Pulling Yourself Up by Your Ball and Chain

September 23, 2023 6:20 AM

Rebecca Traister discusses the latest matrimony as economic policy push for The Cut. New York magazine/archive: It’s easy to see why the marriage solution is so appealing. Like telling people that it’s their responsibility to address the climate crisis by using paper straws, or advising Black men that they need to pull up their pants and be better fathers, it off-loads the responsibility for broad and systemic reform by tsk-tskingly placing it on individuals and their intimate behaviors.

Matt Bruenig also weighs in on the central flawed assumption in much research that compares outcomes for children in 1 parent households to 2 parent households.

Although Traister's piece points to many other recent opinion essays on the value of marriage, this week's marriage discourse is largely in response to economist Melissa Kearney's new book on the topic.

posted by the primroses were over (21 comments total)

Mainly posting this because I like the anecdote Traister uses for her lede so much, but that was a little long for the post itself:

In my neighborhood this past spring, the Parks Department was digging up and distributing spent tulip bulbs to anyone who wanted them. I got in line next to a woman who looked to be about 60. As we waited for our bales of bulbs, she cheerfully recounted to me the story of how she had first planted tulips one fall day when she was pregnant with her first child some 30 years earlier. She’d been on hands and knees, digging in the ground, when her husband had come outside and seen her. He’d scoffed meanly, she remembered, and told her that she looked like a bus — ugly and base, down in the dirt like that.

By the time the tulips bloomed the next spring, her baby had arrived and she had left her husband. Tulips always made her smile, she told me, her arms now full of a new bunch of them. They reminded her of how she had come by her liberty.

posted by the primroses were over at 6:23 AM on September 23, 2023 [51 favorites]

This is the only marriage policy article I’ve read that points out a simple, obvious issue: “you cannot just conjure stable and rewarding romantic commitments on command.”
posted by Countess Elena at 6:41 AM on September 23, 2023 [34 favorites]

It's moving away from romantic reward and into economic necessity at this point, though. Most people can't afford to live alone!
posted by kingdead at 6:49 AM on September 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a great article, thanks for posting it.

I liked this concluding paragraph near the end:

It’s not marriage — it’s money, and the racist and economically unjust policies that leave some Americans with less of it to begin with, regardless of their marital status. For those who have money, marriage is likely to help them to have even more of it; for those who find a good match, there are many emotional and societal rewards of partnership. But you need stability first; you need the money, jobs, housing, and health care first. And these are the things that the American government, particularly the American right, does not want to offer its people.

Something that I'm seeing a lot these days, both in people I know and also in online comments, is people having very long engagements. The initial engagement might happen early in the relationship, but then people often seem happy to stay in that position for several years. I don't recall that being so common when I was younger.

It's moving away from romantic reward and into economic necessity at this point, though. Most people can't afford to live alone!

The difference is that these days there are so many ways to live that don't require marriage. In the 1950s, the socially acceptable options for women were to live at home, live in a single-sex supervised boarding house/apartment building, or be married, basically. Now, even if someone can't afford an apartment on their own, they can live with roommates or live with an unmarried romantic partner, without any need for marriage.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:55 AM on September 23, 2023 [13 favorites]

It's moving away from romantic reward and into economic necessity at this point, though. Most people can't afford to live alone!

Has the institution of marriage ever really been about romantic reward?
posted by fairmettle at 6:58 AM on September 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is the only marriage policy article I’ve read that points out a simple, obvious issue: “you cannot just conjure stable and rewarding romantic commitments on command.”

This is true but it's also true that conservatives are also super excited at the idea of disobedient women being punished and controlled and humiliated (both in the usual sense and in the sense of being forced into humility) by being shackled to the abusive, controlling monsters they demand boys be raised into.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:06 AM on September 23, 2023 [45 favorites]

I've read about causality going in the opposite direction-- poor people are less likely to marry because they see that poverty makes it hard to maintain a marriage.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:28 AM on September 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

Based on the people I know where I live, this is the research/books I'd like to see:

1. Having divorced parents who remarry - so now children have 4 parents and 8 living grandparents - is better for children.
2. Polyamorous parents with additional partners is better for children.
3. Rich married couples with a live in au pair or private nannies who takes care of the children, is better for children.
4. Boarding schools where children live residentially full-time and are cared for by a permanent, round the clock staff, is better for children.
5. People who live in cooperative multi-generation residences is better for children.
6. Being rich is better for children.
7. Living next to friends with similar aged children and sharing caregiving across multiple families is better for children.
8. Children being loved and wanted, is better for children.
9. Children who are raised by adult siblings who are closer to their age, is better for children.
10. Children who have retired grandparents living in the house with their working parents, is better for children.

Am I missing anything?
posted by Toddles at 7:58 AM on September 23, 2023 [14 favorites]

Excellent article-- thanks for posting and the archive link.

