Can Marriage Be Saved?
what are the secrets?
You win the game of life when you become a grandparent. We don’t give young people that message, and even if we did, it would not sink in.
Grandparenthood is most satisfying if you can share it with your spouse. So the winning procedure is to get married, then have children, and then stay married.
My wife and I got married in March of 1980. We are still together. It’s looking like our marriage will last. Based on my experience, here are my thoughts on what makes for a successful marriage.
As individuals, it helps if you can make and keep commitments. In personality psychology, this corresponds to the trait known as conscientiousness—call it C. But my understanding is that C is not purely innate. I think that if we wanted to raise someone’s C, we could do it.
Rob Henderson says that you can raise someone’s C using rewards and punishments. I think that going to school and getting deadlines for assignments can help instill C. If I were asked to “treat” someone with low C, I would probably try to give that person exercises that involve making a small commitment, keeping it, and getting praise.
Beyond C, I think that it helps to appreciate tradition, including religious tradition. Getting married and having children is not just about you, and it’s not just about now.
Traditional rituals mark the major milestones of life: birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Appreciating these rituals helps you to view your marriage as having a significance and life of its own.
Among Jews, there is a lot of ambivalence about tradition. At one extreme, there are those who follow tradition and don’t question it. At the other extreme, there are those who question it and don’t follow it. And there is a well-established tradition of questioning tradition (why is this night different from all other nights?) as we follow it.
You want to come to an agreement about family size. Having children and caring for them takes a lot out of you physically and emotionally. Both in spite of that and because of that, you need to take pride in the joint effort involved.
I know that Bryan Caplan (Selfish reasons to have more kids) says that today’s parents worry too much and create unnecessary difficulty for themselves. But I think you can only reduce your effort on some margins. No matter how relaxed you are as a parent, that diaper still needs to be changed. On a bad day—and there will be plenty of those—you have to be able to laugh and say that you signed up for this.
A stable neighborhood helps to maintain a marriage. The more time your kids spend playing with the neighbors’ kids, the less time they have to annoy you. Also, being around other married couples makes you not want to be the first couple on the block to break up.
Peer pressure in your late teens and early twenties can be good or it can be bad. If the pressure is to aim toward marriage and children, good. If it is to aim toward sexual deviancy or substance abuse, not good.
Anyway, those are one married man’s opinions.
For society as a whole, I don’t think that the solution to the decline in marriage and fertility is a tax credit this or a daycare that. We are seeing the same phenomena occurring across many different political and economic regimes.
I believe that many people exist within a culture that is not sustainable, because it devalues marriage and children. That seems bound to change. I suspect that in another generation or two the values in popular culture will have shifted. The people who devalue marriage and children will not have much impact on the generations to come. The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition.
"The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition."
Or it may be people who are more self-centered, more impulsive, more present-oriented, and with less executive function.
Or it may be both, and society will continue to bifurcate into the equivalents of Belmont and Fishtown. What will be lost will be the middle of people who are together enough to control their fertility and whose utility function prefers all the things they can do today and tomorrow and next year if they don't have kids (the opportunity cost theory of fertility crash, e.g., https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/).
My understanding is that C is not innate, but we are doing things as a society that tend to reduce people's C. In particular, we place 'lack of trustworthiness' and 'actual betrayal of trust' on the list of 'minor transgressions' rather than 'major sins'. Rob Henderson is correct that we can use rewards and punishments to modify C -- but mostly what we need to do is to reform institutions so that those who aren't trustworthy are removed, and face real consequences when they betray those of us who trusted them.