Of particular concern to Brooks seems to be this statement by Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families.
“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,”
Brooks seems to think the problem is that young people have "too much reverence for marriage":
The research shows that far from rejecting traditional marriage, many people down the social scale revere it too highly. They put it on a pedestal, or as Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins puts it, they regard marriage not as the foundation of adult life, but as the capstone.
They don’t want to marry until they are financially secure and emotionally mature. They don’t want to marry until they can afford a big white-dress wedding and have the time to plan it. They don’t want to marry until they are absolutely sure they can trust the person they are with.
Having seen the wreckage of divorce, they are risk averse, but this risk aversion keeps them trapped in a no man’s land between solitude and marriage. Often they slide into parenthood even though they consider themselves not ready for marriage. The Fragile Families study shows that nearly 90 percent of the people who are living together when their child is born plan to get married someday. But the vast majority never will.
In her essential new book, “Marriage and Caste in America,” Kay Hymowitz describes the often tortuous relations between unskilled, unmarried parents. Both are committed to their child, but in many cases they have ill-defined and conflicting expectations about their roles. The fathers often feel used, Hymowitz writes, “valued only for their not-so-deep pockets.” The mothers feel the fathers are unreliable. There are grandparents taking sides. The relationship ends, and the child is left with one parent not two.
It’s as if there are two invisible rivers of knowledge running through society, steering people subtly toward one form of relationship or another. These rivers consist of a million small habits, expectations, tacit understandings about how people should act and map out their lives.
Among those who are well educated and who are rewarded by the information-age economy, the invisible river reinforces the assumption that childbearing is more arduous and more elevated than marriage. One graduates from marriage to childbearing.
But among those who are less educated and less rewarded, there is an invisible river that encourages the anomalous idea that marriage is more arduous and more elevated than childbearing. One graduates from childbearing to matrimony.
The people in the first river are seeing their divorce rates drop and their children ever better prepared to compete. Only 10 percent of students at an elite college like Cornell are from divorced families, according to a study led by Dean Lillard and Jennifer Gerner.
The people in the second river are falling further behind, and their children face bad odds. For them, social facts like the rise of women without men cannot be greeted with equanimity. The main struggle of their lives is not against the patriarchy.
The first step toward a remedy, paradoxically, may be to persuade people in this second river to value marriage less, to see it less as a state of sacred bliss that cannot be approached until all the conditions are perfect, and more as a social machine, which, if accompanied with the right instruction manual, can be useful for achieving practical ends.
The hubris of this article is breathtaking in its ability to combine sexism and classism into some kind of Guiding Principle of the Universe. Brooks posits, after years of conservative thought that the less educated do not revere marriage enough, that instead they revere marriage MORE than those who are better educated, citing the fact that only 10% of students from elite colleges like Cornell come from broken homes. Obviously it has never occurred to Brooks that perhaps the financial costs and complications of divorce among better-educated and higher-income Americans have a lot more to do with that number than any kind of "pragmatism" about what marriage is.
It's also interesting to see a conservative columnist call for less reverence for marriage at a time when his own movement regards the very idea of a gay couple living together and raising children in a committed relationship that has been solemnized before their friends and family as "destroying the sanctity of marriage." If people in the less-educated groups are taking marriage seriously, perhaps they have simply listened to too much conservative dogma about marriage being some kind of holy state accompanied by trumpets from heaven.
Can Brooks really be advocating for the kind of cavalier attitude about marriage among women that was common among some of my peers in college -- an attitude that rarely went any further than the big party and the white dress and being Queen for a Day? Or is there something else operative here?
My guess is that the idea that women may be CHOOSING to remain single, and be happy with that decision, is profoundly threatening to the social order. I have been fortunate enough to find a compatible partner with whom I've lived happily for almost 24 years, 20 of them sanctioned by the government. One reason I think we've gotten along so well is because we do not have children. From what I see, it is the very educated class that Brooks lauds for staying married that has elevated childrearing to the status of a cult, in which the child's every move must be studied, lauded, and examined under a microscope.
I'm not one to hold up the preposterously self-indulgent Ayelet Waldman as a paragon of anything, but I think she was onto something in this article from 2005:
I HAVE been in many mothers' groups -- Mommy and Me, Gymboree, Second-Time Moms -- and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of how often mommy feels compelled to put out. Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex either. These are women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings. These are women who love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them are having any sex.
There are agreed upon reasons for this bed death. They are exhausted. It still hurts. They are so physically available to their babies -- nursing, carrying, stroking -- how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else?
But the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife's passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.
And what of these husbands, who find themselves put out to pasture in favor of their children? Instead of leaving, do they perhaps find solace in someone from the office, assuming (probably correctly) that wifey will be so wrapped up in the consistency of little Jacob's poop, or every crumb little Jacob ate today, or the mode of little Jacob's play, that she won't notice that hubby is working late more often these days? In David Brooks' world, that is a preferable state of affairs to the dire one in which women who aren't married aren't sitting in diners with their girlfriends bemoaning the fact that Men Just Don't Want To Get Married Anymore.
I'm always amazed that anyone gets married in this country at all. We live in a society that has always socialized girls from the time they are toddlers to look forward to their weddings. They read fairy tales. Catholic families even dress them up as brides for First Communion. At the same time, we socialize boys to avoid marriage as long as possible and to run the other way when a girl mentions it. In my circles when I was in my 20's, you had a bunch of girls wanting to find someone to marry, and a bunch of guys running away as fast as they could. This hardly seems like a way to foster more marriages.
I think about the way I was in my twenties. I think about it more often than I used to, mostly because once you reach 50, the changes in your body and how you look start to accelerate and you are smacked in the face with your own mortality every morning when you have to do ten minutes of stretching exercises just to walk downstairs and get coffee. I think about it because like so many other people, I could kick myself for not enjoying my youth when I had it. And much of my unhappiness in my early to mid-twenties was because I believed I wanted to get married but just wasn't finding anyone. That I really didn't want to get married and that the men I chose were a function of that never occurred to me. It wasn't until after I'd made some peace with being single that I did find the right person.
I still know young women in their early 30's who feel prisoners of their own biology, wanting to find someone so that they can marry before having children. I worry about these women, because they hear their clocks ticking so loudly it drowns out the alarms that should be going off in their heads when they encounter men who seem to be willing to commit but are a bad bet for various reasons.
But I applaud these young women who don't feel that they aren't really people until they get married; that they aren't really worthy until someone says "I want to spend my life with you." I applaud the older widows and divorcees who don't feel they have to go out and humiliate themselves at singles dances to try to replace the spouse who left them (or whom they left).
Perhaps David Brooks might be comforted by this little anecdote: I have a friend who was widowed in her early forties. She is now in her early sixties and has been alone for over twenty years, raising her daughter to adulthood and trying to make a life for herself. Last year she met someone online, and he is moving to where she lives. They are both ridiculously happy and wondering how it happened.
Women may not want to be the baby factories that the right would want them to be. But as long as there are people, there will be connections.
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