Shadow Boxing
Irradiated by LabRat
So I’m in the grocery store the other day, browsing the perfunctory bookshelves while I wait for Stingray to finish going through the line, and a book title catches my eye: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. It struck me as being bizarre in its very concept, in the same way that “we have to protect marriage” political sloganeering does. A legal binding contract to effectively merge lives with someone else has never fucked up anyone’s relationship, it’s a neutral concept and entity. Likewise, neither Tiger Woods’s philandering nor Dan Savage’s same-sex marriage has affected my marriage or anyone else’s except maybe direct family members; “protecting marriage” or being “skeptical of marriage” makes every bit as much sense to me as being skeptical or protective of humor. It exists as a concept that is entirely individually experienced.
You can talk about the history of marriage as a civil and religious institution (and how much of each, if any at all of one or the other, varies highly across cultures) until you go blue in the face, and it might even be an interesting lecture, but it’s just that: the history of how cultures handle what is, fundamentally, entirely an arrangement between two people whose existence that the social structures in place agree to honor. You can get married in Las Vegas to someone you’ve known for six hours or to someone you’ve known and loved for sixty years and it makes no difference to society; once it happens, whether it succeeds or fails isn’t up to society, isn’t up to patriarchy, and it’s only tangentially up to God if you’re a believer- it’s all on the people in the marriage how to proceed from there.
Any given marriage has two failure points, and neither of them are anything but the two people involved in it. Sometimes marriages do fail, for a host of reasons “good” and “bad”; maybe one person turned out to be incapable of fidelity or honesty. Maybe the headier aspects of attraction died and the bond underlying didn’t turn out to be as strong as it seemed. Maybe the involved parties grew in opposite directions. Maybe one or both failed to grow at all. Maybe expectations of marriage in general and the other person in particular were just completely unrealistic, or way out of line with the other person’s expectations. Maybe somebody, or both somebodies, just stopped trying at some point and then were surprised when things eventually shuddered to a halt. Maybe they DID try, try real hard, and it just turned out to not be enough, because sometimes it just isn’t. None of this is on anybody else’s failed marriage or desire for a marriage or strange conception of marriage; just the people in this marriage.
It’s fashionable within some circles to postulate that our conception of marriage is literally unnatural, that humans were never “meant” for long-term monogamy, whatever that means. I guess somewhere back before anybody had invented writing there was some broad aberration that struck humans before they began to differentiate into truly distinct cultures and caused them to start doing something unnatural for the next multiple thousand years. I usually interpret such commentary as “I can’t handle long-term monogamy”, much as I tend to interpret men asserting that it’s just male biological destiny to fuck around as “Not only will I cheat on you, I expect to be entitled to your understanding forgiveness of my need for extra tail”. But really, it’s not really any of my goddamn business; it doesn’t actually affect my damn marriage if somebody screws up their own relationship through infidelity, or for that matter decides amicably between partners that their marriage includes an agreement that some on the side is okay as long as ground rules that both are comfortable with are obeyed. Accusing them of somehow making an assault on marriage is absurd- much like any assertion that mine is a soulless lie because I do it differently is.
Just as the concept of a “collective right” is absurd when discussing what individuals are entitled to or not to be restrained from, marriage is not a collective institution in any way except statistically.
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:05 am
It’s fashionable within some circles to postulate that our conception of marriage is literally unnatural, that humans were never “meant” for long-term monogamy, whatever that means. I guess somewhere back before anybody had invented writing there was some broad aberration that struck humans before they began to differentiate into truly distinct cultures and caused them to start doing something unnatural for the next multiple thousand years.
To be fair, marriage isn’t necessarily synonymous with monogamy. There’s polygamy and concubinage, and there’s casual sex outside the marriage. So it’s not necessarily a contradiction to suggest that humans might be “wired” both for strong immediate-family bonds that we’d generally call marriage _and_ for getting Biblical with more than one person.
Like a lot of armchair evolutionary psychology, though, I dunno if that idea really meshes with the evidence. I’m not an anthropologist or a historian, but what I’ve read of both is filled from start to finish with people who like to settle down with one partner, people who like to settle or unsettle with multiple partners, and people who aren’t too into the whole sex thing in any flavor. If there’s one thing we seem to be “wired” for, relationship wise, it’s a wide diversity of preferences.
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:47 am
Yep, I’ve no quibbles with you there. I’ve written about the subject at greater length before, but suffice to say the actual evidence seems to indicate that there are multiple succesful mating strategies for hominids, each with its own costs and benefit, and it only makes sense that a variability of preferences and temperaments would be spread throughout the population. If even baboons have a few different “models” of mating success in what superficially looks like a very straightforward mating system, why on earth would we be simpler?
What I’m railing against here isn’t polygamy or open marriages, it’s what boils down to saying “if you claim your relationship is monogamous and you don’t want to cheat you’re just lying and your partner is probably cheating on you”.
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:54 am
Saying that marriage isn’t natural is like saying that airplanes aren’t natural.
Marriage is a set of customs designed to create a stable environment for raising children and indoctrinating them in a culture.
This indoctrination isn’t a bad thing. It’s a way to pass down lessons learned over hundreds of generations. It’s not perfect, but it’s a much more efficient way to teach a great deal of information than forcing each generation to learn through trial and error.
But while gay marriage, for example, doesn’t change anything in your relationship in particular, it represents a financial cost to society. Many of the benefits of marriage - the custom of having your family covered under your insurance, for example - are a cost to society in general and a benefit to the married couple. These benefits are paid in exchange for the service of raising children and inculcating them in our culture. These benefits, therefore, should not be available to gay couples.
