Marriage – Page 2 – The Thinking Housewife

Brett Stevens on the Economic Value of Chastity

BRETT STEVENS, at the website Amerika, argues that the loss of chastity as a social ideal is part of a larger denigration of hierarchy. As such, it is connected to economic decline of the middle class. He writes: Do we want each sexual act to have meaning, or should we remove context? Do we want a nation of equally impoverished middle classes, or a hierarchy? These questions are eternal because they are mathematical, not human, in origin.

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February 18, 2011

Marriage

Falling in Love with Me

PATRICK writes:

Attached is an article in which the author recounts her decision to terminate her marriage.

It is so familiar, so tired. It is narcissistic and at points even solipsistic. There is no thought given to duty or morality. She infrequently refers to her husband’s feelings, and such references seem hollow. I think her and her fellow travelers simply live in a separate moral universe than traditionalists – and I despair. (more…)

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January 26, 2011

Famous Couples / Feminism / Marriage / Uncategorized

Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Part II

I have become a Socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development – at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete Socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I will stand on a barrel and preach it.

Beatrice Potter, the British heiress who ventured into London slums and dockyards, wrote these words in her diary in 1890. She was born to socialism on her first meeting with Sidney Webb, then civil servant and Fabian socialist. Or rather, as she put it in her diary, she realized then that she had been a socialist all along. There was an element of predestination in her understanding of the phenomenon: the elect were chosen from birth.

Beatrice’s two published diaries, My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership, provide insights into the psychology of a nineteenth-century Anglican collectivist. Reading her recollections, one can’t help but conclude that her illusions about the salutary effects of socialism had a lot to do with her illusions about herself. There is a running conflict with her own womanliness. She wants to commit herself to this bold project of reforming society. On the other hand, she realizes she is not cut out for it, and has painful memories of Joseph Chamberlain, “a sacrament of pain fitting me for a life of loneliness and work.” She seems embarrassed and disappointed in herself for having fallen in love.

Sidney Webb, as it turned out, would dispel this conflict. Before he could do this, she had to overcome her dislike of him. She wrote in her diary:

His tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manner, cockney pronunciation, poverty are all against him. This self-complacent egotism, this disproportionate view of his own position is at once repulsive and ludicrous. (more…)

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January 20, 2011

Famous Couples / Marriage / Uncategorized

Famous Couples: Beatrice and Sidney Webb

Sidney Webb the socialist dined here to meet the Booths. A remarkable little man with a huge head on a very tiny body … somewhat unkempt, spectacles and a bourgeois black coat shiny with wear; somewhat between a London card and a German professor. His pronunciation is cockney, his H’s are shaky, his attitudes by no means elegant — with his thumbs fixed pugnaciously in a far from immaculate waistcoat, with is bulky head thrown back and his little body forward, he struts even when he stands, delivering himself with an extraordinary rapidity of thought and utterance and with an expression of inexhaustible self-complacency.

BEATRICE POTTER wrote these words in her diary the day of her first extended meeting with Sidney Webb in February, 1890 over dinner with others at the Devonshire House Hotel in London. The wealthy heiress, already considered a spinster at 32, was not entirely repulsed by this déclassé figure, the son of a Leicester hairdresser. She added to the above: “But I like the man. There is a directness of speech – an open-mindedness and imaginative warm-heartedness – which should carry him far.”

Two years later, after her repeated refusals and an almost constant exchange of letters, they married.

This unlikely pair became an influential force in British politics and culture. Founders of the London School of Economics and the weekly journal The New Statesman, they were the foremost proponents of Fabianism, the idealistic strain of socialism which shaped the modern Nanny state.

They were “two second-rate minds,” as Beatrice put it, a judgment that has been amply confirmed by posterity, especially in light of their later enthusiasm for Stalinism and their support for eugenics. Nevertheless, these architects of modern collectivism, with its bureaucratic governance by experts and gradual permeation of all institutions, were intelligent and enterprising. Their romance and marriage was a strange melding of Victorian refinement and quasi-religious political fervor. (more…)

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January 18, 2011

Marriage / Uncategorized

The French Family Dissolves

JESSE POWELL writes:

There is a movement in the United States to bring about civil unions not just for homosexuals but for heterosexual couples too. It’s interesting to observe how this idea has been instituted in France and its effect on French society. France has not abolished marriage but it has done the next best thing, given couples the option of forming their own contractual relationships according to their own terms. France has created a legal relationship form called the “Civil Pact of Solidarity” in English, or PACS using the French acronym. (more…)

