It’s always seemed oddly appropriate to me that the motto of the same-sex marriage movement was “love is love.” This is a tautology, of course. And as any beginning logic student can tell you, a tautology (though true!) doesn’t explain anything.
It was meant to be romantic. “Let’s not judge and classify people. Let’s just recognize that everyone needs love and intimacy and affirm their efforts to find it.” Everyone does need love and intimacy, but they seem to be scarce commodities nowadays, so here’s a quick question. Has that become more or less true in the years since Obergefell?
Mind you, I’m not positing some simple or direct causal relationship, far less suggesting that we could restore a healthy marriage culture by rolling back a SCOTUS decision. Forcing a re-litigation of that issue, right now and in our present climate, would be a spectacularly bad idea. But I do really think that the energy that pushed it through in the first place had a great deal to do with the deep sympathy people feel nowadays for the fear of being alone. Because we are increasingly alone. Unfortunately, the movement itself exacerbated the problem, becoming the Defining Cause for a whole generation and persuading them that “I’m a little fuzzy on this marriage business, but I do at least know that whatever it is, it must be something two people of the same sex can do.”
I don’t think that was helpful. Love is love, obviously, but we aren’t simply born as good lovers; we have to grow into that. We learn it across years of being asked to shoulder moral responsibilities, which ideally should increase in weight as we develop the capacity to carry them. We grow morally by striving to be better friends, siblings, sons and daughters, and community members, eventually adding new roles such as “colleague” and “adult citizen.” But particularly in marriage, the most serious and deliberate of human relationships, it is vital to commit ourselves up-front to “doing this right.”
That’s quite hard to do if one cannot answer the question: What are we doing here?
Young people are retreating from marriage at an alarming rate. In 1960, only 11% of young men were still unmarried by age thirty; today it’s nearly half. Pew tells us that as of 2021, fully a quarter of 40-year-old American adults still have never married. It’s not that they want to be alone. A sizable majority (69%) say they would like to marry, but that they can’t find the right person or situation.
I don’t imagine many of those people would see this as a definitional problem. They have a sense of what they want from marriage: romance, companionship, emotional support. But they’re like people who desire “professional success,” understand that mainly in terms of status and financial security, and wander around applying for every high-level job they can find. It doesn’t work like that, kids. You’ve got to build a resume and some skills. You’re confusing the rewards of the job with the job itself.
In a similar way, adults in their late 20s or 30s have great difficulty finding that perfect person who is loving and fun to be with, and slots right into the life they’ve already built for themselves. Marriage isn’t a “besties with benefits” program. Neither is it a perquisite that gets rolled into your first big signing bonus.
The good news here is that we have successfully preserved much of the core structure of traditional marriage, despite all the social upheaval of the past several decades. Exclusivity, fidelity, and permanence are still widely embraced as defining features of marriage. When a couple announces their engagement, we assume that their plan is to build a life together, centered around an exclusive sexual relationship. People differ in their tolerance of divorce and spousal abandonment, but hardly anyone thinks it’s appropriate to intend that on the day of the wedding. Polygamy and open marriage put a bit of pressure on this model from the outside, but they don’t seem to be mainstreaming to any noteworthy degree. Moral judgment of those phenomena may have ebbed, but they just aren’t what most people want.
My considered view here is that something like the traditional Catholic view, though gloriously consistent and deeply meaningful, is too demanding to be fully realized as a normative model in fallen human societies. Most people won’t commit to it.
The bad news is that we now find ourselves with a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Fidelity and permanence are pretty big asks, especially “until death do us part.” If you’re going to push all your chips to the center that way, you want to be sure the other person is doing the same. Now though, we see the weakness of a “capstone” or “companionate” model of marriage. What’s the glue? How do we set it up to ensure that both spouses pay the buy-in? That returns us to the question: What are we doing here?
Historically (but still for many people today) the answer was simple. A married couple is a procreative pair. A baby-making team. Essentially every human society has made a point of joining man and woman, with a ceremonial pomp that has no real parallel in any other human relationship, for the obvious reason that man plus woman equals baby. And that momentous reality creates a lot of further need: babies need care, young mothers need protection and support, fathers need a secure connection to offspring they might otherwise never know. Seems like we’ve got a lot of complex but dovetailing interests on the table. Here comes the bride!
