On bended knee

By the time Roiphe wraps things up with a letter to her daughters regarding their future marriages, we're beginning to wonder if such a fixation on her children's marriages doesn't indicate some restlessness and ambivalence toward the path she's chosen for herself. She writes, "You can't go on just doing as you please, just following your star, just flashing your pretty wings about the universe." Oh really? Says who? Whether this is good motherly advice or good old-fashioned jealousy, this book can leave you more determined than ever to flash your pretty wings anywhere you damn well please.

In the epilogue, Roiphe is overjoyed as one of her daughters announces her engagement, and as pedestrian as this anecdote may sound to some, her joy is surely not uncommon. Still, it remains unclear why Roiphe should feel so invested in her daughter's adherence to some preset notion of what love should look like, beyond a need to justify her own choices.

What makes us so suspicious of people who firmly state that they're not interested in getting married? In "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families," James Q. Wilson's suspicions are on parade. He asserts that America is made up of two nations:

"In one nation, a child, raised by two parents, acquires an education, a job, a spouse, and a home kept separate from crime and disorder by distance, fences, or guards. In the other nation, a child is raised by an unwed girl, lives in a neighborhood filled with many sexual men but few committed fathers, and finds gang life to be necessary for self-protection and valuable for self-advancement ... In both nations, harms occur, but in the second, they proliferate -- child abuse and drug abuse, gang violence and personal criminality, economic dependency and continued illegitimacy."

Wilson asserts that this second nation falters because its inhabitants refuse to marry. "Family is the foundation of public life. As that foundation has become weaker, every structure built upon it has become weaker." How does he support this sweeping statement? By dumping on single-parent families, of course. "The children of single moms are more likely than those of two-parent families to be abused, to drop out of or be expelled from school, to become juvenile delinquents, to take drugs, and to commit adult crimes." Wilson concedes that single parents are often poorer, and that therefore some of these problems may be caused by poverty, but then cites a study that concluded that "poverty by itself accounts for about half of the differences in how children behave; the rest is explained by living in a one-parent family."

How can these two factors -- poverty and single parenting -- possibly be separated from each other? Wilson's book is filled with such tenuous leaps that, by the last chapter, add up to a nightmarish narrative: Soon our country will be subsumed by lowlifes, drug addicts and criminals who are "armed to the teeth, excited by drugs, preoccupied by respect, and indifferent to the future." What's the solution? Marriage, of course: "No matter how we arrange money incentives, we have not induced people to marry. And unless they marry, and stay married, the children will suffer."

So once again we hear the typical narrow-minded us vs. them reaction to difference: What's wrong with them? They're not like us. How can we fix them? By making them more like us.

Surely there are a large number of people who have perfectly sound reasons for not wanting to be legally wed, or for avoiding long-term relationships -- from career goals to creative pursuits to travel to anything that requires moving through the world without dependents. A mirror to Wilson's book might be titled "The Marriage Problem: How Our Families Have Weakened Culture." Such a book might explore the deplorable state of modern art, literature and philosophical thought, thanks to the overwhelming emphasis society places on building families. When families take precedence over art, over innovation, over ideas and lofty, evanescent goals that don't take the form of steady employment -- and therefore rule out the possibility of creating a nurturing environment for children -- how can our cultural arts flourish, except among the supernaturally rich?

Of course, few would argue that marriage is bad for people across the board. Most who are happily married recommend it strongly, one senses, for the peace of mind and the feeling of permanence that it brings them.

Perhaps it's not surprising that many of us would cling to marriage at this time in our history. After all, there is a loneliness to American life today. We often live thousands of miles away from our families, in cities where most public spaces are indistinct, impeccably designed by corporate creatives telegraphing class -- the towering pillars of the Banana Republic at the outdoor mall, the endless escalators and tiled walls of the multiplex. Jobs come and go, people move away at the drop of a hat, relationships begin and end and begin again. It's understandable that so many of us long for some feeling of permanent connection, some certainty of a relationship that could withstand the constant flux we experience, year after year.

But that fixation on one lasting connection may actually contribute to our inability to keep our marriages intact. If, in the back of our minds, we're fixated on marriage as the answer to all our woes, then we won't manage to invest enough in the jobs, people and places that do come into our lives, and they'll ultimately pass us by like billboards on the freeway. Building steady, permanent relationships with a wide range of people and fostering a sense of community that transcends romantic relationships may contribute more to our health and happiness than we can imagine. More and more people seem to believe this, as the definition of family broadens and bends to include endless variations on the nuclear model.

And it is these variations that seem to scare the traditionalists at the Alliance for Marriage. Their amendment states, "Neither this constitution nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups." This is the language of a country under siege, the kind of law that feels decidedly martial. And it is, ultimately, unrealistic. By recognizing marriage as the only legally binding relationship an individual can choose, and by pushing marriage on those who are economically and emotionally vulnerable and therefore are potential candidates for domestic violence and child abuse, the government puts undue pressure on a relationship that is, by all accounts, difficult to maintain, its permanence impossible to guarantee.

In the end, the mystical baptismal waters of family and country and faith and honor that the marriage revivalists praise simply boil down to a legal contract. Pro-marriage pundits fervently assert that we need federally applied binding to save us from our own worst urges. But how sacred is a vow that only remains intact under the constant threat of repercussions?

Despite the best intentions of those who vehemently spread the good word of holy matrimony, the current marriage revival can only be approached with the caution one reserves for cults that punish members who try to defect. For a true sense of permanence, two individuals must foster a faith in each other, on their own, private terms. Likewise, it is the deterioration of this faith -- not the deterioration of some higher sense of duty or moral obligation -- that causes marriages to fall apart. And faith can't be manufactured or legislated.

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