A few years ago, my mother called my New York apartment in an outrage.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“‘Mind of a Married Man.’ Is that show for real? Do guys typically hang around pool tables debating whether to trash their marriage for a hand-job in a massage parlor?”
“Mom …”
“For godssake, get out of that disgusting city!”
It didn’t matter that “Mind of a Married Man” was set in Chicago. What freaked my mother was the hatchet the show took to her cheerful vision of my future: me walking down the aisle with a chiseled chap pleased as punch to be hogtied to the likes of me until our skin sags around our ankles. She was calling to pity me, to extend her apologies about the slime-ification of the modern male, and to sniff around for any lascivious tendencies on my end.
The census bureau released marriage statistics in October that only encouraged my mother’s tirades. For the first time in recorded history, married couples are in the minority. Responses to the numbers have been rabid. Hand-wringers predict a future of schoolhouse orgies and rampant herpes. Denialists snarl that the numbers are chicanery, nothing but a gay-happy media conspiracy. And my mother: “You kids can’t have it both ways, you know,” she barked after reading a few blogs on the topic. “Marriage takes discipline and restraint, and your generation has neither.” As if 50 million cheating couples are my fault.
The panic, of course, has less to do with marriage than what marriage represents: Family Values. Folks talk about values the way scientists discuss string theory, as a phenomenon so complicated and elusive that only an enlightened being could comprehend it (a rabbi, a minister—well, maybe not a minister). Without these robed and holy messengers to descramble Right from Wrong (the thinking goes), what’s to stop us from ditching the marriage bandwagon and shacking up with the nearest sidewalk tranny?
The assumption that wedding bells keep Americans honest is bogus. Holy matrimony is no safeguard against bad behavior. It does not ensure integrity, security, or a buzzy sense of well-being. “Staying the course” for the children does them no service if Daddy shows more affection to his 5-iron than his kids, and if Mommy is busy playing bi-curious with her pilates instructor. If parents can’t pass the bagel tray without belittling one another, the kids pick up on that. They take that language on. They grow up assuming it’s OK to talk that way to another human being, to be hateful and reckless, to, as my mother calls it, “trash one another.”
At a time when cheating is so cliché that my MFA teacher banned all stories on the subject, it’s pretty clear that marriage is no ethical bedrock. Case in point: Married men hit on me twice as often as single men. I noticed it first in bars, then on airplanes, then in salad lines at Balducci’s. I stopped looking for the ring—Married Man had become a given. When a father of newborn twins grabbed my hand during a lunch meeting, I couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Is this a regular habit of yours?”
“Hey, whoa, I thought we were connecting. I just want to feel alive, you know? When I’m on my deathbed—”
“—you want to know you really lived.”
“You understand.”
“Sure. I take it your wife enjoys the same freedom?”
He dropped my hand. “My wife isn’t like that.”
“But she’s OK with you being like that.”
We seem to be stuck at a crossroads. Folks are entering life-long contracts, but aren’t committed to the sacrifice. Mom was right. You can’t drive down both streets. What will it be, the comforts of loyalty and commitment, or electric, rip-roaring mystery? Marriage seems to be losing its allure, and the breeziness with which couples shuck their marriage vows like an itchy wool sweater proves it.
There’s a simple, rational explanation for this development: Excessive Stimulation. Between Facebook dating, MySpace gawking, X-box when we’re giddy, YouTube when we’re bored, hormones to make us younger, shots to numb our pain, skin-tightening collagens to make us smooth and plucky as a teen—titillation is a given. The options are too good, too plentiful and too boisterous to ignore. Forget about security and contentment: We want euphoria. We want to be stars, and we’ll do anything to achieve it— lie (lonelygirl15.com), cheat (Ashlee Simpson), plagiarize (Kaavya Viswanathan), whatever. The possibilities are endless, and they’re in our face, blinking and snapping and pressed up against our eyeballs, telling us how to get exactly what we want. Right. Now.
Baby boomers can stomp and shout themselves green, but for better or worse, times have changed. People are less willing to stick to one career, one marriage, one life trajectory when a glittery, mirrored trunk of treasures waits behind the velvet curtain. We may have regressed into jittery, wired teens—attention-deficit, commitment-trashing, fame-starved speed junkies—but we’re simply responding to what the world is providing. Technology is evolving at sonic boom speed, and our brains are desperate to keep up. Call it a survival instinct. Adaptation is what humans do. There aren’t clear paths to follow anymore, no set job descriptions, no “do as I do” guidelines—career mentors aren’t even adults anymore. Advice from the crusty Forbes reporter no longer applies: It’s the mo-hawked eighth-grader with a video blog who just scored a talk show deal. In a time when sexual virility can be bought online and delivered in a fruit basket, anything is possible.
The eternal marriage worked in the past, when the average life span was closer to 50 than 80. Cycles are different now. What constitutes a family is different now. If men want to marry men, and single women want mail-order babies from Malawi, then so be it. We don’t need to populate the planet. We don’t need hundreds of little hands to cut the crops and strangle the pigs to feed the family. We can no more predict what home life best suits every individual than we can mandate pizza toppings or cologne scents (much as we’d like to)—it’s a matter of personal taste. And contrary to popular belief, what works for individuals is what works for society—not the other way around.
The problem isn’t marriage statistics. The problem is narrow-minded thinking. Bush, Hillary, Pelosi and Pope Benedict XVI are all forcing an old structure on a new order. Church leaders and government chieftains will always loathe change, for the simple reason that change is slippery: it threatens the power keepers’ ability to control us. The unknown may be terrifying, but the unknown—from the dirt beneath our feet to the twinkling galaxies above—is our legacy. Life is a gorgeous, gelatinous mystery, and trying to stun-gun its growth inspires little more than suffering. As a string theory scientist wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Exploring the unknown requires tolerance of uncertainty.” He’s talking about the cosmos, but the human heart and mind are no less uncomplicated, or less infinite. Relationships will find a way to work. For the time being, church leaders should heed their own advice—and have a little faith.