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May 26, 2010

Illegitimacy / Marriage / Masculinity / Uncategorized

Illegitimacy, Class and an Anti-Child Culture

IN THIS PREVIOUS ENTRY, Jesse Powell and I discussed the differences in illegitimacy rates and family stability along class lines, looking at the widely held view that because the college-educated and affluent suffer relatively low rates of out-of-wedlock births, they are not seeing serious levels of family breakdown. We continue our discussion here. (more…)

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April 23, 2010

Illegitimacy / Marriage / Uncategorized

Births to Unmarried Mothers Exceed 40 Percent; White Fertility Low

JESSE POWELL WRITES:

The federal government has released the preliminary birth data for 2008. For the first time the out-of-wedlock birth ratio is over 40 percent in the United States, at 40.6. For non-Hispanic whites the ratio is at 28.6 percent; for Hispanics (who may be of any race) it is 52.5 percent. For non-Hispanic blacks it is at 72.3 percent.

Of special note, the black out-of-wedlock birth ratio stayed about the same for 10 whole years, from 1995 until 2005 at about 70 percent (in 1995 it was 69.9 and in 2005 it was 69.3.) One would have hoped that this ratio had hit some kind of natural ceiling and that it couldn’t go any higher. Perhaps that was the end point of family breakdown and human resiliency meant it couldn’t continue to climb. Sadly, that is not the case. The black out-of-wedlock birth ratio has risen steadily and quickly for three years in a row. In 2005, the non-Hispanic black out-of-wedlock birth ratio was 69.9. In 2006, it was 70.7. In 2007, it was 71.6 and in 2008, 72.3 percent. (more…)

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April 6, 2010

Marriage

A World of Mister Wrongs

marryhim

WOMEN HAVE reacted with outrage at the proliferation of books and Internet sites recommending Game and pickup strategies for men. At the same time, many women pursue their own reductionist romancing.

Lori Gottlieb, the author of the new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, has made a big hit with her advice. Here is a venomous critique of the book at The Spearhead website. By the way, Gottlieb is the perfect modern authority on love: She dated for 25 years and finally conceived a child through artificial insemination. In the words of the writer Obsidian:

Gottlieb’s book no doubt will be viewed as “dating advice;” perhaps even as “self-help”-and in any event, such books are marketed in droves to Women, for years. All kinds of truly dehumanizing language and allusions are made to Men, such as the very title of the book we’re discussing; we’re rated and objectified, ranked and given the heave-ho for the slightest imperfection, infraction or just the misfortune of being human -a necessary evil all in the name of the Precious Ladies’ search for “Mr. Right”…

The sheer arrogance, hubris and out and out megalomania, that this Woman exudes is something the likes of which I’ve never set my eyes on before-and believe you me, I done seen a lot of stuff…

(more…)

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February 20, 2010

Marriage / Masculinity / Uncategorized

One Father’s ‘Remorseless Interrogations’

indians_1

SOMETIMES it seems the world has been emptied of fatherliness. You know, father, the big guy who lives with your mother. You know, the guy who says no. Maybe the world took Jean-Paul Sartre too seriously when he said, “There are no good fathers … It is not the men who are at fault but the paternal bond which is rotten.”

Still here and there, fathers, typically men who haven’t gotten the message that the paternal bond is rotten through and through, show up for duty. Here’s one.

James H. writes:

As the father of four girls, I’ve faced many “dates” and do not feel as though I’ve done my job unless I’ve managed to instill some fear and trepidation. (more…)

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February 10, 2010

Female sexuality / Male and female relations / Marriage

The Unfaithful Wife, cont.

Fitzgerald writes:

I was glancing through some of your older posts and found this entry on unfaithful women. I wanted to offer a few comments on the remark by a woman reader who said women have been forced to put up with male infidelity for eons.This is, sadly, very naive. While it may be true that men are more apt to cheat than women, it is not true that it’s the rare woman who cheats. This is a form of the same lie that says women don’t have sex drives, good girls don’t, women want commitment and use sex to get love… blah, blah, blah. Balderdash.