In the past, the vast majority of marriages were at least intended to produce children. The burden of barren couples was small, and extending the benefits of marriage to all married couples was a reasonable practice. Now, we have not only gay couples who want to get married, we have far more couples who choose to remain childless.
What we should now do is decouple the financial benefits of marriage from the legal benefits - next of kin designation, right to take care of burial, right to visit in the hospital, and so on. The legal benefits should be available to any couple, or even group of people who draw up the appropriate contract. The financial benefits should then be restricted to those couples raising children in a stable two-parent home.
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Kendrick, I’m curious about the “costs to society” that gay and childless couples create. The insurance bit is silly, I pay more for my family than a single person does, and more than a simple married couple without children does. Besides, while I don’t have the stats, I would assume that most young couples regardless of sexual orientation have two incomes. I can’t think of anyone that I know that has the luxury of staying home while the other brings home the bacon.
But you recovered from that in my eyes by at least allowing the legal benefits of marriage. . . and then killed me with your last sentence: The financial benefits should then be restricted to those couples raising children in a stable two-parent home.
I’m trying (and failing) to phrase a reaction other than “who the hell are you (or I for that matter) to judge what a stable home is, or how many parents it has?”. What about a single mom raising kids? Shoot, any military family where one parent has to deploy for a year or so? How about a family of 3 adults and children? For that matter, does that mean that as soon as your kids turn 18 that you should loose all marriage benefits?
But really, it’s the “financial benefits that are a cost to society” that really makes me wonder. The only thing I really found was Social Security (benefits go to a surviving spouse), avoiding estate taxes, and I guess if you squint really hard, the additional cost to the employer for health insurance to a married, single income family. What am I missing that is hitting my wallet so hard?
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Is it written into the various states’ insurance regulations that policies must include an option for married couples and families? Because from where I’m sitting, it sure looks like a private contract between the insurer and the insured (or the insured’s employer), and society can go hang.
I realize that as one of those who’ve chosen (thus far) to remain childless, I’m part of the problem, but I’m just not seeing where my happy marriage is a burden to society.
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:39 pm
…I was waiting until I was less annoyed to respond, but Jeff and Squid pretty much covered the salient points.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Kendrick, would you support mandatory divorces for couples past child-bearing age as part of Social Security reform? Or is the expectation of long-term retirement benefits a vital incentive to convince a boy and a girl who like each other very much to have kids and raise them to the best of their abilities?
For that matter, if the financial benefits to marriage are (“ought to be”) subsidies for raising children in a two-parent household, would you support gay/barren-couple marriage conditional upon the married couple adopting a child? It’s not like there’s any shortage of children up for adoption, after all, and the social benefits of giving those kids a stable upbringing would surely exceed the costs.
Heck, let’s talk about marriage as a financial incentive to raise kids (leaving insurance out of it: as Squid pointed out, that’s a private contractual affair). The current national debt load is unsustainable. The historical record shows that the vast majority of couples don’t need to be bribed to care of their children. How do you feel about removing the financial benefits of marriage to reduce the deficit? Personally, I think it’d be an unnoticed drop in the bucket — which suggests that spending one-ninth as much money on gay marriage benefits would be about one-ninth as noticeable.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:36 pm
With all of the most troubling/absurd implications ably dealt with…
Married couples don’t get subsidies for being married. They get taxed less, and the explicit reason for that is because they represent a single household. (And even then, depending on your exact situation, you can even wind up taxed MORE, not less- see H.R. Block for a quick thumbnail on the subject.) Children- and adult family members temporarily or permanently unable to take care of themselves- are covered explicitly in the tax code as DEPENDENTS, not in any way contingent upon marriage. Your argument is fallacious at its core.
What kills me is that nobody seems at all concerned about the HORRIBLE BURDEN TO SOCIETY imposed by childless marriages like mine, or about government’s role to save THE POOR CHILDREN in unstable marriages that divorce, have substance abuse problems, have abuse, or just have two feckless idiots with poor planning skills who never really liked each other that much anyway- until two men or two women want it. Then, because it’s not the Cleaver version of marriage, suddenly government needs to apply standards it never remotely approached in the past in order to make sure they don’t get their hands on it and destroy society.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Excellent post and my comment(s) have already been covered…
I would add as one who has had a failed marriage, there is a significant monetary penalty if children are involved too… sigh…
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:13 pm
LR: I used the term “subsidy” carelessly, conflating it with employer-provided health insurance. If the costs of marriage and child-rearing were paid in pre-tax dollars (now there’s an idea), it’d be a subsidy; targeted tax breaks are more like transfers. That’s what I get for slinging around econ jargon I only half understand.
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Blunt: no worries, seeing your reply translated into econ just made me go “HEY there’s a central problem with this argument that I missed while objecting to everything else”.
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:03 pm
LR: Just being pedantic.
Funny how the first time I read your post, my only thought was “Marriage skepticism? People write books about that? There’s another topic for the dilligaf list”, and now I’ve posted three comments….
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:36 pm
In my own case, as soon as someone starts to froth at the mouth about something like marriage, I want them to define the term as explicitly as possible. Why? Because there is so much assumption that everyone knows precisely what they mean when they use the term without any need for clarification.
March 4th, 2010 at 7:08 am
I an add some anecdotal evidence to Labrat’s points about married people paying more. My wife and I payed about $2,000 more in total taxes after we got married. Further, we each have our own insurance despite working at the same company because it is actually more expensive to have a two person family plan compared to two seperate adult plans. Maybe if we had kids, or insured our cats, it would make sense to have a family plan, but at least where we are it makes a lot more sense for two single professionals to just go it alone until some non-income generating parasite starts growing inside one or the other. And depending on the parasite, it might not make sense even then…