The trouble with critics
Today, I am attempting my first fisking. For those of you not up on the latest Internet lingo, a fisking is a point-by-point examination (usually the form of a refutation) of a news article, opinion piece, or blog post.
Last week, I came across an article written by Laura Kipnis, a professor in Northwestern University's school of communications. In it, she tries to make the case that marriage should be abolished for the good of society. When I first sat down to type out my response, I wrote things like "What's WRONG with you??!!! Are you UTTERLY INSANE or just COMPLETELY STUPID?!!" I realized that such language on my part would not have been helpful for anyone, including me, so I waited a few days and resumed my task once I was a little calmer.
Here's the article, originally published in The Observer, 9/7/03. I found it at The Age, 11/15/03. Kipnis's words are indented. My comments are not.
Laura Kipnis has provoked a storm in the US with a new book attacking marriage. Here, she explains why monogamy turns nice people into household tyrants.
Marriage: The new blue-light case of the week. Everyone is terribly worried about its condition: can it be cured? Or has the time arrived for drastic measures - just putting it out of its misery? Euthanasia is a dirty word but, frankly, the prognosis is not so great for this particular patient: a stalwart social institution is now scabby and infirm, gasping for each tortured breath. Many who had once so optimistically pledged to uphold its vows are fleeing its purported satisfactions. In the US, a well-publicised 50 per cent failure rate hardly makes for optimism; in Britain, too, the Office for National Statistics report that divorce has reached a record high at around 15 per cent. But this lower figure goes with a drop in the number of weddings - at their lowest level since the reign of Queen Victoria; this should mean fewer divorces, since not getting married in the first place seems the best way - these days - of avoiding this sorry (often expensive, usually ego-damaging) denouement.
I should first say that I have no idea what Kipnis means by "blue-light case." A google search for the three words together resulted in a few links to her article on various sites and a few Web sites selling a decorative PC accessory. In this context, however, she seems to be comparing marriage to a terminally ill patient who has no evident quality of life and no evident hope of recovery.
I have tried to find a reliable source for the divorce rate in the United States, but no one seems to agree on how many marriages actually end in divorce. The Straight Dope has a seemingly logical examination of the issue of figuring divorce rates. Suffice it to say, the 50 per cent figure is unreliable.
Avoiding marriage may be the surest way to prevent divorce, but in no other sense of the word is it the best way.
Certainly, there are happy marriages. No one disputes that and all those who are happily married can stop reading here.
Here is the crux of the problem. Good, happy, and fulfilling marriages do exist and always have. I'm in one. I know people who love being married. There are people I don't know personally who visit this blog because they love their spouse. I'll also go so far as to say that I am at heart a selfish, prideful man who would prefer not to compromise on even the smallest point. But still I have a good marriage and the love of a wonderful woman, however selfish, prideful, and averse to compromise she may be as well. I maintain that if I can do it, anyone can do it. Or at least this: If it's possible for some, it's possible for many, if not all. Even if most marriages fail, that's not a matter of statistics—it's a matter of human will. Statistics are irrelevant.
Additionally, there is always serial monogamy for those who can't face up to the bad news - yes, keep on trying until you get it right, because the problem couldn't be the institution itself or its impossible expectations. For these optimists, the problem is that they have somehow either failed to find the 'right person', or have been remiss in some other respect. If only they'd put those socks in the laundry basket instead of leaving them on the floor, everything would have worked out. If only they'd cooked more (or less) often. If only they'd been more this, less that, it would have been fine.
The failure of serial monogamy has less to do with feelings of guilt or mismatched fate than is does with unrealistic personal expectations stemming from an inaccurate concept of marriage. I've written before about how media mis-shapes popular ideas about romance and relationships. Anyone who expects a long-term relationship (marital or not) to resemble anything they see on TV, which I think most people do, will find more disillusionment than fulfillment. Anyone who believes that there is one and only one "right person" in the world with whom a successful union can be formed will never find that person. No one is perfect, and no two people match perfectly.
The fact that most people have egregious misconceptions about marriage does not necessitate a demolition of the institution. It simply indicates that older generations must educate younger generations more effectively in the ways of life, love, and relationships.
And what of the growing segment of the population to whom the term 'happily married' does not precisely apply, yet who none the less valiantly struggle to uphold the tenets of the marital enterprise, mostly because there seems to be no viable option? A 1999 Rutgers University study reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually happy in that state. This is rather shocking: so many pledging to live out their lives here on earth in varying degrees of discontent or emotional stagnation because that is what's expected from us, or 'for the sake of the children', or because wanting more than that makes you selfish and irresponsible. So goes the endless moralising and finger-pointing this subject tends to invite.
In times past a couple might have stayed in an unhappy marriage for lack of viable options. That probably is still the case in some instances. But modern society is full of legal and socially acceptable alternatives to traditional marriage (not many healthy alternatives, in my opinion, but they exist nonetheless). These days, most couples who remain unhappily married have very good reasons. They may want to restore their marriage, knowing that a difficult stretch of time does not necessarily foretell the imminent end of the world (see Todd's story, for instance). They may want to honor the commitment they made to one another. They may want their children to have a stable home and are willing to work through their conflicts to give it to them. Many parents, after all, put their children's well-being ahead of their own, no matter what the moralizers and finger-pointers might say.
I will continue this tomorrow.
