Marriage and social construction
Marriage is absolutely a good thing. Why does it exist, though?
First thing to note: my sleep restriction is ongoing and uneventful. I sleep somewhere between 5 hrs 30 and 6 hrs 30 every night, and feel generally fine. I might make a whole post about this, but probably won’t.
On to the topic at hand!
A friend of mine recently started a podcast, and an early series discusses marriage. I have no specific attachment to the institution, but contrarianism is fun and I think there are deeper flaws in this whole discourse around social construction that I feel motivated to write about.
Here are the episodes I’ll be discussing:
1. Introduction
“X is just a social construct” is a far too common response to interesting questions about society. Yes, I understand that it’s just a semi-ironic dismissal and I shouldn’t take it seriously but I’m trying to make a point here, so shut up.
This attitude (and there is an underlying attitude, it’s only semi-ironic) is obviously juvenile. It comes from the school of college sophomore angsty existentialism that stems from wanting to look smart or get laid rather than think hard. I’m not knocking it; I’ve been known to dabble. But I think we can do a little better here.
While the podcast obviously assumes this starting point, it is willing to go a little deeper. Marriage as a social construct is the fundamental framing, but the discussion continues: what does that imply? What’s wrong with that?
This is an honest attempt at social commentary beyond the rejection of society. Hooray! Beats 90% of the drek coming out of the Harvard humanities department today… but I digress. The podcast actually does grapple with the realities of marriage and sex in American culture.
The podcast has a lot of mostly vacuous discussion of teenage expectations for relationships and sex, how they differ by gender, whatever societal something something, and I have nothing to add to that so I’m only going to discuss the marriage bits.
I’ve broken their main ideas about marriage down into three categories: gender roles make marriage bad, reliance on another person makes marriage bad, and religion makes marriage bad.
2. Gender roles make marriage bad
The argument generally goes that traditional gender roles (women cook, clean, and watch kids; men work, drink, and have social lives) are deeply baked into the institution of marriage, or at least a significant segment of the population believes so.
They cite the phenomenon of tradwives—a waspy online trend in response to the recent waves of feminism and empowerment that has some (often conservative and religious) women advocating for marriages which instill old-fashioned gender roles.
This is a real thing, and it is stupid. But in all honesty, it shouldn’t be taken seriously. Every social revolution will inevitably face a counter-revolution. Resistance to fourth-wave feminism seems to be past its peak, and this version is pretty tame compared to the manosphere.
Fundamentally, though, it has no bearing on the potential value of marriage—traditional gender roles can and do exist with or without a ring, and if you want to fight them, be anti-religious not misogamist.
3. Reliance makes marriage bad
There’s quite a bit of focus on self-love and independence in this argument, and I’m planning a post on just that topic within a couple weeks, so I won’t address it super-directly here.
For now, this article (no paywall) oughta suffice. In short, dependence on another human being is a good and normal thing; it’s ok if your sense of self isn’t totally nailed down by the time you commit to someone.
I’ll also add that financial and social ties to your partner often serve a positive function: they raise the bar for leaving the relationship. Feelings about a relationship will always undergo some random fluctuations, and you probably shouldn’t be ending a long-term relationship on a whim. Raising the barrier to leaving makes the relationship that much more secure.
Once you’ve invested emotionally to a degree, it’s important to have the extra defense mechanism—that’s why you get married. Of course, the barrier can’t be raised too high: easy access to divorce and legal protection from abuse is vitally important as a balancing measure.
This barrier is particularly salient in the context of child-rearing. The nuclear family has its flaws, but a two-parent household is still hugely important to children’s wellbeing. Again, abuse cannot be tolerated, but the phenomenon of ‘staying together for the kids’ is an argument for, not against, the institution.
4. Religion makes marriage bad
Yes! It’s true, Abrahamic religions have a generally weird framing of marriage. It tends to exist—as the podcast puts it—as a license to have sex after years of sexual repression. This is absolutely a weird and bad thing. Organized religion tends to prescribe weird and bad things.
Weddings (which are almost always massively religious) are also weird and bad. In the podcast, they’re correctly equated with birthday celebrations as a needlessly egotistical and expensive display for a mostly unremarkable milestone—erecting a protective barrier for an existing relationship.
Then again, marriage can be done irreligiously, and religiousness can be done without sexual repression (see: the Talmud admitting that sex outside of marriage is more fun).1 There’s plenty of room for marriage as a purely social construct rather than a religious one.
5. Conclusion
Marriage is certainly a social construction. That makes it worth discussing at length.
The podcast does just that, showing examples of marriage and relationships gone wrong and right, and providing hypothetical explanations. However, most of these explanations are fundamentally wrong.
They only invalidate a very restrictive version of marriage which is simple enough to avoid, and some observations (like increased emotional and financial interdependence) actually provide evidence in favor of marriage as an effective social instrument.
Marriages are weird constructions, there’s no doubt about that. But on the whole, people in them are probably better off, and so are their kids.
6. The more interesting discussion about social construction
The podcast’s basic assumption of marriage is that it’s socially constructed and that all that matters is figuring out what that implies.
It’s a fine pursuit, but a boring one. The more interesting thing to explore is why (and how) society constructed it.
Why does marriage exist? Someone had to come up with it, and it had to get popular! If it’s bad for the individuals involved, how’d it ever catch on? And why’d it catch on everywhere?
Ancient Mesopotamia was an awesome place. Sumer was rich like crazy, and the urban centers and their massive temples generated a ton of economic activity.
A lot of that economic activity came from prostitutes. A lot of those prostitutes were the daughters of nearby nomads and ruralists. A lot of them didn’t like that. As a result, they would periodically organize and raid the urban centers, wreaking havoc before returning to the desert.
Now, Sumer had a very gentle attitude toward sexuality and marriage in general—many of the taboos we have today were widely and openly practiced, and women (before about 2300 BC) enjoyed near-equality in social and family life.
Here’s where I deviate from the historical record into more speculative territory.
The desert nomads detested Sumerian customs in general. The liberality and prostitution and excesses of the temples irritated the generally more conservative rural Mesopotamians.
You know what those irritated conservative rural Mesopotamians eventually did? They wrote the Bible. They generated all the social norms we’re used to about marriage and gender roles and sexuality in direct opposition to Sumerian principles.
And they took over.
We see the same pattern across the world. Marriage existed somewhere along the continuum between egalitarianism and exploitation in every ancient civilization, and its practice changed with the rise and fall of different ideological groups.
Why it existed in all those ancient civilizations in the first place is probably ultimately unknowable. Social evolution tells us it likely increased the fitness of whatever groups started doing it.
My guess2 is that marriage created family units where it became clear who’s job it was to provide for which kids. The kids in tribes that had marriage tended to live to adulthood at a higher rate and grow up better-educated, which gave their generation a leg up over the neighboring tribe without marriage.
At a fundamental, evolutionary level, marriage is all about the kids.
Not to misrepresent the Talmud’s stance on sex before marriage—it’s strictly forbidden. Then again, who cares? It doesn’t ever actually say that in the Torah, so as far as I’m concerned, the Haredim can totally go at it.
There’s probably actual scholarship about this that’s pretty easily googleable. But that’d take all the fun out of it!