(more…)

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December 13, 2009

Male and female relations / Marriage / Masculinity

When a Husband Fails as a Man

A reader takes strong exception to my advice to a woman who feels her husband is not manly. Laurence Butler, in his comments in the previous post, writes to the woman: If the leadership role has been temporarily vacated, you had better step in lest your children grow up to imitate a stoic but sorrowful mother doting on an unimpressive father. I think it’s totally appropriate for you to tell him you are dissatisfied with his behavior, with his composure, and with his unwillingness to supply the manly presence you fell in love with and pledged to spend the rest of your life with. If he ‘wishes’ for you to leave him alone and let him keep his femininity, I think you have an obligation to the both of you to not respect that wish. This isn’t to recommend incessant nagging or anything, but woman in her highest role, the heroines in the great plays remembered throughout history, did not sit idly by and watch their lord’s mind, body, and manor decay from the foundation while she put up nice curtains. Too frequently now are the women who allowed this, or worse those who encouraged the emasculation of men/the masculation of women, being reenacted by posterity.

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December 13, 2009

Fatherhood / Feminism / Male and female relations / Marriage / Masculinity

Married to a Wimp

Dear Thinking Housewife,

Men are not taught how to be men nowadays. What can I do about the fact that my husband is such a girl?

Regards,

Anonymous (in an unspecified location)

Dear Anonymous,

I’m sorry, Anonymous, this question makes me mad. Not mad at you, but mad at this. In many ways, the debate over marriage is over, isn’t it? Women are already married to women. And, men are already married to men.

(more…)

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December 12, 2009

Marriage / Uncategorized

Marriage and Ideas

Marital compatibility is an inexact science. It goes without saying that like race and like culture are no guarantee of a good marriage. Leaving aside these larger cultural issues, there seem to be two general types of incompatibility: ideological and psychological. The first is far more serious than the second.

Two people can be entirely different personalities, one an extrovert and the other introverted, one energetic and the other passive, one fastidious and the other so messy he wears two different socks and throws his bath towels on the floor, and still it is possible to create lasting and harmonious matches. Many people even prefer to live with opposites.

But when two people share entirely different world views, this is a potential disaster. To have to spend one’s days with a person who sees the meaning of life in opposing terms is not impossible, but very hard. Since many people haven’t really formed a world view when they marry, a similar background and culture help to assure they move in the same direction.

But similar culture does not guarantee this kind of compatibility.

Before she married Charles Darwin, Emma Wedgewood, who was a Christian believer, was distressed by Charles’ skepticism. “My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us,” she wrote to him in a letter.

She finally concluded in another letter that “though our opinions may not agree on all points of religion, we may sympathise a good deal in our feelings on the subject.” They were married for more than 40 years and had nine children. But the truth is her happiness depended on two things. First, her ignorance: she did not understand the metaphysical nature of his work. Second, Darwin considered faith an acceptable flaw in a wife.

(more…)

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December 5, 2009

Marriage / Race

Marriage and the Merging of Worlds

Sheila Coyne writes in regard to the recent discussion on intermarriage: I've been doing a lot of thinking about this thread, and thought I'd add a comment. I was raised in a liberal, agnostic, culturally Jewish household and as a teenager spouted the usual liberal platitudes - what's inside is what matters, love transcends all, etc. I remember arguing with an orthodox Jewish family I babysat for that felt Jews should only date other Jews. Since I wasn't attracted in the least to Jewish guys, I argued against this - in college, too, when others suggested I join "Hillel" (college Jewish students' group) I always responded that simply having parents of the same religion didn't mean we had anything in common. When it came to religion, I practiced what I preached, and dated primarily Christian men (my dissatisfaction with Judaism and religious searching - I had already started on my long journey of faith toward Christianity - certainly had a lot to do with this). Somehow, though, I balked at dating black men, despite being unable to pinpoint my unease or articulate my reasons - aside from lack of physical attraction. Even in England in the early 1980s, doing graduate work, I noticed kids of half British/half American parentage, and started to really consider how much nature and nurture had to do with culture. I began to assess what precisely made me American in my views, and whether or not it…

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December 4, 2009

Marriage / Weddings

A Wedding in Prison

As marriage becomes more meaningless, weddings become more extravagant and bizarre. The wedding day is now a chance to display originality and defy tradition with ironic gestures and theatricality.

I thought I had heard it all until I read this about a couple who got married in a former prison. Eastern State Penitentiary was built in the early 19th century and is famous for its creepy architecture and its system of placing inmates in solitary confinement. It housed as many as 1,700 convicts at a time and was closed in 1971. It is now open for tours and an annual Halloween haunted house. The couple thought it would be neat to get married in the central rotunda overlooking crumbling cell blocks such as the one below. “Kevin entered the rotunda to the theme from Shaft. Lori walked in to “Time” by Pink Floyd.”