Because those single women that Republicans rail against? They vote against Republicans. And Republicans know it. On Fox News, in the days after 2022’s midterm elections, Jesse Watters was explicit: “Single women are breaking for Democrats by 30 points … So we need these ladies to get married. And it’s time to fall in love and just settle down. Guys, go put a ring on it.”
posted by travertina at 8:06 AM on September 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Am I missing anything?

I think I am. Do you mean, you believe research confirms this and you want to see that research, or do you mean that these are questions you would like to see research try to answer? Some of them are pretty complex questions: in #5, for example, you'd have to balance out extra caregivers versus those caregivers almost inevitably imposing outdated gender roles on the kids.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:06 AM on September 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

I knew a woman (mid 20s) who was proudly showing off her engagement ring at work. It was very pretty! She seemed so happy. I was happy for her. Someone in the group asked approximately when she planned to get married. She told everyone that they're still considering getting married, and talking about what kind of marriage and marriage arrangements they want to have, and might— sometime down the road—agree to get married.

No judgement, just telling a story.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:17 AM on September 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The people who push this for black people in particular don't appear to care to observe the outcomes for progeny of two parent homes that were actually disclosed in the article* - often still not great - because it means that you'd have to discuss the impact of racism again. On a micro level they seem to understand the idea that "no, the man she was with was not a good prospect for marriage even if he requested her hand, which was a circumstance that was unlikely to occur", but on a macro level because they think the difference will come out of their pocket they get all block headed and pretend that these women are refusing earnest, upstanding, compatible suitors because the welfare is too good.

*that I've independently researched before because I'd heard this argument a bunch of times and happen to be a product of a two parent black home
posted by Selena777 at 8:19 AM on September 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

One of my favorite Internet writers, Roy Edroso — who I've followed for at least 20 years now — just posted about this and included the Traister piece: Link

I highly recommend his paid Substack, by the way.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:25 AM on September 23, 2023

I knew a woman (mid 20s) who was proudly showing off her engagement ring at work. It was very pretty! She seemed so happy. I was happy for her. Someone in the group asked approximately when she planned to get married. She told everyone that they're still considering getting married, and talking about what kind of marriage and marriage arrangements they want to have, and might— sometime down the road—agree to get married.

My take on the long engagements that some people have is that in part, it is because being engaged these days gives you much of the social approval that in the past required being officially married. You are marked and accepted publicly as a "real" couple in a way that being boyfriend/girlfriend/etc doesn't always get you. The marriage itself is less essential to that acceptance now, so it can be delayed until people are ready for that actual step. (And, an engagement doesn't require going to court to dissolve, so it isn't such a major step legally.)
posted by Dip Flash at 8:29 AM on September 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

"It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure. It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing- principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage."

Yuuuuuup.
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:56 AM on September 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

Let’s be real, too, a man being yoked to a helpmate that he can barely stand is one who will stay at the office and work long hours to avoid the family which grinds him down. A shitty marriage can be a real boon to capitalism.
posted by amanda at 11:41 AM on September 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Isn’t divorce a mini financial disaster in a person’s life, though? Capitalism doesn’t like personal bankruptcies.
posted by Selena777 at 12:01 PM on September 23, 2023

It depends Selena. If your spouse was bad or irresponsible with money, a divorce might bring you economic relief. I've known men and women in that position.
posted by emjaybee at 12:26 PM on September 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

When I was a kid I used to pray to a God I wasn't sure existed that my dad would leave the mother and take me with him. (She was very abusive in most possible ways)

He didn't, until I was an adult and basically had to rescue him. He was raised to believe that divorce was the absolute worst thing that you could do to kids, and he lived by that. My life still reflects the consequences of that choice.

I wish I could share, viscerally, those consequences with the assholes who push marriage at all costs. Sometimes the cost is just too high.
posted by Vigilant at 6:02 PM on September 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Isn’t divorce a mini financial disaster in a person’s life, though? Capitalism doesn’t like personal bankruptcies.

This really comes back to Matt Bruenig’s observation that you need to estimate how the same people would have fared together. In my parents’ case, it brought financial stability for my mother because while being a single mother re-entering the workforce wasn’t easy, it was reliable in a way that it never was with my father (something along the lines of depression he refused to get treatment for throughout his life). I know multiple other people who had similar experiences where one partner was simply a financial drag and unwilling to change.

A large part of why the right-wingers keep making these pushes is that the mostly-women who left situations like that raised their children with the idea that they shouldn’t put up with someone who doesn’t carry their fair share, that doing so isn’t part of being good or Christian, etc. The book which started this round of articles is the quasi-intellectual side, the “trad-wife” stuff is the pop version, but it all comes back to there being a large market of dudes who feel threatened by the expectation that a relationship should be a net-win for both people.
posted by adamsc at 6:15 PM on September 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

A underclass of people who are desperate means a steady supply of workers who never quite make enough money to tell you to F off. I mean, economically, Mississippi should not be setting the bar in our country for how we should be treating women and children but here we are. Having more women and children in poverty must be good for something!
posted by amanda at 5:31 AM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]