FBXL Social

The idea that marriage is solely about abusing and dominating women -- or for that matter, men -- really is short-sighted.

I suppose this might be my fault for starting to integrate my post-metamodern super-positional framework, but I can't unsee multiple truths.

Especially under a true nuclear family model where women get to pick who they marry, marriage is ideally a partnership and a quid pro quo.

Ideally under a true nuclear family model, a man is supposed to go out into the world and make something of himself, and become worthy of being selected for marriage by a woman. At that point, the man is going to typically be at the beginning of their long productive span of worthiness, and a young beautiful woman is near the beginning of a fairly short period of youth, beauty, and fertility.

The man gives the woman fidelity (so the woman doesn't have 15 baby mommas knocking at the door), a promise of long-term support, long-term companionship.

The woman gives the man fidelity as well (so the man knows his child is his), a promise of working with the man to help maintain his household and raise his kids together, and long term companionship.

In a good marriage, both parties get things they want. The man wants to know his child is his, and also wants to be able to support his children, and he knows he'll have a beautiful woman by his side that he likes. The woman gets singular access to a quality man she knows she likes, and support raising her children both material and otherwise, and importantly once she's old and infertile she's got a guarantee of support, assistance, and companionship.

There are potential problems in both directions, and part of the problem happens when the other party tries to get their part of the bargain without giving their side.

Ironclad marriage laws where a man doesn't need to do anything to fulfill their side of a marriage are obviously unfair to women who give up their youth, beauty, fertility, and end up with children (typically the mother is responsible for children throughout history and in the primate kingdom before history). That's screwed up. Can't really agree that it's acceptable for women to be trapped in crappy marriages with no real recourse.

Ironclad alimony and child support and custody laws where a woman can just cut and run means that the woman doesn't need to do anything to fulfill their side of a marriage, and that's obviously unfair to men who give up their future earnings and some degree of their freedom and might lose access to their kids, and also lose the ability to support their kids. That's also screwed up. Can't really agree that it's acceptable for a woman to leave and run off with the money and the kids and maybe even end up with those kids getting hurt or killed by a step-parent who by the numbers is overwhelmingly more likely to harm the kids than the actual father.

Marriage can really be good for the parties too, though.

Women on dating apps know full well that it sucks being the 10th date of the day for some supposedly great guy. She doesn't want to just bang a great guy, she wants to ultimately date a great guy and eventually be by that great guy's side for good. Marriage lets her find that great guy and get him to agree to settle down with her. Eventually she's going to want kids, and she wants someone who is going to provide for her during pregnancy and traditionally while she's raising their child, and a great guy is going to provide money, protection, emotional stability, companionship, and he's going to be a big part of raising the child himself. That sort of deal is something worth giving something up for.

Men in general know that it's hard to meet a good woman, and once you do meet her, you might eventually want kids too. The thing is, if she's out banging every guy she knows, there's a good chance it isn't your kid. You want to be able to provide all the things the woman is looking for because it means your child is going to have the best chance at life, but if you can't get an assurance of fidelity, there's a chance you spend your life's effort raising another man's child which is catastrophic.

Both sides of this arrangement are part of a new method of survival that became necessary about 250,000 years ago. Prior to that, women had sex with whoever -- perhaps every man in the tribe -- because it meant all the men would like the woman. Individual men didn't have much of a stake in a baby though, carrying the kids and raising the kids was the job of the woman. If a man could pump and dump, great -- the child was likely to survive, and the only lineage that would matter is the matrilinal one. What happened 250,000 years ago is that the heads of children got too big. What happened next is twofold: First, pregnant women became far more vulnerable. Second, babies were born earlier and earlier in development. Human babies are effectively born premature, and so are completely vulnerable for a very long time after birth. Because of this development, men who did a pump and dump effectively saw their kids die off and their mates die off, while men who stuck around to protect and serve their mates and provide for their offspring saw their kids survive and thrive. On the other hand, this large investment from men meant there was danger for men -- if a sneaky fucker (which is, I kid you not, an actual academic term) gets in an inseminates the woman the dedicated man agrees to take care of, then the man has just completely blown it for himself -- he spends years of effort raising a sneaky fucker's kid, potentially taking himself out of the gene pool entirely.

So I think both the MRAs and the feminists are right about marriage, and they're also totally wrong about marriage. It isn't about exploiting men, it isn't about exploiting women, at least when it's done right it should be about making sure both parties get what they need out of the deal and that both parties are incentivized not to renege on their end of the deal, which is certainly not what the system is set up for today because it is trapped in modernist and postmodernist black and white ideology which can't see multiple viewpoints at once.

There's even more truths besides children. Often in discussions like this people start going "So you're saying if a man and a woman are infertile they shouldn't be married?", but there's things other than children that marriages are for.

The postmodernists correctly point out that not all labor in a relationship is economic. People need to divide labor on childrearing, but also on cleaning the house, doing the yard, maintaining things, and stuff like throwing parties, arranging birthdays, setting up cards, and so on. The problem is that postmodernists are modernists, and so they only see the world through the lens of economics, and assume that if labor isn't paid then someone is being exploited. In reality, a good marriage sees division of labor that should include helping to build communities locally.

The promise in a marriage to stay together does something important, it takes a huge resource sink off the table. People spend huge amounts of time, resources, and effort trying to find connections, and cutting and remaking them adds to that, then that's a potential waste of resources. If you can keep good people together, then there's value in that. They spend resources doing productive things instead of rebuilding lost connections.

That promise also helps with something critically important for humans: Planning ahead. If we assume a more traditional family structure of one main bread earner, then the main earner can plan for a retirement with their spouse and supporting the kids they know they'll have, and the other partner can focus on non-economic plans both short and long term without worrying about trying to half-assed save for retirement because they know they'll be taken care of. It's a big part of what makes family an institution and not just a group of folks.

There's a powerful psychological component to a long marriage too. People you know a day, a week, a month, a year, these people don't know everything about you. they don't know about your childhood. They don't know about the time you backed into a parked car. They don't know about your deepest hopes and dreams and fears. That's what people who have been with you for a long time are for. And those people are your rock. Someone who has been by your side when you got that big raise. When your puppy died. When you finally got the house. The person who held your hand when the baby finally came. That person is something more important than an economic relationship. They're a part of you. There's a reason why married men live so much longer than unmarried men.

Speaking of love (since it's implied in the last paragraph but not stated), love is something broader than love songs. It's not just the butterfly you feel when you see your crush, it's a strong stone foundation one builds over time upon which you build your life. I can't really write about it in a meaningful way because it's personal and it's big and broad and thick. Today "love" is seen through the economic modernist lens as something to be consumed rather than something to be nurtured and built. The verses on love in Corinthians are ancient wisdom on love and it's a good start. Most people don't know that Christianity was considered a fairly pro-woman religion at the time it was founded, because the Romans shared a lot of sexual mores with today's sexual liberation, to the detriment of women -- You'd have powerful men with massive and neglected harems, and many men who never got to touch a woman. Moreover, Roman society was truly patriarchal, and the male head of the family could go so far as killing his wife and kids and it was understood to be acceptable as part of his duties and powers as family head.

So understanding there's so many positive aspects to marriage outside of the modernist/postmodernist viewpoint really changes your view. A marriage can be bad and worth ending, but marriage itself? It's not an evil. There's a reason why both men and women tolerated this thing and continue to tolerate this thing.