They’re both 43. He’s divorced and has four children. They intend to live hundreds of miles apart until his youngest child graduates from high school. Judging from the description of the wedding, which involved decorating the prison with strips of celluloid film, this was a typical extravaganza in the range of $20,000 to $30,000. I think Anthony Esolen would call this a case of “pseudogamy.” It would be wrong to think there was anything symbolic about this couple’s choice of a prison (even though the groom was a state trooper.) The point was originality and I think they succeeded. The problem with marriage is that inherited form, not novelty, is what keeps it going.

(more…)

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September 16, 2009

Marriage / Same-sex marriage

Soccer Moms and Same-Sex Marriage

This winter, the legal battle against California’s ban on same-sex marriage heads to federal court and may ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court may declare government-supported traditional marriage unconstitutional, setting the stage for civil upheaval and an inevitable battle over a federal amendment. The most radical of social experiments is closing in upon us. What do America’s soccer moms think? After all, they live in a world sustained by marriage.

The sad fact is, many support it. In fact, many grow teary when talking about it, especially at the mention of the homosexuals they know. Though their homosexual friends may live with little social disapproval, deed property to one another, and even raise children, they cannot have a wedding. Weddings are beautiful and everyone deserves one. Human identity is meaningless without marriage to whomever one pleases.

The truth is if soccer moms could peer into the future, they would be very unhappy with the results of homosexual marriage. If they could see the boys raised by pederasts; the children conceived by anonymous sperm donors who care nothing about their existence; the lesbians who look wistfully on a life spent only with women; the increased suicide rate and health problems that are associated with widespread homosexuality even in societies that endorse it; and the greater disinclination by men to enter into an institution that joins together two guys, their feelings would be affronted. They would see that feeling and compassion are on the side of traditional marriage.

So soccer moms are not really guided by emotion after all. They are guided by ideas. The ideas are not of their own making. They are in the very air around them and the soccer mom lacks the time and inclination to see them for what they are. She is a traditionalist at heart. She is a traditionalist and yet does not want to seem too backward. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to stability and normalcy. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to these by supporting innovation in the lives of others. If she can sit in a television studio and calmly watch as a prostitute gives a tour of her work place, is there any level of social experimentation that the soccer mom won’t tolerate? Is there any limit to her radical compassion?

Soccer Mom, Know thyself. This world you approve of does not approve of you.

(more…)

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August 20, 2009

Marriage

Men in Aprons

The egalitarian dream of companionate marriage in which men and women co-parent, co-dust, co-cook, and co-resent each other is explored in an article in Atlantic, a magazine that has matched our cultural decline with its own remorselessly juvenile articles on family decay. The author, Sandra Tsing Loh, bares her divorce for all the world to see. She and her middle-aged teeny-bopper girlfriends say their husbands do the cooking, but decline to have sex. When girls become guys and guys become girls, who feels like love? Animals in the zoo have the lowest reproduction rates on earth. They’re just not in the mood.

The article doesn’t simply stop at a voyeuristic view of one couple’s willful destruction of their childrens’ lives. It goes one step further and in the hallowed tradition of modern intellectuals pronounces the very institution of marriage defunct. This sort of aggression is what differentiates the Atlantic from harmless trash. Loh says:

In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

(more…)

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July 17, 2009

Marriage / Weddings

Vanity Vows

Here is the story of one recent wedding ceremony. The details are not typical, but the effort at originality is. The couple not only penned their vows, but their English bulldog walked up the aisle in a collar that matched the best man's vest. Each of their 125 guests went to the microphone and spoke. Weddings are now widely viewed as theater, occasions to display a couple's production skills. Couples today don't just worry about the dress, the tux, and the party. They often feel the need to write their own wedding vows too. Unfortunately, a bride and groom usually succumb to vanity, romance and amateurism when they throw out traditional vows. Most prefer to do away with the whole "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health" business. Who really wants to think about poverty and illness at one's own wedding? It's only the stern wisdom of convention that added this gloomy stuff to the festive day. The truth is couples struggle to make weddings a good show. In an age of sexual license, weddings just aren't exciting. They make for great parties, but the thrill is gone. Often, the marrying couple has been living together for years. Their daughter may be the flower girl or the bride may be pregnant. There's an after-the-fact tone to the whole thing that no amount of novel staging can take away. As Anthony Esolen put it, "where there is not much to celebrate, we can only distract ourselves from the lack by throwing big parties, getting drunk, spending a lot of money, or, what is more likely, causing a lot of people…

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July 13, 2009