Your Children Need to See You Kiss
Something is wrong.
Imagine your culture has a common folk ritual of which everyone knows, it has lasted since before written history, and is innately good. Your stories tell you it is good; nearly every folk and fairytale your grandparents told you revolves around this good ritual. Your science tells you it is good; if you partake in this ritual, you have measurably less psychological distress, you become wealthier, and you even live longer. Your very heart tells you it is good. By all accounts, you and everyone you know, rational and Romantic, should understand this thing is good. If you would like, it can even cost no money and very little time to perform. Despite this, an overwhelming amount of young people from every class and creed walk away from the ritual, the good old tradition, every year. They cite financial hardship, a desire for personal growth, prioritizing their profession. When your mother was a girl, nine out of ten people took part in this ritual. Now, about three out of ten do.
This ritual is real.
It is marriage, and young people are walking away from it.
How did we come to this? How did we get here? What can, or even should, be done? Everything stated in the opening paragraph is true; marriage causes us to live longer, have reportedly fewer and less extreme mental health problems, and has been a cultural keystone for longer than any historian can remember. We are, in many ways, defined by marriage. Yet now we stand at the precipice of abandoning the good old tradition altogether. We need to explore why, where we stand, and where to go from here. We owe ourselves this.
The Old Ball and Chain
We have had access to mass media, television, for less than a century. In that time, our regional culture, accents, music, and traditions have rapidly homogenized. There is no arguing that television has affected our society immensely and the content of it has influenced us. For the last seventy years of American programming, men who openly despise their nagging wives have been front and center. One could even go so far as to argue that “I Hate my Wife” is not so much a trope as it was a full on genre. It was most prominent in sitcoms from the 1950s to early 2000s and, although modern shows tend to avoid it due to evolving norms, one must wonder what damage to our society, institutions, and culture has been caused by having an entire genre of sitcoms starring resentful husbands and domineering wives blaring in every American home for the last seventy years.
You may roll your eyes at this assertion, but ask yourself how our culture would be different if we had been constantly inundated by respectful spouses who were enamored with each other, courtly romance, or faithful partnerships built on mutual admiration and a shared goal. What if, instead of laughter generated from bitterness, these programs proclaimed that love could deepen over decades, that family life was not a trap but something which to aspire?
Media forms us more than we care to admit. We are not immune to propaganda or even the subconscious erosion of our morality by everyday tropes. When every punchline is aimed at the same sacred thing, how long before we learn to laugh at it too? Something is wrong.
Bachelor Night
Years ago, before my beautiful daughters were born, my wife and I, recently wed, owned a small home in a city. She left for a weekend to a work trip (a conference for historians I think) and, to dull the edge of loneliness, I met up with some friends at a bar. A new acquaintance with whom I was unfamiliar joined us and I explained to him my wife was out of town. His face twisted, he leered, and offered with an earnest growl “Heh, bachelor night, am I right?” and gave me a knowing nudge and wink. There was an implicit understanding that I was supposed to do something unfaithful while she was gone, let loose, engage in some sort of debauchery and this man was inviting me into his confidence expecting to hear my dark plan that did not exist. I brushed him off and asked him if he was married. He explained he was too busy living his best life, chasing goals, and “keeping things chill” to tie the knot with anyone. Maybe one day, but right now, he was good flying solo and not being tied down. His explanation stuck with me all these years for one reason: nearly everything he said conveyed a sense that he equated marriage with a loss of freedom. In his eyes, to be married was to be tethered, domesticated, diminished. It was clear he saw marriage not as a declaration of love but rather a limitation.
After fewer drinks than I would normally have, I said goodnight to my friends and went home early to our empty house. When I went inside and closed the front door, I thought about this man who was mistaking detachment for independence. I looked around at the evidence, the artifacts of the life my wife and I were building together. The photo of our wedding reception where she is grinning amidst a tangle of hair and a flower crown. The back yard we were landscaping, figuring out the right plants for a climate to which we were both strangers. The large table frequently crowded with friends and family. I was building something good with someone I loved, and nothing about that felt like a cage. It felt good and it felt right.
What Can We Even Do?
As I stood there in my house, preparing to go to bed, thinking of my wife, I considered how marriage was not just inherently good, but how it was fun. So much of what we have been conditioned to think about marriage from popular culture equates it to a loss of freedom, a loss of agency, a loss of self. In exchange, we are taught, we gain a perpetual responsibility or are doomed to a slow emasculation by way of nagging. It’s not just television; you see this subtly, insidiously boil to the surface in every aspect of our culture. An off-handed remark from a neighbor, a commercial that portrays the husband as a bumbling fool, a social media joke that gets thousands of likes for reducing a wife to a burden or a husband to a child. You do not even notice this just as the fish does not notice the water in which it swims. It is too engrained.
So how do you counter it? How do you dispel the snake-whispers promising freedom and regain the good old attitude that marriage is an institution worth preserving?
You have fun. You kiss your spouse in front of your children and laugh as they groan. You carve your initials into a tree and let them ask why. You dance together in the kitchen. You laugh together, build together, flirt in front of blushing company. You make visible the joy of your union. You show them that responsibility and romance are not enemies, that they are not diametrically opposed to independence. You show them that freedom is not found in avoiding commitment, but in giving yourself fully to something worthy, that the work of loving a person and your place together is hallowed.
The children will call you cringe and gross while they quietly feel the warmth of security wash over them. The riotous love you display transfers to them. When you kiss your husband or wife, your child feels it. They feel everything.
We don’t reclaim the image of marriage by arguing about it, by writing essays and hosting podcasts. We reclaim the image of marriage by embodying something worth coveting, by living something to which our children may aspire.
We evangelize through loving our husbands and wives with reckless abandon.
We win back the good old thing, the innately good timeless ritual, by living marriages that speak for themselves, marriages full of laughter, devotion, joy, sacrifice, and fierce, grit-tooth loyalty. If we want the next generation to believe in marriage again, if we want them to return, we must show them it is desirable and do so with a vengeance. Let the children wake from their sleep to see you building a fire in the backyard together. Let them hear the inside jokes that only years of love can decipher. Let them witness the arguments that end in tearful apologies by the stove.
The ritual survives through lived witness.
Marriage is a rebellion, a defiant stand in a wounded world of greasy ease and plastic impermanence. It is a vow to stay when the modern cultures tells you to move. In a world that says with a forked tongue “keep your options open,” it is a defiant, joyful choice to close the door behind you, hand your lover the key, and build something enduring within the threshold.
Something is wrong, yes, but it can always be made right.