Three reasons I can't encourage people to get married
Despite the fact that I'd love to get married again
Recently on Twitter someone I’m not familiar with wondered “why it’s so hugely socially preferred to agree to spend the rest of your life with whatever person you happen to be dating in your late 20s/early 30s. seems much more fulfilling to date a series of people for a year or two at a time (with long single periods between)”
(I got there via Visa, who’s amazing and you should follow if you’re on that hellsite.)
So, for those who don’t know me well yet, here’s my very abbreviated relationship history so you can know what dogs I have in this fight. I find it helpful to keep in mind that when people are telling you how to live, 99% of the time they’re either trying to justify their own choices to themselves or expressing regret at their choices.
I monogamously married at 22 years old and initiated my divorce when I was 26. I’m 35 now. Between my divorce and today I've had many sexual partners. Probably 30 short romantic relationships. And probably 10 long-term relationships, both monogamous and non-monog. I’ve cohabitated with some of those partners.
In my experience and from what I’ve read, I think there are good reasons and bad reasons for people to encourage other people to marry young(ish) and stay married for life.
Let's start with some of the best reasons. First, a happy, lengthy marriage is associated with a lot of positive outcomes. It's economically efficient. People in healthy marriages are generally happier and wealthier. Parents being married and staying married is associated with better outcomes for children. There's some benefit to everyone following a similar model for adulthood in terms of efficiency.
Caveats: The things that make you happier, healthier, and richer are generally also going to help you get and stay married. For example, studies indicate that marriage doesn’t cause men to be healthier or higher-earning, but rather that healthier, higher-income men are more likely to marry.
But the biggest benefit to marriage imo is something I briefly touched on, ironically in my last post “My wife and I want to invite a third into bed.” Which is, essentially, that knowing one (or two or three) people really, really well is more interesting, rewarding, and meaningful than whoring around.
This isn’t to say dating isn’t valuable. Dating and having sex with a lot of people helped alleviate some of my anxiety about my body, helped introduce me to new ways of thinking and living, broadened my world, gave me practice socializing, and taught me a good deal about myself.
But at this point I feel I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns from dating more people. I strongly suspect I've pretty much maxed out the value I'm going to get out of getting to know more people at a medium or shallow depth. And I think most people max it out more quickly than I did. I think most people have lower libidos and value novelty (especially around sex) less than I do, for instance. I think most people also value the kind of learning you get from dating more people less than I do. For most people, I believe whatever they’d learn from dating a lot of people isn’t much more valuable than what they’d learn from going deep with one.
So that's an extremely brief overview of the reasons I find compelling and pro-social to "settle down."
I think the bad reasons to encourage people to settle down essentially boil down to two motivations. First, many people don't care about outliers.
As I mentioned, I’m an outlier in many ways when it comes to sex and romance. (And when it comes to other things as well, tbh.) The big drawback to a model that says everyone needs to get monogamously married for life is that actually everyone doesn’t need to get monogamously married for life. For some people that’s a terrible idea.
It was terrible for me! As much as I'd love a long-term committed partner now, staying with the man I married at 22 would have been a huge mistake.
One huge problem I have with social conservatism is it basically says, "Fuck the outliers." If it turns out lifelong monogamous marriage is clearly very bad for your growth and mental wellness, sucks to be you. Get in line because we need a model that works for us, and people like us, and you're inconvenient.
Sorry, I’m not going to co-sign a model that is happy to sacrifice the marginalized because they pose an inconvenience to those in power.
The second common bad reason to encourage people to settle down is that many people fear women having agency. Many people push early mono marriage because they're afraid women who don't feel pushed into it will demand more from men or opt out of marriage entirely. In this they’re not entirely wrong. Many women are having trouble finding men who are either willing to take on the bulk of domestic responsibility or earn a wage that would enable their wives to work at a level where the wives could take on the bulk of domestic responsibility. And many of these women are choosing to opt out of marriage entirely rather than work a full-time job and then do everything at home. Can’t say I blame them.
Where I break with people who fear women having agency is that I don’t think encouraging women to settle in order to optimize outcomes for mediocre men is a worthwhile trade.
Ultimately, I think long-term, committed partnership is great. I want everyone who wants that to have it. And I think it’s a good goal for most people.
However, long-term, committed partnership isn’t necessarily monogamous and it isn’t necessarily marriage. I’d love to get married, ideally non-monogamously. I hope the next one lasts a lot longer than the first. But it’s important for people to decide what they want. Do they want something long-term? Do they want something monogamous? Do they want to split assets in the event they part ways? In some ways “marriage” makes things easier by containing a lot of assumptions. But it also makes things more difficult by containing a lot of assumptions.
Further, saying “this thing is probably good for most people” isn’t the same as saying “this is something people should try to encourage or even enforce as a norm.”
I can’t go as far as to encourage most people to get married for three main reasons:
Encouraging people to get married is redundant. Polling shows that most people already want to get married. According to one study a whopping 5% of never-married people say they don’t ever want to marry. Contrary to AEI bullshit about unmarried mothers choosing to stay single for welfare benefits, only 10% of unmarried mothers say they don’t want to get married.
The research indicates that people who aren’t married generally aren’t married due to factors largely outside of their control. Usually, it’s because they’re poor. The higher your income and education, the more likely you are to marry and stay married. Most marriages are between people with similar levels of income and education. Two poor people getting married is less economically beneficial than two wealth people getting married. And studies show poor people who get divorced are usually worse off financially than those who never married. If your argument is that poor people are poor due to their own choices, please read anything about economic mobility in the United States.
To the extent that encouraging monogamous marriage for life makes life more difficult for people for whom that won’t work, I can’t support it. Outliers matter.