.
One of the pro-marriage (conservative) persons says she’s choosing to view marriage as a societal entity and not something for individuals – of course. And that is kind of the wrong view to take about marriage, especially when you’re upset that more people are not marrying.
My fellow conservatives often fail to take each individual’s situation into account. A lot of them fail to realize (or care?) that many women desire marriage but are unable to find a suitable partner.
They instead often write social media posts or magazine articles assuming that women are intentionally avoiding marriage, so they shame and insult single women for being single.
(By the way, in some nations other than the U.S.A., where marriage is also on the decline, some women are deliberately choosing to opt out of marriage, because in those other cultures, marriage does not benefit the women. So I do not blame or criticize women who intentionally decide not to marry if they realize that the institution will harm them and not benefit them.)
The one conservative lady, Hymowitz, victim- blames one lady who was mentioned in an essay about how difficult dating is for women these days, a lady who was involved with a man who was addicted to drugs and the guy walked out on her; they broke up. Hymowitz criticizes the lady in question for dating such a poor quality man.
There is so much I could say here, but I don’t want to write a 70 page essay about why some people end up with bad partners.
To summarize, I will say, it’s not always fair or compassionate to blame women (or to blame men) for marrying abusers or drug addicts, for one reason of several, a lot of addicts or abusers hide their problems until after they move in with, or marry, their partner, and the partner ends up being blind-sided.
By the time the partner can see the addiction or abuse, they may be “trapped” in the relationship and not have the courage or finances to leave.
Why women (or men) end up dating or married to abusers or addicts is another topic for another blog post (it can involve, but is not limited to, issues like personality disorders, unresolved childhood trauma, unhealed codependency, and many other factors),
but in the meantime, I think it’s kind of unfair, unwarranted, and ignorant to issue a blanket statement or attitude unilaterally blaming people who end up living with or married to a jerk, so they break things off.
Why some people end up with, or are attracted to, toxic people is a complicated subject that would take pages to discuss, but suffice it to say, it can be unfair and uncharitable to blame people who do end up dating or married to jerks.
Most people who end up dating or married to poor quality persons (who they sometimes later divorce or break up with) didn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know what? I want to knowingly and deliberately date and marry a drug addict or an abuser!”
That’s not how it works.
(Link): Why Is the Pundit Class Suddenly So Marriage-Obsessed?
Excerpts:
We convened a roundtable of experts on the history of marriage to talk about why it’s becoming so politically charged.
by Joanna Weiss
January 6, 2024
Marriage, at least in the U.S., isn’t what it used to be. Over the past 50 years, marriage rates nationwide declined by 60 percent. Forty percent of U.S. children are now born to unmarried mothers, twice as many as in 1980. One widely covered poll last year found that 2 out of 5 GenZ-ers and millennials consider marriage an outdated concept.
Such stats have inspired a volley of columns, blog posts, think pieces and books, arguing why we should (or shouldn’t) care. The decline of marriage, after all, joins other social changes such as falling birth rates and a “loneliness epidemic” — the new crusade of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — that arguably could be solved by more marriage. So conservatives, broadly, have preached a return to tradition: In the New York Times, David Brooks advised younger readers “to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage.”
Liberals, meanwhile, have often argued that society’s problems are too deep to be fixed with a wedding band: In New York Magazine, (Link): Rebecca Traister pushed back against scholars and politicians who “have routinely imposed marriage — as if it were a smooth, indistinct entity — as a cure for the inequity, dissatisfaction, and loneliness that plague this nation.”
But opinions haven’t always shaken down along the usual partisan lines. University of Maryland economics professor Melissa Kearney made the case for marriage to her fellow liberals in her widely discussed book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
“This is still so wrenching to discuss,” wrote Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a column that essentially agreed with Kearney’s point that liberals should be concerned about the collapse of the traditional family.
Why is the marriage conversation so challenging? Maybe because it touches on economic policy, racial history, the culture wars, the long-term effects of the feminist revolution and the intimate contours of everyday life.
POLITICO Magazine wanted to explore all of those dynamics with a group of marriage experts, advocates and thinkers who had different perspectives and politics. So we invited them to a Zoom session to hash it out.
Matt Bruenig is a blogger and president of the left-leaning think tank People’s Policy Project. Stephanie Coontz is director of research and education for the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of several books about gender and the family, including Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
Kay Hymowitz is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the author of Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.
Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of the forthcoming book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, due out in February.
Deadric Williams is a professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville who studies race and family structure.
They spent more than an hour in a conversation, moderated by contributing writer Joanna Weiss. They debated the real sources of these concerns about marriage, whether the institution itself has “magical” properties for raising children and if properly supported families of any variety can offer the same advantages.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Joanna Weiss: I want to start with you, Stephanie, since you’re the marriage historian. Over the past couple of centuries, marriage has evolved from pretty purely an economic institution to a social institution, a cultural institution, a theoretical joining of soulmates with all that implies. How has it changed in the U.S. in the last 50 years, and in the last 10 years?
Stephanie Coontz: Marriage used to be the only game in town. You could not get access to legal rights without marriage. Most women could not support themselves outside of marriage.
Most men could not work a full-time job and get their meals made and their house cleaned, and any children they had raised outside of marriage were not protected.
[Harvard historian] Nancy Cott once made a really interesting analogy: What we saw over the last 100 years is the disestablishment of marriage as an institution, the same way we saw the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Some of the decline in marriage is absolutely inevitable, completely irreversible. Some, however, is occurring because it’s harder and harder to build a marriage, and many marriages that people can enter don’t look like they’re going to deliver the goods and the solace that we expect.
…Matt Bruenig: I don’t know that I have prepared a case, exactly. There are sometimes very incomplete and, frankly, lazy arguments that people make about marriage, where they don’t distinguish between high-quality marriages and low-quality marriages, and that can generate a lot of mistaken policy conclusions. That’s what I’ve mostly been writing about with respect to Melissa Kearney’s book.
As far as my stance on marriage in general: We live in a pluralistic society. Let a thousand flowers bloom on different approaches to life.
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