Sunday, June 21st, 2009...6:15 pm
Clarification: I Have Not Become A Natalist
My post:
Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will—“a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history”—rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?
As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone’s time. Tsing Loh thinks we’re deluded, but perhaps we’ve adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than “does/does not last forever”? Tsing Loh asks “why we still believe in marriage,” but I’d like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you’re in when you die.
And Amanda Marcotte’s characterization of my post:
Kerry Howley suggests that marriage would work better if people treated it like a business partnership that is still a success if dissolved, as long as you have happy children as a result.
Look… I have a lot of weird opinions, but believing that meaningful relationships require children is not among them. I wrote a long, extensively reported Reason cover story in opposition to natalism and have composed myriad blog posts against the cultural pressure to have children at all. (Nor do I think loving 20-year partnerships are much akin to marketing deals, but anyway…) It’s one thing to spend your time playing ideological policewoman. It’s another thing altogether to mischaracterize someone’s opinions and then declare said person out of bounds.
3 Comments
June 21st, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Surely the people who play the part of professional “ideological policewoman” are also most likely “to mischaracterize someone’s opinions and then declare said person out of bounds”? That would seem to go with the territory. Also with the type of thinking that demands all folk think as I do and discounts the possibility that there are several, nay myriad, paths to happiness and fulfillment.
I dunno. Being unmarried and childless myself I guess the standard criticism is that I Have No Idea About Anything. But what works for some people doesn’t work for others. We are not all of a piece. I confess that this seems elementary to me, but it seems to escape the kind of feminists (?) who write for The Atlantic and other Serious Magazines.
Of course, I may be wrong. But if I were writing for the Atlantic I’d like to think I’d be wary of extrapolating so wildly from my own experiences.
Your Atlantic piece, is a different matter entirely. For one thing, it’s good.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
She’s had it in for you ever since you schooled her in that LA Times debate.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Amanda didn’t seem to understand that you cited Tsing Loh’s thriving children as only one example of how a marriage can produce some “successes,” even if the union doesn’t last forever.You were not saying that happy children are the only, or even the most important measure of a successful marriage. It was just an example, and there are plenty of successes that can be attributed to childless marriages that culminated in divorce or premature death.
However, I do wonder how many divorcees look back on the whole endeavor with unqualified regret- similar to a teen parent who says, “If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have my beloved child…but it was still an altogether terrible idea.”
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