Home Alone, For Better or For Worse

Fewer Americans are marrying today. Fewer people want to get married. Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart surveys the data here.

Beginning in the 1970s a tidal wave of divorces hit the nation. We were told that it was for the best.

We were assured that separated, self-fulfilled, happy, autonomous, independent, liberated parents were better for children than a couple that stayed together out of habit.

If your marriage did not make you happy and fulfilled, you needed to reconsider your commitment. At the least, you needed to engage in an ongoing struggle against your spouse, the better to bring the war home, as the saying went.

Families were destabilized; couples started playing by different sets of rules; children suffered.

Back then people were justly concerned about the anomie that was being produced by the divorces. Children saw their lives disrupted, their routines discarded, their emotional stability undermined.

Now, the children of the divorcing generation are choosing not to marry at all.

Ironically, a young generation that considers the struggle for same-sex marriage the civil rights struggle of its day is choosing to avoid the marital estate.

Young people fiercely desire that the marital institution become more inclusive. They insist that this will strengthen the institution.

At the same time, more and more of them are scrupulously avoiding it.

Marriage is a commitment affirmed in public by sacred vows. Fewer marriages mean fewer commitments and fewer sacred vows.

If good character involves being trustworthy, and if being trustworthy means being good to your word, then fewer marriages mean fewer people being willing to give their word.

The decline in marriage accompanies a loss of moral character.

Men have many good reasons why they do not want to marry. Women do too. Yet, when it comes to divorce, women seem mostly to be leading the way. See Walsh's essay here.

Apparently, marriage is not good for women. Many of them are happier on their own.

As though she were trying to prove marriage to be a patriarchal institution, Dominique Browning declared recently, based on a few random anecdotes, that men need marriage more than women do.

If so, then marriage exploits women and they are best liberated from it.

Obviously, Browning’s message is feminist dogma.

When faced with the question of why divorced men marry more often than divorced women Browning responds that men are the needier sex and are more afraid to be alone. Thus they like to be married because marriage provides them with a caregiver and nursemaid.

Browning has been criticized for demeaning and degrading men. Unfortunately, the critique is well-founded.

She grants no real credence to the idea that divorced men remarry more than divorced women because of certain biological and socio-economic realities.

In Browning’s feminist theater, divorced women thrill to the freedom to get up when they please, to have breakfast when they please, and to do as they please with whom they please when they please. Other women would find this vision of a life without family bleak and depressing.

Browning believes that her freedom largely compensates for the loneliness and the feelings of rejection.

She argues that when a woman retreats to the shelter and sanctuary of her home she feels happy and contented. If no one else is there, if she does not have to answer to anyone else, and if she has no responsibilities to anyone else she feels especially happy.

A man alone, she imagines, feels endangered, insecure, and miserable.

Browning has no sense that a man might be contributing something to a marriage, that he might feel obliged to make his wife happy and contented, or even that he may want to protect her.

To her women are invulnerable. They need no protection.  Unfortunately, this is an illusion, a dangerous one at that.

Looking at the decline in marriage from this angle we find another reason why men might not want to marry. Why would a man want to marry a woman who considers his presence to be an extra chore that, were it not for certain biological imperatives, his wife would not bother with at all.

Browning herself was a successful magazine editor; she was, presumably, a woman who could support herself. Perhaps she is speaking for herself when she says that there is precious little a man can do that she cannot do for herself.

For the vast majority of women, a protective masculine presence makes a home a sanctuary. For Browning, this is not the case. I would call her experience an anomalous, rather than indicative.

In fact, Browning is not talking about marriage per se. She is talking about a kind of modern marriage where a woman is the breadwinner. In such a marriage the traditional roles will either be reversed or skewed.

It reminds us of famed author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Gilbert, the world knows, walked out of her seemingly happy marriage to undertake a round-the-world therapeutic journey of self-discovery.

Look closely at the way she describes her mental state at the moment when she decided that she did not want to be married any more.

In Eat Pray Love she wrote: “Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog walker and the wife and the soon-to-be-mother, and – somewhere in my stolen moments – a writer?”

Why did she leave her marriage? Because it felt like she was married to herself. She was husband and wife, breadwinner and homemaker. She did everything by herself and for herself.

She did not need an extra burden in the person of her husband, a man who was not making any concrete contribution to the marriage.

It seems that Browning was in a similar position. If the examples of Browning and Gilbert tell us anything, they tell us that when a woman is completely self-sufficient, to the point where she does not need a man to provide for her or to protect her, the man in her life will feel and act diminished.

A man who meets a woman who can take care of herself will tend not to want to marry her. If she encroaches on his role and diminishes him as a man, he will do better to look elsewhere for a wife. 

Perhaps the men that Browning finds to be so needy are simply men who no longer want to be married to such dynamic feminists.

Their second wives might be younger, but these women might also respect them for the real contributions they are making to the family.