The fact that male-female intimacy naturally leads to new life gives it both momentous social significance and a unique emotional character. That’s true before the baby exists, or even if it never does. When a woman says “yes” to a man, she is opening herself to bearing his child, an utterly transformative event for her but also for the universe. That’s just what sex is. And the reality lingers in our psychology no matter what steps we take to bury or efface it. That’s the glue, friends. Any effort to re-engineer marriage entirely without that component is going to struggle to hold. It just won’t be sticky enough.
I’m talking like a Catholic now, which I know not everyone likes, but before I descend from my soapbox, let me make one more point about Catholics and our open-to-life, no-contraceptives-and-no-divorce radicalism. Though there is obviously very substantial overlap with the teachings of other religious traditions, it’s hard to find a better example than Catholicism of a faith with a very well-developed theology of marriage that is radically built around the moral gravity of sex, with its awesome life-producing power. Most people find the demands of this view a bit much, which I understand completely, but even if that’s you, take a moment to appreciate the upsides.
Catholic orthodoxy is extremely stern about the moral implications of sex and marital commitment. It pushes us into some extreme-seeming positions that many people find abhorrent, and even the relatively “healthy and normal” case can look pretty radical-fringe by modern standards. Along with that though, Catholicism is remarkably relaxed about most of the other things that religious traditionalists like to use to make marriage stickier, e.g. gender roles, gendered clothing, patriarchal privilege. Of course at the fringes you can find particular Catholics doing kooky things, but that’s pretty much on their own initiative. The Church isn’t continually trying to browbeat women into submitting to their husbands’ despotic authority. We don’t get hot and bothered about women having advanced degrees or careers. There are no set rules about who occupies which space at the dinner table, or who is permitted to change diapers. You just don’t need all of those reactionary accretions when The Mission itself is so hard. If you know on the day of the wedding that you might be in the delivery room together nine months later, that’s a very high buy-in, powerful enough to cut through the marital Prisoner’s Dilemma. Marriage is your quest, not your capstone, and your spouse is the other sworn member of your Fellowship.
I’m not exactly proffering this as the solution to the erosion of marriage. It is in fact a very effective solution, but most people won’t do it, because it’s too hard. I’m afraid I may sound self-congratulatory here, but please trust me that I mean this quite sincerely: I don’t think it’s realistic to expect many people to choose such a difficult path, unless bolstered by serious religious and moral conviction. This essay isn’t meant primarily as a personal reflection, so I won’t ramble on about (say) what it’s like to give birth three times in four years, but… not easy. There were many times when I prayed, in effect, “Lord, I can’t do this, it’s too hard.” I would have quit, except I didn’t, because in my own mind that would effectively have made me a failed human being. But even though I am deeply grateful for my family and my faith (and will happily confirm that the long-term rewards are rich), I don’t need an explanation of why people aren’t racing to sign up for this marital model. Come on in, folks! The water is ice cold.
My considered view here is that something like the traditional Catholic view, though gloriously consistent and deeply meaningful, is too demanding to be fully realized as a normative model in fallen human societies. Most people won’t commit to it. It can nevertheless supply a kind of scaffolding for social practices that deviate at certain points (where the ask just seems too hard), holding the center without demanding that everyone attach themselves directly to it. All of those deviations carry costs, of course. They’ll leave casualties. Some human societies have stabilized marriage by winking at adultery or prostitution or divorce. Sometimes women have been placed in degrading or just very restricted social positions. In the ancient world infanticide was common; polygamy has been regarded by many societies as a necessary mechanism for ensuring all women have a male protector.
Our society is different. Women have much higher status here, so we aren’t going to subjugate them. (Sniff.) We do in fact value marital friendship and companionship very highly, and we also value individual freedom, so a stringently role-defined marital model won’t work well for us. Now comes the crucial question: What might work for us?
I’ll pick it up there next week.
We had a great time in the corn maze yesterday, and were sad to bid the grandparents farewell this morning. But maybe it’s just as well not to be in the same house tonight as Notre Dame faces off against my parents’ alma mater. I love you, Cougars! But, Go Irish.
As my Dad said before leaving, “Hey, there’s not much at stake here, except the question of which is the One True Faith.” Indeed.