Why Don't Women Marry?

In the justly famous Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze,” the decisive clue is the dog that didn’t bark. I will spare you an exposition of the story, only to mention that in reading Anna Louie Sussman’s plaint about why more people are not getting married, her inability to see feminism as the problem speaks volumes.

Over the past decades, feminism has revolutionized the conjugal estate. Now that women are suffering the consequences-- childlessness or husbandlessness-- they have banded together to blame men.

The feminist party line has had it that the greatest indignity a woman can suffer is to be a housewife. Who could have imagined that men, basking in the glow of hook-up culture, and having been dispossessed of their role as breadwinner, would have concluded that they had no reason to get married. 

No one ever went broke underestimating the male understanding of relationship dynamics.

If you think that this was not predictable, your crystal ball needs a good cleaning.

Oblivious to the implications of her examples, Sussman begins with the case of single mother Sarah Camino. The salient details are these-- her child’s father was a drug addict who had been fired from his last four jobs. 

How many IQ points do you need to figure out that the man is not going to be a responsible father, to say nothing, of a breadwinner. So, Sarah got pregnant, broke up with her deadbeat boyfriend and  moved back in with her parents.

Surely, she must have been fully cognizant of the contraceptive options. And she certainly could have exercised her right to choose abortion. So, when you ask why she allowed herself to have a baby, the only rational response is to recognize that she was 37 years old at the time. 

Feminism redefined traditional roles out of existence. No more husbands and no more wives. Women would not need a man for anything, beyond an occasional deposit of genetic material. The result, unsurprisingly, has been that American men and women are increasingly unlikely to form durable relationships. 

And, good feminists blame it all on men. No kidding. Sussman expresses it thusly:

But harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today. Having written about gender, dating, and reproduction for years, I’m struck by how blithely these admonitions to get married skate over people’s lived experience. A more granular look at what the reality of dating looks and feels like for straight women can go a long way toward explaining why marriage rates are lower than policy scholars would prefer.

Consider the experience of low income single mothers:

It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.

Let us try to place this in context. In today’s America there is an ongoing war against men. Feminists have insisted that men be displaced from positions of responsibility and authority, whether in college admissions or in hiring and promotion. Thus, women have displaced men; women have taken charge. Men responded by joining gangs or becoming slugs.

And then women do not want to marry such men. As the old saying goes, you made your bed, now lie in it.

Some people are minimally aware of the problem. Sussman seems to be one of their number:

The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health. Ms. Kearney, for example, acknowledges that improving men’s economic position, especially men without college degrees, is an important step toward making them more attractive partners.

Naturally, Sussman joins feminists in blaming macho culture, failing to notice the obvious sociological fact, namely that cultures become more macho when they become more female-dominant:

….by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.

Did you get that? These men, dispossessed of their access to the jobs and careers that would make them better breadwinners, are not very good at being girls. They also lack “emotional sensitivity.” Fancy that.

Emotional ssensitivity is not part of the male game plan. A woman who wants to marry someone who is emotionally present and available should marry another woman.

And then there is the demographic mismatch. Since colleges and universities now privilege female applicants, we end up with a large cohort of educated women who imagine that their advanced degrees and corporate sinecures are going to make them irresistible marriage material. When they look for men with comparable credentials, they come up short.

In time, most of them discover that they have been sold a pig in a poke, as the only saying goes. But then, it is too late, so they obscure their achievements, in a last desperate attempt to find a man who will be more like a woman.

Sussman concludes with a plaintive wail. It is that much more plaintive because she has failed to place responsibility where it belongs-- with the feminist scolds who have transformed the institution of marriage, to the detriment of women.

But unless we pay attention to the granular experiences of people in the dating trenches, simply advising people to marry is not only, frankly, obnoxious for the many women out there trying — it’s also just not going to work.

I would make one request-- please spare us words like “granular” unless you are talking about powder. Trust me, if I compared women to powder and grain I would not hear the end of it.

I will add a point that I have made elsewhere. Courtship is an outgrowth of a medieval ritualized seduction, called courtly love. 

In it a married woman, husband having ridden off to spend a couple of years fighting the crusades, takes up with one of the young males who remained on her estate-- that would be stable hands, dishwashers, cooks and gardeners. Obviously, these males are adolescents. This means that they were not prospective husbands but were emotionally sensitive, to a fault. 

So, the ensuing seduction ritual-- one that the participants refused to admit had been consummated-- was created of, by, and for women.

When it comes to romance, women are in charge. Like it or not, when the ritual no longer seems to be working for them, they ought to be able to do better than to blame men. They ought to look in the mirror.

If you transform social structures you are responsible for the fallout, even if and especially if it does not fulfill your wishes.

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